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      Best Jazz Albums of 2021

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      In a year of continued uncertainty, musicians held their colleagues, and listeners, close.Esperanza Spalding, Pharoah Sanders and Jason Moran made some of the year’s strongest jazz releases.Clockwise from left: Will Matsuda for The New York Times; Sam Polcer for The New York Times; Heather Sten for The New York TimesEven the big-statement albums made by jazz musicians this year had a feeling of intense closeness: of large-scale problems being worked out within an enclosure, with limited tools and just a few compatriots. No surprise there, I guess. Twelve months ago, the year began with promise, but we’ve hardly returned to old comforts. Rather than breaking out, we spent 2021 getting used to a feeling of unquiet, making the most of being mostly alone. The best improvised music of the year understood that, and met us there.1. Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra, ‘Promises’Why fight it: This year’s big talker in the experimental-music world ended up being just as powerful as we’d hoped. Not really jazz, not exactly classical, definitely not electronic music per se, “Promises” is the first-ever collaboration between Pharoah Sanders, the octogenarian spiritual-jazz eminence, and Floating Points, nee Sam Shepherd, a 30-something British composer and polymath. They each use music to get at questions of healing — Shepherd typically as a solo musician, Sanders as a communitarian — and although “Promises” was recorded before the coronavirus pandemic began, it arrived a year into lockdown, just when we needed it most.2. Jason Moran, ‘The Sound Will Tell You’A pianist, visual artist, curator, writer and guiding force in jazz, Jason Moran has been quietly releasing albums on his Bandcamp over the past few years, after ending a lengthy relationship with Blue Note Records. He doesn’t have a publicist, and barely self-promotes beyond his personal social media feeds, but these releases are worth seeking out. Moran recorded “The Sound Will Tell You” alone in January, just as he was mounting an exhibition of deep-blue works on paper at Luhring Augustine in Tribeca. This is an intimate and tender, harmonically lush piano record, heavily inspired by the writings of Toni Morrison, blurred occasionally by electronic effects but always clear in its melodic intent. (Listen to “The Sound Will Tell You” on Bandcamp.)3. James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet, ‘Jesup Wagon’The tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis tends to blow hard into his horn, but he likes to save up extra breath in the bottom of his lungs, so that his notes don’t necessarily fade, but sometimes grow louder and stronger over time. It’s a way of broadcasting patience and urgency all at once, and reminding you that he’s in control. After years of mounting buzz, Lewis cashed in his chips with “Jesup Wagon.” The album’s seven original compositions — composed for an unorthodox quintet, with the life of George Washington Carver in mind — are built around yawning, polyphonic melodies (Lewis’s saxophone intertwined with Kirk Knuffke’s cornet) and layers of rhythm stacked underneath (William Parker’s bass and guimbri, Christopher Hoffman’s cello and Chad Taylor’s drums and mbira).4. Patricia Brennan, ‘Maquishti’Twinkling and mesmeric, the debut album from this Mexican-born, New York-based vibraphonist and marimba player mixes composed material with tracks that were improvised in the studio whole cloth. Some are retouched with echoey, scrambling effects, but none is particularly lush or layered. Moving way outside the standard language of jazz vibraphone, Patricia Brennan has created something like a landscape of vapor, full of wandering melodies lost in the fog.Patricia Brennan’s “Maquishti” blends composed tracks with improvisation.Noel Brennan5. Adam O’Farrill, ‘Visions of Your Other’Weaving, pulsing, fine-grain complexity, intense focus: They’re all at play in the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s tangled compositions. On “Visions of Your Other,” his third album with his quartet, Stranger Days (featuring Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone, Walter Stinson on bass and Zack O’Farrill on drums), the group slips into the music like a perfectly tailored suit.Adam O’Farrill’s “Visions of Your Other,” his third album with his quartet, Stranger Days, is a study of intense focus.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York Times6. Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, ‘Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs’Sam Gendel, a saxophonist, and Sam Wilkes, a bassist, are millennial pals who seem equally interested in using music for the purposes of comfort and disruption. In 2018, they put out “Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar,” a stealthy little album that might have spluttered out of a vat where time, space, genre and the titular instruments themselves had all melted down into a roux. Recorded live to tape and released on Bandcamp, it became an underground obsession. Their follow-up LP, “More Songs,” contains nine additional tracks in the same vein, and it’s at least as hypnotic as the first.Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes followed up their 2018 release this year.Marcella Cytrynowicz7. William Parker, ‘Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World’The bassist, composer and organizer William Parker’s five-decade career sends a galvanizing message: Yes, you can do it all. You can play in and outside of any improvising style you choose; you can lead and you can follow; you can play the bass like a heavy rhythm instrument while coaxing grace and lyric from it. “Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World” is not one new LP, but in fact 10, each featuring Parker’s original music recorded with a different collaborator or band. So it works as a measure of his enormous range, and an index of his network on the downtown avant-garde — a scene that would hardly be the same without him.8. Sara Serpa and Emmanuel Iduma, ‘Intimate Strangers’Sara Serpa, a Portuguese singer whose voice is both small and bold, has spent the past few years immersing herself in the shocking history of Portugal’s colonial misadventures on the African continent, and responding through music. On “Intimate Strangers,” she collaborates with Emmanuel Iduma, a Nigerian memoirist and critic, who has written in evocative detail about the experiences of migrant laborers on the continent today. Through him, Serpa found a way to explore the present-day legacy of colonialism, while usefully decentering her own perspective. But the music remains distinctly Serpa’s: cool-toned, vocal-driven, abstract and yet immediately beautiful.9. Wadada Leo Smith/Douglas R. Ewart/Mike Reed, ‘Sun Beams of Shimmering Light’Nearing 80, Wadada Leo Smith retains one of the fullest and most arresting trumpet sounds around. But playing alongside him means getting in touch with silence, too, as if there might be energy coming from his horn that hasn’t yet become sound but still needs room to breathe. The saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Douglas R. Ewart — who, like Smith, moved to Chicago in the 1960s and became an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — brings a similarly restful approach to improvisation. Working with the younger Chicagoan drummer Mike Reed, Smith and Ewart created an album of expanse and vision that lives up to its name. (Listen to “Sun Beams of Shimmering Light” on Bandcamp.)10. Esperanza Spalding, ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’“Songwrights Apothecary Lab” takes the form of an album here, but it began as more than that (and it’s likely to continue as more, too). Esperanza Spalding, the bassist, vocalist and self-described “songwright,” held residencies in New York and her native Oregon during the pandemic, bringing together a mix of healers and artists in search of new and therapeutic methods of making music. Each of the LP’s 12 tracks is a “formwela,” blending lyrical and wordless vocals, instrumental textures and hooks that condense out of thin air.Esperanza Spalding held residencies during the pandemic.Will Matsuda for The New York Times More

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      John Coltrane’s Unearthed Live ‘A Love Supreme,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by SZA, Fantastic Negrito, Mary Lattimore and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSZA, ‘Nightbird’SZA released a trio of intimate songs on SoundCloud this week, perhaps as a place holder before her next album. On “Nightbird,” the mood is toxic and the singing is limber. SZA has a way of frankly and unflashily relating profoundly complex emotional experiences, building on the melodic structures of 1990s R&B, but also adding some of the sonic distance that’s been built into the genre over the last decade. “Nightbird,” both offhand and devastating, is among her best. JON CARAMANICAFantastic Negrito featuring Miko Marks, ‘Rolling Through California’“Rolling Through California” has a twangy, country-soul groove that harks back to the late-1960s San Francisco of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, all