Meshell Ndegeocello's groundbreaking new album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin takes you on a musical journey which defies categorisation.

Eight years in the making and set for release on 2 August – Baldwin's centennial – the album’s origins date back to Ndegeocello’s 2016 musical and theatrical tribute to the iconic writer and activist, "Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin", commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks programme.

In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem for self-driving cars back then, and generative AI now, is that the last 0.1% is something special. Intractable.

Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a  co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.

You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.

With a title track that sounds like the theme tune of the best TV series of your life – only it doesn’t exist yet – and some star guest jazz players joining the core trio of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts, and Elliot Bennett, Slowly Rolling Camera mark their 10th year with a luxuriously immersive sixth studio release on Edition Records.

Voice and piano. The combination can have a simplicity, a conversational freedom, a rightness about it, as it does here. “My Ideal” (Dot Time), with its eleven songs from the early days of jazz up to the 1950s, is already being placed alongside classic duo albums by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins, or the great pairing of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, and it is indeed a very fine and uplifting album.

It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.

As Dust we Rise ends with “Quilt,” a percussion-driven lamentation bringing to mind the New Orleans stylings of Dr. John. The album begins with “Hem,” where stabbing piano and strings interweave with a pulsing, wordless chorale. After a while, a muted trumpet and pattering wood blocks fill it out.

Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory.

Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.