The Improv Café Breaking News: The Bad Plus Say Goodbye, Bill Bruford Returns, and the Live Jazz World Keeps Delivering the Extraordinary
This Week in Live Jazz — The Stories That Are Reshaping the Landscape, Right Now
There are weeks in the live music calendar when the news arrives in clusters — when a succession of announcements, releases, and events lands within days of each other and forces you to stop, take stock, and acknowledge that something larger than any single story is happening. This is one of those weeks. The jazz world delivered several seismic developments in rapid succession over the past few days, and taken together they paint a picture of an art form operating at full intensity — saying farewell to one of its most daring ensembles, welcoming back a legendary drummer from a thirteen-year hiatus, releasing one of the most anticipated vocal jazz albums in recent memory, and staging two of the most historically significant festival events of the year, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, simultaneously.
At The Improv Café — the radio station that only plays live Jazz, live Big Band, and live Swing — we track all of it. Not because it helps us curate a playlist algorithm, but because the live music ecosystem is what we broadcast, and what happens on stages and in studios and in the plans that artists and ensembles make about their futures matters to every listener who tunes in to hear real music played by real musicians in real time. This edition of the Improv Café newsletter covers the stories that broke this week, gives them the depth and context they deserve, and connects them to the larger world of live jazz that this station has always been built around.
The Bad Plus Announce Their Farewell: The End of One of Jazz’s Most Daring Experiments
On July 10, 2026, the avant-garde jazz community received news that had been feared and privately anticipated in equal measure for some time: The Bad Plus officially announced the full international slate of their 2026 Farewell Tour, confirming what founding bassist Reid Anderson and founding drummer Dave King had shared with heavy hearts earlier this year. After 26 years together — two and a half decades of refusing every conventional definition of what a jazz ensemble should be or do — the band will call it a career in late December.
The statement Anderson and King issued together carries the quiet dignity of musicians who have nothing to prove and everything to be proud of: “The Bad Plus has been a band for 26 years. That’s quite a long time. As we enter into year 27 — after a great deal of soul searching and consideration — we have decided to bring this chapter to a close. 2026 will be the final year of The Bad Plus. We share this news with heavy hearts, but also with great pride in what we have accomplished. It has been a privilege to share our music with the world and we leave behind a body of work that we could not be more proud of. This band changed our lives. Thank you all for being a part of that.”
Those words deserve to land with the weight they carry. Because The Bad Plus changed more than their own lives. They changed what jazz listeners expected from a piano-less acoustic trio — and then, as the band evolved to its current configuration with guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonist Chris Speed alongside Anderson and King — they changed again, demonstrating that an ensemble willing to keep questioning its own premises can remain vital across decades without ever retreating into formula.
The newly announced international leg of the Farewell Tour is a send-off at a scale the band deserves. A three-night stand at Blue Note Tokyo on October 17, 18, and 19 brings the band to one of the world’s great jazz venues for what will be one of the final chances for Japanese audiences to witness this group live — and it marks the current lineup’s first visit to Japan together. A debut tour of Australia follows in late October, with performances at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, City Recital Hall in Sydney, and The Liberty Theatre in Perth — an entire continent experiencing The Bad Plus for the first time just as the ensemble is preparing to close its doors. The final New York City performance — one of the most emotionally weighted shows of the entire tour — is set for November 12 at Le Poisson Rouge, performed in-the-round in a configuration that places the band at the center of the room and the audience surrounding them on all sides, an intimacy that feels entirely appropriate for a final night in the city that has always been at the center of the band’s world.
Also in November, the tour touches Philadelphia’s Perelman Theater on November 14, Baltimore’s Keystone Korner on November 15, Richmond, Boston, Asheville, Durham, Atlanta, Orlando, and Gainesville before the calendar turns toward the true finale. That farewell closing run — ten shows across five nights at the Dakota in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from December 23 through December 28 — brings The Bad Plus home to the city where they were founded, where the first version of this band took shape, where everything began. It is the right ending and it will be devastating in the best possible way.