affable and gleaming. But Fantastic Negrito, with Miko Marks harmonizing above his bluesy cackle, sings about how the old California dream has given way to wildfires and pandemic; the foot-stomping chorus goes, “Can you hear the sound/It’s burning to the ground.” JON PARELESThe Felice Brothers, ‘To-Do List’This “To-Do List” starts with everyday chores — “Go to the bank and deposit checks” — but escalates quickly, casually and magnificently to greater goals: “Defy all natural laws,” “Proclaim a lasting peace,” “Discover a miracle drug.” True to the band’s upstate New York location, the Felice Brothers hark back to the Band, with hand-played instruments and a chugging beat; it’s romping honky-tonk existentialism. PARELESRandy Travis, ‘Ain’t No Use’Listen to the mechanical beat of the drums and the ultraprecise mesh of the twin guitars in “Ain’t No Use,” an unrequited love song complaining, “It ain’t no use to talk to you about love.” It’s a track that was shelved from Randy Travis’s 1986 album “Storms of Life,” and even with Travis’s conversational vocal, it’s also a harbinger of the computerized country to come. PARELESDeerhoof, ‘Plant Thief’“Someone’s cooking with my spices!” Satomi Matsuzaki complains in “Plant Thief”: just one reason for the song’s pummeling drums and bass and guitar that wrangle in stereo with staggered, constantly shifting jabs. The song starts out frenetic and builds from there, assembling and discarding dissonant patterns, switching meters and coming to a fiercely open-ended conclusion: “They never weren’t!” she sings. PARELESTerence Blanchard, ‘Diana’No influence looms larger over the Grammy-winning pen of Terence Blanchard — an esteemed jazz trumpeter known for his Spike Lee film scores — than the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, with his terse yet seemingly horizon-less compositions. On “Absence,” a new album paying homage to Shorter, the trumpeter visits with a few rarely covered Shorter gems. Blanchard’s version of the cloud-dwelling ballad “Diana” opens with the strings of the Turtle Island Quartet (featured throughout “Absence”), entering one by one; eventually his quintet, the E-Collective, takes over. Swaddled in synthesizers and trumpet effects, avoiding a firm tempo, Blanchard savors each unorthodox harmonic payoff, feeling no need to take a solo. RUSSONELLOSelena Gomez and Camilo, ‘999’In “999,” Selena Gomez vies with Camilo for who can whisper-sing more quietly. Their voices, harmonizing and dialoguing, share a duet about infatuation, distance and anticipation: “I don’t have photos with you, but I have a space on the wall.” It’s set to a skulking bass line and percussion that wouldn’t wake the neighbors, enjoying the tease, the buildup and a nearly vanished 21st-century experience: privacy. PARELESIcewear Vezzo featuring Lil Baby, ‘Know The Difference’For Lil Baby, it’s new day, new flow on this collaboration with the Detroit favorite Icewear Vezzo. Rapping first, Lil Baby leans in on terse bars, tightening his flow until it’s taut: “I wasn’t ’posed to make it out/I stay by the governor house/I done found another route.” When Icewear Vezzo arrives, the fog lifts ever so slightly — his subject matter is the same, but his flow dances and shimmies. CARAMANICA​​Umu Obiligbo, ‘Zambololo’A duo of brothers from Nigeria, Umu Obiligbo shares close harmonies over their band’s dizzying six-beat, two-chord electroacoustic groove — Nigerian highlife — with constantly evolving tandem guitars and choral harmonies teasing and extending each other. Most of the lyrics are in the Nigerian language Igbo, but the glimpses of English are sharp: “What a man can do, a woman can do it better.” PARELESEsperanza Spalding: ‘Formwela 10’The bassist, singer and songwriter Esperanza Spalding convened not just musicians but also experts — in neuroscience and psychology, among other fields — as she wrote the therapeutic-minded songs for her album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” due Sept. 24. That that didn’t impair the virtuosic playfulness of her music. “Formwela 10” is an apology for mistreating a lover: “I put you through a living hell/This is a way to make the damages clear so I won’t do another that way”; it’s also a leaping, twisting, syncopated melody, a chromatic ramble, and a meter-shifting arrangement that dissolves and realigns around her as she makes peace with her regrets. