The Late Set Podcast
1) Best Jazz of 2025 (So Far)
Don’t look now, but we’ve reached the midpoint of 2025 — and listened our way through well over a hundred albums, in search of elevated sounds. It feels like the right time for a pro...Show More
2) Into the Amazon, with Amaro Freitas
Amaro Freitas was born in Recife, on the northeastern coast of Brazil. He began playing the piano in church, discovering jazz after his first exposure to the music of Chick Corea. What Freitas has don...Show More
3) New Pinnacle, with Brandee Younger
The spiritual and the sensual find common cause in the music of Brandee Younger. As the world’s leading improvising harpist, she carries a torch for Alice Coltrane, whose astral meditations cont...Show More
4) Run the Song, with Ben Ratliff
“Out quickly and on the move” — so begins a bracing new book by Ben Ratliff, the brilliant music critic and scholar. It’s titled Run the Song: Writing About Running About ...Show More
5) Lost Coast, with Jenny Scheinman
Some artists can always be counted on to channel a sense of place. For violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman, it’s the homeward pull of Northern California’s so-called Lost Coast, between...Show More
6) Pilgrimage, with Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer
Few events embody the act of listening and receiving quite like the Big Ears Festival, which happens every spring in Knoxville, Tennessee. Nate was there this year, conducting artist interviews and ta...Show More
7) Record Store Day Preview
April is Jazz Appreciation Month, and we’re celebrating just as we always do, by chasing down live music and supporting the scene. But we’re also looking ahead to Record Store Day, which f...Show More
8) Branches and Paths, with Renee Rosnes
Renee Rosnes has traced a momentous musical trajectory over the last 40 years. A pianist and composer of exceptional insight, she’s served apprenticeships with Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter and R...Show More
9) Let Her Cook, with Endea Owens
Endea Owens knew what she meant when she called her 2023 debut Feel Good Music. As a bassist, a bandleader and an organizer, she specializes in the kind of buoyant uplift that just won’t quit. Y...Show More
10) Poetry is the Process, with Aja Monet
There’s a heartstopping moment in “for sonia,” Aja Monet’s ruminative elegy for the revolutionary poet Sonia Sanchez, when she recalls uttering the word “poetry” at...Show More