Take Five: Mid-Year Forecast Edition

It seemed like everyone and their uncle released a mid-year album list in 2026. That’s cool, I recognize the hustle. I even contributed to one, at NPR Music. (I leaned into honest pleasures for both album and song picks: respectively, Kacey Musgraves and Tomeka Reid. Both have been on regular rotation here.)

I thought about posting my own mid-year album roundup here at The Gig, but something about it felt obligatory until I tweaked the timeframe. So what you’ll find below is a Take Five of killer music just appearing on the horizon line. A few are out in August, the other two in September. So consider this a handcrafted musical amuse-bouche, with the assurance that you won’t have long to wait for the main course.

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Before we dive in, I do want to shout out one album that’s already been released: Mana, by trombonist-and-now-vocalist Kalia Vandever. It dropped on International Anthem almost a month ago, the same day they performed an excellent solo set at Solar Myth in Philly. Before the show, Vandever joined me for an onstage interview, which you can now hear in the new episode of The Late Set from WRTI.

I hope you enjoy the episode. I also hope you’ll check out Kalia’s album, if you haven’t yet. And in that spirit, shall we proceed?

Multi-reedist Henry Threadgill, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Dafnis Prieto: here are three distinguished artists deeply serious about composition, in both notated and spontaneous forms. Their history as a cooperative trio goes back more than a dozen years — back to a benefit for The Jazz Gallery, which has hosted them a handful of times since, as recently as last month. Around the same time, we received the welcome news of a studio album, Fifteen, due out on Nonesuch on August 21. The news came with a single, and the single came with a video from the session.