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘We Wave From Our Boats’Mary Lattimore’s music holds potent simplicity. The delicate plucks of a harp and the hum of a synth are all she employs on “We Wave from Our Boats,” a four-minute meditation with an arrangement that reflects the aquatic quality of its title: ripples of plucked strings stream over each other, like waves lapping on the shore. But there is also a kind of congenial intimacy to the song. Underneath its marine textures is the glow of closeness: maybe an after-dinner drink shared among friends, a tender embrace, a laugh that fills the belly with warmth. ISABELIA HERRERANite Jewel, ‘Anymore’There are breakup songs that express the profound heartache of a relationship’s end. And then there are songs that probe at the trickier feelings of its denouement, like Nite Jewel’s “Anymore,” from her new album, “No Sun.” Its bright synths and divine harmonies belie the song’s true content: “I can’t describe anything that I want,” sings the producer and vocalist Ramona Gonzalez. “I can’t rely on my desire anymore.” This is a song about the uncertainty and estrangement of a separation: the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself, of no longer trusting your own desires to find a way forward. HERRERA More

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      Lorde’s Sunburst, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ava Max, Clairo, PmBata and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lorde, ‘Solar Power’About the last thing to be expected from a songwriter as moody and intense as Lorde was a carefree ditty about fun in the summer sun. “Solar Power,” the title song from an impending album, is just that, riding three chords and brisk acoustic rhythm guitar (and glancing back at George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”) to celebrate hitting the beach, getting sun-tanned cheeks and tossing away her “cellular device”: “Can you reach me? No! You can’t,” she sings, and giggles. She has an offhand but attention-getting boast — “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus” — and an invitation completely free of ambivalence: “Come on and let the bliss begin.” JON PARELESAva Max, ‘EveryTime I Cry’Just to be certain, I have Googled and confirmed that no one has yet referred to Ava Max as Una Lipa. There’s still time. (This is a compliment.) JON CARAMANICASaint Jhn and SZA, ‘Just for Me’A beat ticks along behind slow-pulsing synthesizer chords as Saint Jhn appears, claiming lovelorn angst but safely distancing it with Auto-Tune. But when SZA arrives, a minute and a half in, her voice leaps out. Like him, she proclaims a desperate, dangerous infatuation. Unlike him, she sounds like she means it. PARELESPmBata, ‘Favorite Song’Endlessly cheerful lite-pop-soul, “Favorite Song” is a bopping strut from PmBata, toggling between singing and rapping, though less hip-hop-influenced than his earlier singles like “Down for Real.” The come-ons are a little frisky, but the attitude is never less than sweet. CARAMANICAJomoro featuring Sharon Van Etten, ‘Nest’Jomoro is the alliance of two percussionists turned songwriters: Joey Waronker, Beck’s longtime drummer, and Mauro Refosco, a David Byrne mainstay. Of course they need singers, and they have assorted guests on Jomoro’s album, “Blue Marble Sky.” Sharon Van Etten provides sustain and suspense on “Nest,” singing about “the darkest corner, the back of the mind” over a steadfast march of synthesizer tones textured with bells, shakers and hand drums: physical percussion to orchestrate a mental journey inward. PARELESClairo, ‘Blouse’It was inevitable that current bedroom-pop songwriters would discover the hushed intricacies of predecessors like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Clairo embraces both, recalling Smith’s whispery vocal harmonies immediately and Drake’s elegant string arrangements soon afterward. She’s singing about a kitchen-table lovers’ quarrel and a situation neither man would think to portray: “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down my blouse?” PARELESEsperanza Spalding featuring Corey King, ‘Formwela 4’Over an eddying sequence of arpeggios plucked by Corey King on acoustic guitar, surrounded by the sounds of springtime, Esperanza Spalding sings in patient and gentle tones about long-term trauma, and about reaching out for support. “Wanna be grown and let it go/really didn’t let it go though,” she begins. When Spalding gets to the chorus, it mostly consists of one repeated line: “Dare to say it.” This track, released Friday, comes as part of Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an evolving project that imagines musical collaboration as a pathway toward healing. (It already yielded a suite of three powerful tracks, created with other prominent musicians and released earlier this year.) She and King wrote “Formwela 4” in response to a simple challenge: “Say what is most difficult to say between loved ones.