A band that endures over the course of years is bound to deepen and evolve, and that is certainly true of Aaron Parks Little Big, launched by the celebrated pianist in collaboration with guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr. and original drummer Tommy Crane. Now with new drummer Jongkuk Kim joining the fold, the group is proud to share their third album and their first on Blue Note Records. Even more so than on their previous records, this one prioritizes a collective band identity and in-the-moment communication. It also includes compositions not only from Parks, but also from Tuohey and Ginyard. The group spent a week of intensive rehearsals and performances at Brooklyn’s ShapeShifter Lab workshopping the new material before heading up to the legendary Dreamland Recording Studio for tracking. “This feels like a really special record to me,” says Parks. “It’s simultaneously the closest to what I imagined this music sounding like, and also way beyond what I could have imagined on my own.” Little Big continues to cultivate a productive tension between structure and spontaneity, with melodies that seem not read from a page “but more as if they’re spontaneously sung,” Tuohey says. “When the band began we would approach Aaron’s songs with clear written parts, working within a fairly tight framework with a lot of polishing and tightening.” But over time, “it’s become something of its own nature, and not always on the grid,” he says. “We’re creating something really loose and open.” The band now has reached a place where it really feels beyond genre, seamlessly incorporating our influences from non-jazz sources in an integrated and distilled way. But it also feels riskier and more alive than ever before, and therefore in some ways it’s more jazz than ever.

NEA jazz master Billy Hart is one of the most sought-after jazz drummers of his generation, able to perform in diverse contexts ranging from straight-ahead to avant-garde to pop. He appears on more than 600 recordings, including five with his critically-acclaimed quartet, the most recent being Multidirectional on Smoke Sessions.  Hart grew up in the nation's capital in a music-loving family who introduced him to jazz early on. His maternal grandmother bought him his first drum set. At age 17, he was hired by the great local saxophonist Buck Hill for an extended gig with his band, which also featured two of Hart's high school classmates, pianist Reuben Brown and bassist Butch Warren. His next important mentor was singer and pianist Shirley Horn. After being established locally, Hart spent most of the 60s touring with three of the preeminent working groups of the era, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, and Eddie Harris.  After moving to New York, Hart became associated with a group of like-minded and forward thinking musicians, recording with Pharaoh Sanders, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Joe Zawinul, and, especially, Herbie Hancock, with whom Hart spent three productive years in the band now known as Mwandishi. He also appeared on the seminal Miles Davis 1972 album On the Corner.  Other notable associations include four years with Stan Getz, almost ten years with Charles Lloyd, and record dates ranging from standard bearers like Frank Foster, Clark Terry, Horace Silver to experimentalists like Joanne Brackeen, Geri Allen, and James Newton. Notable cooperatives with Hart include Quest and The Cookers, and he released a memoir, Oceans of Time, in 2025.