Jane Cornwell, Jazzwise ★ ★ ★ ★
Three years after 2023's Lean In, a collaboration with guitarist Lionel Loueke, the American jazz singer-songwriter Gretchen Parlato gifts us The Wise Ones, a close-miked, finely shaded album of songs written over two decades and recast, with guests, from the perspective of now. Honouring earlier selves while accepting change is the album's central tenet, but Parlato's voice remains a thing of wonder: light, breathy and exact, slipping around a beat rather than sitting inside it. Words, here, are texture. Space matters more. A pause carries meaning. An impressive coterie including keysmen Robert Glasper and Gerald Clayton - providing harmonic depth while never crowding the vocals - help make this intimacy feel like a rhythmic device rather than a mood. 'Never Come Down' somehow manages to be muscular yet delicate, its low-slung pulse aided by Meshell Ndegeocello's bass and Mark Guiliana's beats. 'Mad World', Parlato's take on the Tears for Fears song, is the curveball, its pop drama stripped away in favour of a familiar melancholy buoyed by Alan Hampton's bass and the millennial singer-songwriter Becca Stevens on kora and voice. In creating a multigenerational work about ageing, wisdom and artistic legacy – ideas that seep into the music – Parlato, 50, has made an album that feels lived in, and quietly persuasive. Recommended.