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHypnotic Brass Ensemble featuring Perfume Genius: ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’The Minimalism-loving Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has rediscovered “Sapphie,” an EP that was released in 1998 by the prolific English musician Richard Youngs and rereleased in 2006 by the Jagjaguwar label, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary with left-field, interdisciplinary collaborations. Youngs’s original version was a stark acoustic meditation, just quiet fingerpicking behind Youngs’s high, breaking voice, with musings like “Sometimes it’s better never than late/and there’s a spareness of days” and “Happiness leaves everything as it is/and the future isn’t anything.” Hypnotic Brass Ensemble adds inner harmonies and orchestrates them with Philip Glass-like motifs for brass and woodwinds and surreal reverberations as Perfume Genius sings in a rapt falsetto, trading Youngs’s solitude for immersive depths. The video — perhaps taking a hint from the song’s first line, “working around museums,” shows the visual artist Lonnie Holley creating images with spray paint, twigs and wire. PARELESJulian Lage, ‘Squint’The gangly, big-boned drum style on this track might be recognizable — particularly to fans of the Bad Plus — as the sound of Dave King when he’s having fun. The drummer is heard here in a newish trio, led by the virtuoso guitarist Julian Lage, and featuring Jorge Roeder on bass. “Squint,” the title track from Lage’s Blue Note debut, begins with the guitarist alone, causally demonstrating why he’s one of the most dazzling improvisers around; then King comes in and things cohere into that lumbering swing feel, held together by Roeder’s steady gait on the bass. RUSSONELLOPoo Bear, ‘The Day You Left’Poo Bear (Jason Boyd), a songwriter and producer with Justin Bieber, Usher, Jill Scott and many others, shows his own achingly mournful voice in “The Day You Left.” He’s a desperately long-suffering lover who knows he’s been betrayed for years, but still wants his partner back. The production, by a team that includes Skrillex, keeps opening new electronic spaces around him, with celestial keyboards in some, shadowy whispers in others. PARELESNoCap, ‘Time Speed’More glorious yelps from the Alabama sing-rapper NoCap, who, over light blues-country guitar, is enduring some push and pull with a partner. “I might be gone for a while, just write,” he urges, but confesses he’s not in the driver’s seat. If she feels compelled to stray, he says, “just don’t hold him tight.” CARAMANICA More

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      Esperanza Spalding’s Quest to Find Healing in Music

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      The bassist, vocalist and producer’s latest project is a therapeutic suite of songs sparked at an artists’ retreat she started during the pandemic.Esperanza Spalding has never been one to sit idle. Her wandering spirit has brought this 36-year-old musician major achievements over the past decade and pushed her work in new directions. In 2017, Spalding, a bassist, vocalist and producer, spent 77 straight hours in the studio, writing and arranging songs. The resulting album, “Exposure,” was pressed directly to CD and vinyl for a limited release of just 7,777 copies. Her next project, “12 Little Spells,” explored the healing power of music; each song correlated with a different body part.Continuing in that vein, Spalding’s new release, a suite of three songs called “Triangle” due Saturday, is meant to bolster listeners, physically and emotionally. But this time, she’s setting her sights on pandemic tension.“I was remembering ways that music had supported me,” she said on a recent call from her native Portland, Ore., “and wondering if we could go deeper into those themes.”Spalding, an easygoing conversationalist who effortlessly accesses a broad range of scientific vernacular, lights up when unpacking the medicinal powers of music. But with her youthful curiosity and considered cadence, it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a stuffy professor. Over the past year, she spent time building a retreat in Portland where like-minded artists can think and create without real-world interruptions. Occasionally, she jammed with other musicians, including the R&B luminary Raphael Saadiq and the jazz guitarist Jeff Parker.The concerns about health and restoration in “Triangle” have been percolating in Spalding for quite some time. After the release of “12 Little Spells” in 2018, she took a semester off from teaching music at Harvard and moved to Los Angeles to finish writing an opera with the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who had fallen ill.