Between now and Minneapolis, the band still plays Newport Jazz Festival on August 2 and Monterey Jazz Festival on September 27 — two of the most storied festival stages in American music — ensuring that the Farewell Tour will have touched every level of the live jazz landscape before it concludes. Tickets are available now at the band’s official website, and every serious fan of innovative, boundary-dissolving jazz should treat this as one of the essential concert decisions of 2026.
The Bad Plus arrival in the jazz world was itself an event. Their recordings and live performances expanded the territory of what a jazz ensemble could address, bringing rock energy, avant-garde compositional thinking, and a collective musical intelligence that was unlike anything else in the scene. Their covers of rock songs — from Nirvana to Blondie to Aphex Twin — were not ironic gestures but genuine reinterpretations that revealed something about both the source material and the jazz tradition. Their original compositions were complex, adventurous, and deeply musical. Their live performances were unpredictable in the best sense, full of the kind of risk and spontaneous creativity that defines live jazz at its highest level. They were, across 26 years and 18 albums, the real thing. And the real thing is going to take its final bow by the end of this year.
Bill Bruford Returns: A Legendary Drummer Steps Back Into the Room
The announcement this week of the forthcoming release of Group Chat — the new live CD/DVD from the Pete Roth Trio featuring Bill Bruford — is, for a significant portion of the jazz and progressive rock worlds, the most exciting piece of music news in years. This is not hyperbole. Bill Bruford is one of the most distinguished and influential drummers in the history of either genre, a founding member of Yes, a long-term member of King Crimson, the leader of his own jazz ensemble Earthworks, and a musician who has spent five decades demonstrating that the drums are a melodic and compositional instrument of extraordinary versatility. He retired from performance in 2009. He has not appeared on newly recorded material in 19 years. Until now.
Group Chat, produced by Pete Roth and Bruford himself for Winterfold Records and set for release on September 18, 2026, documents the Pete Roth Trio — guitarist Pete Roth, bassist Mike Pratt, and Bruford on drums — in live performance, and the result is being received by advance listeners and critics as something genuinely extraordinary. The trio’s description of what they do gives you the territory: rooted in jazz but never constrained by it, moving fluidly through funk, contemporary classical influences, and spontaneous improvisation, with nothing treated as untouchable. It is a group philosophy that sounds, when you read it, exactly like the kind of music Bill Bruford has always made — music that respects the traditions it works within without being imprisoned by them, that finds the next idea rather than the comfortable one, that is live and improvised and committed to the risk of the present moment.
The critical reception to the advance material has been remarkable in its consistency. One reviewer called it “a thoroughly invigorating listen.” Another described “a genuinely unique and original conversation between equally genuine masters.” A third found it “rich with nuance, invention, and telepathic rapport.” One of the most evocative responses described the album as “the next best thing to being in the room” — which, for The Improv Café, is precisely the highest compliment a live recording can receive. Being in the room is everything. The live recording is the document of what being in the room sounded like. And a Bill Bruford live recording, after a 13-year absence from the stage, is a document of very high historical significance.
The track listing tells its own story about the breadth of what the Pete Roth Trio reaches for. Original compositions — Full Circle, Dancing With Grace, Original Sin — sit alongside collaborative pieces including Part Of The Charm and Looking Forward To Looking Back, the charming title track Group Chat, a genuinely beautiful arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime, and — in the moment that has drawn the most surprised and admiring reactions — the trio’s improvisation on the Largo from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. That is a piece of orchestral music beloved by millions of listeners who have never attended a jazz concert, and hearing it transformed by this trio is the kind of encounter that converts new listeners to the possibilities of improvised music while simultaneously delighting those who already live in that world.
