Master drummer Jack DeJohnette is part of a continuum in jazz that stretches back to the 1960s when the Chicagoan was a member of Charles Lloyd’s seminal quartet and when he made his debut as a leader. The line continued the next decade via Miles Davis and the groundbreaking album Bitches Brew, and then into the 80s and on with his own influential group Special Edition. With the foundation of the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, a new chapter in both DeJohnette and Jarrett’s career began, the birth of a group that would revitalise the trio format and then influence a myriad of jazz trios keen to break the mould just as DeJohnette and Jarrett had done themselves.

Daring to be different, singer Christine Tobin is set to delve still deeper into the consciousness of her fans and newcomers alike if the arrival of her brand new album Secret Life of a Girl is anything to go by. An emotional and personal stirring, one step beyond her previous album, the dark Romance and Revolution, Tobin on Secret Life inhabits the world of the young characters in the songs, representing different stages of an untold story, an incipient self awareness and maturity. The album is released at a time when her partner and regular musical colleague, guitarist Phil Robson, releases Six Strings and The Beat, a Bartók-infused strings album flavoured by post-modern jazz and African music alike. Stuart Nicholson talks to the pair about the story behind their albums and their quest to follow the road less travelled while long time fan, Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, describes her reactions to that voice.

Misunderstood in his own lifetime, but in time elevated to the pantheon of composers that make him as relevant today as he was in the heyday of bebop, the totemic presence and music of Thelonious Monk forms the bedrock of a new monumental work by Jason Moran. The pianist, who tours the UK this month, with an Anglo-US band, has taken Monk’s At Town Hall and reimagined it for the jazz of today. Kevin Le Gendre talks to Moran about how he got inside the mind of the one and only Monk.