“I was worried that Wayne’s health was not going to hold and we wouldn’t be able to finish his opera while he could see it,” Spalding said.But over six months, he “completely sprang back to life,” she said. “He was like this wilted plant that finally got the water and just completely transformed before our eyes.”When the pandemic took hold just a month later, she returned to Portland to start the retreat, where she and 10 other artists of color spent a month on a 5,000-acre property. It’s an idea Spalding had been considering for years.“People use this weird uninvited breath of the pandemic to start the things that they’ve been putting off,” she said. “That definitely happened for me.”The real spark for “Triangle” came at the end of the retreat, where after an event, she sat alone in a garden and wondered how she could assuage the stress of isolation. “We’ve all experienced being confined in a situation that we didn’t design and didn’t ask for,” she said. “A feeling like we can’t break out of it.”She started drafting sketches for songs, with sounds rooted in Sufism and South Indian Carnatic and Black American music, and sent them to would-be collaborators.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with Justin Tyson, Phoelix and Raphael Saadiq.Will Matsuda for The New York TimesThe compositions — which were written in consultation with music therapists and neuroscientists — are supposed to elicit different emotions. The hypnotic “formwela 1,” carried by Spalding’s looping falsetto, is meant to aid self-soothing during stressful times. “So you learn the song and then you can play it for yourself in your head when you are stuck in a home and there’s no way the dynamic in that moment is going to change,” Spalding said. The ethereal “formwela 2” and soulful “formwela 3” are designed to calm interpersonal aggression and re-center the listener once the anger has dissipated.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with the drummer Justin Tyson, a regular collaborator of hers; the keyboardist Phoelix, a go-to producer for the Chicago rappers Noname, Smino and Saba; and Saadiq, who’s worked with D’Angelo, Solange and Alicia Keys.“Honestly, she didn’t need anything,” said Saadiq, who produced “Triangle” with Spalding and Phoelix. “She’s so moving in how she plays and how she thinks. I likened myself to Phil Jackson — like, why was he there when Michael Jordan was on the court?”“Triangle” was recorded in his studio. When he heard the final version, he recalled the sound being so transformative that it helped him mentally reset. The music, Saadiq said, “took everything out of my head. I was 100 percent clear.”When played in one go, “Triangle” burrows into your head and stays there, its meditative blend of chants, the sound of rain and vocal repetition meant to pacify prevailing anxiety. “It’s happening,” said Shorter, who plays on the third track. “It’s out there, but it’s interesting what she’s doing. She’s taking all kinds of chances and not giving up. If you see a fork in the road, which path should you take? Take both of them. She’s done that and is going to need good company.”“Triangle” is being released through Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, where she, other musicians and practitioners in music therapy and medicine will explore how songwriters blend therapeutic sounds into their work. This summer, she will host in-person pop-up labs throughout New York City, where residents can make appointments and have compositions created to fit their mood.“Basically, what we want to do is hear what people are wishing for from the music, like, what do you need?” she said. “It’s an invitation to hear what you need a song for, and then that informs what we look for in our research, in our investigation.”The songs created in the lab will be available on the website. Some of them will be featured when Spalding releases a full album this fall.It seems like she’s not interested — at least not currently — in the conventional rigors of recording albums, putting them out and going on tour. These days, Spalding would rather improvise and see what happens. Still, she understands that her new initiatives might take some getting used to.“It’s a lot,” she said. “I know part of the work I have to do is introducing and making legible the shape of this project and the offering, because it’s not an album and it’s not a concert. It’s not this and it’s not that.”“I want the collaborative truth of it to be legible,” she added. “That’s part of what’s most important to me about sharing music.” More