The Fasching Club in Stockholm described the Pete Roth Trio as “nothing sacred, not retro, not comfortable, just brilliantly unruly.” That is exactly right. And brilliantly unruly is exactly the kind of music that lives at its best in live performance, which is exactly why this CD/DVD document is the release of the moment for anyone who cares about what happens when extraordinary musicians stop calculating and simply play.
Cécile McLorin Salvant Steps Into the Orchestra — and the Result Is Stunning
If any single release in the current jazz moment captures the full scope of what vocal jazz can be when it reaches its highest ambitions and most generous resources, it is Cécile McLorin Salvant’s With Every Breath I Take — the Grammy-winning singer’s first full orchestral album, released June 26, 2026 on Nonesuch Records, featuring the Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley, with all arrangements conceived and executed by composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue.
The Metropole Orkest — the Netherlands’ massive symphonic orchestra dedicated entirely to pop and jazz repertoire — is not a chamber ensemble playing quietly behind a soloist. It is a full orchestra of extraordinary sonic power and flexibility, an ensemble that has built its international reputation on genre-blending collaborations with artists from Snarky Puppy to Gregory Porter to Laura Mvula, bringing a genuine jazz sensibility to orchestral scale without sacrificing either. Paired with Salvant, whose vocal intelligence and theatrical range are unlike anyone else currently working in jazz, and with Argue’s arrangements — which critics have described as “sumptuous and refined” while finding room for rolling time signatures, dancerly tempo shifts, and moody orchestral shadows — the collaboration produces something that is larger than the sum of its already extraordinary parts.
The album’s repertoire reflects Salvant’s characteristic curation — she has never simply picked a set of recognizable standards and given them pleasant readings. Here, songs are chosen for what they say about a woman’s experience in the world, which gives the recording an emotional coherence that purely aesthetic criteria could never produce. Her own composition Left Over from her 2015 debut is placed alongside Buddy Johnson’s Ever Since the One I Love Has Been Gone, Sondheim’s Being Alive, Cy Coleman and David Zippel’s title track, the Ellington standard Sophisticated Lady, Kurt Weill’s challenging Barbara Song, the theme from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and the signature Lush Life — a song that has tested every jazz singer who has attempted it and that Salvant navigates with what AllMusic described as “an aching spark against the Orkest’s orchestral shadow.”
Throughout all of it, Salvant is accompanied by her standard trio — longtime pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist David Wong, and drummer Kush Abadey — which grounds the orchestral grandeur in the intimate, conversational language of jazz even when the Metropole Orkest is playing at full, magnificent scale around her. The result is a record that manages the difficult trick of feeling both sweeping and close at the same time. “She pulls you close,” one critic wrote, which is precisely the skill that separates the greatest vocal jazz performances from the merely excellent ones. The orchestra is there. The arrangements are lush. And Salvant’s voice, in the middle of all of it, makes it feel like she is singing just to you.
With Every Breath I Take is not a live recording, but it is a document of live sensibility — recorded in December 2025 at MCO Studio 1 in Hilversum, Netherlands, it captures the Metropole Orkest and Salvant’s trio performing together in the room, in real time, with the kind of musical presence and immediacy that the best jazz records always carry. It is already being discussed as one of the most significant vocal jazz releases in years, and it deserves every word of that.
Montreux at 60: The Swiss Festival Returns to Its Home and the Jazz Lab Becomes an American Club
While the jazz news at home has been dominated by farewells and returns and new releases, the global calendar is currently anchored by one of the most historically resonant events in the international festival landscape: The Montreux Jazz Festival, currently running through July 18, 2026, in its 60th anniversary edition — and doing so, for the first time since 2023, from within the fully renovated halls of its legendary home venue.
The Montreux Music & Convention Centre — completely rebuilt over three years at a cost of 94 million Swiss francs and rechristened as the 2M2C — reopened its doors for this 60th edition with updated acoustics, redesigned access, and new panoramic terraces overlooking Lake Geneva and the Alps, and it brings back the two rooms that define what Montreux sounds like at its most essential: the Auditorium Stravinski, with a capacity of 4,000, and the Montreux Jazz Lab, the club-scale intimate room where late-night performance has always been the most electric and unpredictable programming the festival offers.
