Ron Carter - Skyline (2021)

On Skyline, each of the three musicians offers up a pair of his own previously recorded tunes. That includes Carter’s Gypsy and A Quiet Place, DeJohnette’s Silver Hollow and Ahmad the Terrible, and Rubalcaba’s Promenade and Siempre Maria. The nine-track recording also features two Cuban standards — Lágrimas Negras and Novia Mia — as well as a final track titled RonJackRuba, a spontaneous collective improvisation that the trio didn’t even know was being recorded at the time.

Rubalcaba’s early-’90s albums Discovery: Live at Montreux and The Blessing — both with Blue Note — were instant classics, breaking him into the American jazz market by showcasing his virtuosic technique and dense improvisations. He has since been nominated for six Grammy Awards as a composer and performer and has won two Grammys for best Latin jazz album as the producer of Charlie Haden’s albums Nocturne (2001) and Land of the Sun (2004).

Panken writes in the liner notes that Skyline is “an immersive album that is unique in Rubalcaba’s discography for its unendingly dialogical quality, in which no topic, idea or motif is off-limits to kinetic, soulful investigation.”