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.