For the 60th edition, the Lab has been given a specific and deeply meaningful identity: for two special evenings, it is transformed into an American jazz club. Marcus Miller — the extraordinarily gifted bassist and composer who served as Miles Davis’s final musical director and has spent decades carrying the Davis legacy forward with both fidelity and creative independence — headlines those Lab evenings with a program that honors the centennial of Miles Davis’s birth, reuniting musicians who played on the legendary We Want Miles! live album, one of the most celebrated documents of Davis’s late-period touring band. Billy Cobham, the drum innovator who was central to the fusion era Davis pioneered, joins the bill. Gregory Porter brings his magnificent baritone and his deep connection to the vocal jazz tradition to a Montreux stage that has hosted some of the greatest vocal performances in the festival’s history. And Charles Lloyd — one of the most spiritually compelling saxophonists of the past six decades — makes a return of extraordinary historical significance: he performed at the very first Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967, and his presence at the 60th edition creates a living connection between the festival’s birth and its current milestone.
Those Jazz Lab nights at Montreux are not, strictly speaking, jazz events in the conventional festival sense. They are something richer: a recognition that the history of this particular festival is also the history of what jazz has done in the world over six decades, and that the musicians who can most compellingly stand in for that history are the ones who were there, who made the music that mattered, and who are still here to play it. Marcus Miller with Miles’s musicians, Charles Lloyd returning to the first room that welcomed him on this stage — these are moments of genuine historical weight dressed in the immediate, spontaneous language of live jazz, and they are happening right now, in a renovated hall above Lake Geneva, for audiences fortunate enough to be there.
The Auditorium Stravinski’s broader 60th-anniversary programming reflects Montreux’s long tradition of reaching beyond jazz’s conventional boundaries. The festival has never pretended to be exclusively jazz in the narrow sense — it has always understood that the music it was founded to celebrate grew from the same roots as rock, soul, funk, R&B, and the full tradition of Black American music, and that the most honest programming acknowledges those connections rather than ignoring them. This year’s Stravinski headliners include The Isley Brothers, whose eight decades of influence span rock, soul, and funk in ways inseparable from jazz’s own story; The Roots, one of the great live band-based hip-hop collectives; John Legend and Sting, long-standing festival presences; Van Morrison and James Taylor, who close the 60th edition on July 18 in a conclusion fitting for a milestone anniversary. Of particular note: nearly half the artists on the 2026 Montreux lineup are performing their only Swiss date of the summer there, making the festival not just a celebration of its own history but an irreplaceable live music event for its region.
PERUJAZZ Live in Madrid: Afro-Peruvian Jazz Crosses the Atlantic
One of the more quietly significant broadcasts of the current week happened on July 11, when the global streaming platform Oh! Jazz aired a live presentation of PERUJAZZ from Café Berlín in Madrid — a performance that placed the ensemble’s distinctive fusion of Afro-Peruvian rhythms, Andean musical traditions, and modern jazz improvisation before an international streaming audience that extended far beyond the Spanish capital.
PERUJAZZ occupies a genuinely rare position in the global jazz landscape — a group that takes one of South America’s richest and most rhythmically complex musical traditions and places it in direct, unmediated contact with the jazz language rather than simply deploying it as exotic color. Afro-Peruvian music has its own percussive vocabulary, its own rhythmic feel, and its own emotional character, shaped by centuries of African, Indigenous, and European influence converging in the coastal cities and highland communities of Peru. PERUJAZZ brings all of that into the jazz conversation with authenticity and creative intelligence, producing music that neither genre fully anticipated and that both are richer for having encountered.
