A blend of birdsong, flute and percussion flourishes, and a gentle piano stroll kick off the debut album from the New England Jazz Collaborative. It’s like an awakening of the senses for what’s to come in the six tracks.
The album released Friday, “Tributaries,” is a big step for the collaborative — which formed in 2021 to provide a platform for new jazz works to be recorded and performed. The songs on the album are all played by the collaborative’s standing big band, made up of professional musicians from the region.
The group’s founder, Jeremy Cohen, told WBUR’s All Things Considered he and other composers had troves of music — much of it written in the pandemic, when they were isolated and not gathering with other musicians — but no straightforward way to get it played and heard.
“It was kind of this explosion of creativity that came out of the pandemic and then gave us this momentum to have the organization that we have now,” Cohen said.
The eclectic range of jazz on the album was written by Cohen and three of the collaborative’s other composers, some of whom are faculty members at Berklee College of Music and other area colleges and universities. Though it includes a little bit of classic New Orleans swing reminiscent of the early big bands, it dips into everything from oddly-timed funk and soulful balladry to West African highlife.
“It just goes to show that even if you have a traditional big band, it doesn’t mean that it has to sound like anything that came before it,” Cohen said. “Jazz has always been a genre that was able to accommodate lots of different influences — from world music, to electronic music [and] rock ‘n’ roll. And [a jazz] orchestra is just an amazing palette for all of those different influences to come together.”
The collaborative produces jazz events in the community, including concerts with smaller configurations of musicians and influences from Latin American to Afro-Caribbean. It’ll celebrate the release of “Tributaries” with a concert in Cambridge on Sept. 17.
This segment aired on July 17, 2026.
