Two of the top players in modern jazz make the second in a sequence of quintet recordings that presents jazz as unusually easy to love even as it maintains modern complexity.
On From This Place, Pat Metheny's recent and superb quartet is supplemented by orchestral arrangements on ten new Metheny originals.
Jazz bassist Linda May Han Oh adds a string quartet to her group to produce something wholly integrated on Aventurine.
This is trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas' second quintet, playing its repertoire from memory in eight sets in four nights. Dazzling.
The best and most exciting jazz of 2017 is increasingly happening at the intersection of different streams of music. Reveling in a diversity of influences and therefore a kind of complexity makes it "art music", inevitably.