The Oh! Jazz broadcast from Café Berlín is now archived for worldwide on-demand streaming — a small but meaningful example of how the global live jazz ecosystem is using digital platforms to distribute performances that would once have reached only their immediate audiences. This is exactly the kind of work The Improv Café celebrates: live music, made in a specific room with a specific energy, shared with the world in the most direct possible form.
Tony Adamo and the Spoken Word Jazz Tradition
In the category of music that exists at the fascinating intersection of multiple forms — where jazz improvisation meets the spoken word, where the groove becomes a vehicle for language rather than a backdrop for instrumental display — Tony Adamo’s new single It’s Gotta B U!, released July 7, 2026, represents the vanguard of a tradition with deep jazz roots. The organ-driven funk single serves as the opening statement for Adamo’s upcoming album Sing Speak Hipspoken Word, and it is precisely what its title promises: energetic, groove-forward, and committed to a vision of the jazz-spoken word synthesis that hip-hop first encountered in the jazz vocal tradition and that Adamo has spent his career developing in his own distinctive direction.
The connection between jazz and the spoken word is older than most listeners realize. The great jazz poets of the 1960s and 70s — Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka — were working in a tradition that jazz itself had always included: the blues singer telling a story, the bebop vocalist whose scat made language and instrumental sound indistinguishable. Adamo’s work continues that lineage with contemporary energy, and the arrival of It’s Gotta B U! signals that the album to come will be a statement worth watching.
Coming Thursday: Harry Forlenza-Bailey Ensemble at Bourbon & Branch, Philadelphia
For listeners in the Philadelphia area — and for anyone who believes that live jazz in an intimate neighborhood setting is one of the essential pleasures that a great city can offer — this Thursday, July 16, provides a genuinely wonderful opportunity. The Harry Forlenza-Bailey Ensemble headlines a free evening of live jazz at Bourbon & Branch in Philadelphia, beginning at 9:00 PM.
Free. Live jazz. A neighborhood venue. Thursday night in Philadelphia. Everything about this is what The Improv Café was built to celebrate. The Harry Forlenza-Bailey Ensemble is exactly the kind of working jazz group that forms the backbone of the live jazz ecosystem — artists who are showing up in clubs and restaurants and community spaces and doing the thing that sustains this music between the big festivals and the marquee events: playing live, for an audience, with everything they have, in a room where every person there can feel the music in real time. If you are anywhere near Philadelphia on Thursday and you love live jazz, this is where you should be.
No ticket required. No reservation. Just show up, find a seat, and let live jazz do what it does.
Back Deck 2026 Tonight: AMANI: The Music of Burt Bacharach
Spend a summer evening under the stars celebrating the unforgettable music of one of America’s greatest songwriters. Amani brings its polished vocal harmonies, refined musicianship, and expressive interpretations to the timeless compositions of Burt Bacharach, creating a concert that honors both the elegance and emotional depth of his remarkable catalog.
Audiences can expect beautifully crafted performances of beloved favorites including Walk On By, Alfie, What the World Needs Now Is Love, and other enduring classics. With fresh arrangements and heartfelt performances, Amani captures the sophistication and warmth that have made Bacharach’s music resonate across generations.
Set against the relaxed atmosphere of the Back Deck, this outdoor concert offers the perfect setting to enjoy an evening of exceptional live music. Whether you’re a longtime admirer of Burt Bacharach’s songwriting or discovering these iconic songs for the first time, this performance promises an unforgettable experience filled with timeless melodies and unforgettable moments.
Back Deck Visitor Information
Guests are encouraged to bring their own outdoor chairs and refreshments to enjoy throughout the evening. Standard-height lawn or patio chairs are recommended for the best viewing experience.
Concert seating is sold by reserved outdoor blocks:
$63 for an 8’ x 8’ reserved block accommodating up to two guests
$33 for a reserved block accommodating one guest
A $3 handling fee per reserved block is included in the ticket price.
Performances begin promptly at 7:30 PM, with gates opening at 6:30 PM, allowing guests plenty of time to settle in and enjoy a picnic before the music begins.
Should weather conditions require moving the performance indoors, the concert will be presented in the Museum’s Bickford Theatre with general admission seating.
For ticket purchases, seating assistance, group reservations, or additional information, please contact the Box Office at 973-971-3706.
All artists, programs, dates, and performance details are subject to change.
The Week in Perspective: What All of This Means
Step back for a moment and consider what this week’s news, taken together, actually shows you. The Bad Plus — one of the most daring and original jazz ensembles in modern history — is saying goodbye with a farewell tour that spans five continents and ends, fittingly, at home. Bill Bruford — a musician who walked away from performance thirteen years ago and has been missed every moment since — is returning with a live recording of such quality that critics are already reaching for superlatives. Cécile McLorin Salvant — arguably the greatest jazz vocalist currently working — has released her first orchestral album, and it is everything her reputation promised and more. Montreux Jazz Festival is celebrating its 60th anniversary inside a newly renovated home venue, with Marcus Miller honoring Miles Davis’s centennial in a Jazz Lab transformed into an American club and Charles Lloyd returning to a stage he first graced 59 years ago. PERUJAZZ is bringing Afro-Peruvian jazz to Madrid and the world. Tony Adamo is pushing at the boundaries of what spoken word and jazz can be together. And on Thursday, free live jazz is happening in Philadelphia, because that is what live jazz does: it shows up in every room that will have it, at every scale, for every kind of audience that is willing to listen.
This is the live music ecosystem that The Improv Café exists to celebrate and to broadcast. Not any single story, not any single venue or artist or release, but the full, generative, inexhaustible living organism of jazz performance in all its forms — from the farewell tour of a legendary ensemble to the free Thursday night set at a neighborhood bar. All of it matters. All of it is real. All of it is live.
And that is what this station broadcasts. The real thing. Live Jazz. Live Big Band. Live Swing. Every song, every night, from a stage, in a room, as it happened.
The week ahead is already full of it. Tune in.
The Improv Café — Live Jazz. Live Big Band. Live Swing. All live. Every song. Every night. No exceptions.
The Improv Café — Live Jazz. Live Big Band. Live Swing. All live. Every song. Every night. No exceptions.
Weekly Radio Shows
SUNDAY NIGHTS
Singing with Swing
Sundays are meant for relaxation, and that’s why we have created the ‘Singing with Swing’ radio show.
This program features some of the most fantastic vocal jazz artists of our time, providing you with the perfect ambiance for a cozy night in. Tune in and unwind with some of the best vocal jazz music around. Check Out The Schedule.
TUESDAY NIGHTS
Live at the Village Vanguard
Live at The Village Vanguard is a phrase that carries great cultural significance and musical history. Over the years, some of the greatest names in jazz have graced the stage at The Village Vanguard, leaving audiences mesmerized and inspired.
Tune In Every Tuesday Night for FIVE (5) Continuous Hours of Classic Live Jazz Music Recorded at The Village Vanguard! Check Out The Schedule.
WEDNESDAY NIGHTS
Live at the Blue Note
The Live at The Blue Note Radio Show plays music recorded live at the clubs or recorded live onto an album or CD!
The Blue Note is a renowned music club that has played host to some of the most talented musicians in the industry. Located in the heart of the city, it has become synonymous with great music and entertainment. Check Out The Schedule.
FRIDAY NIGHTS
Swing with the Big Bands
Looking for some fun on Friday nights? Tune into our ‘Swing with the Big Bands’ radio show where you’ll hear legendary live performances from the top big band artists throughout history!
Make sure to dance, bop and swing to the beat as you indulge in these incredible performances. Check Out The Schedule.
Listen to Live Jazz, Big Band & Swing Music 24 Hours a Day! The Improv Café, described as the world’s first all-live jazz station, features Singing with Swing, focusing on vocal jazz every Sunday night, Swing with the Big Bands, highlighting live big band performances, and live sets from the Village Vanguard and Blue Note.