SOUNDS OF APRIL AND RANDALL ANNOUNCE DISHES AIN’T CLEAN, A NEW SELF-PRODUCED ALBUM OF ORIGINAL SONGS ABOUT THE UNPOLISHED PARTS OF LIFE
APRIL MAY WEBB & RANDALL HAYWOOD WITH MENTORSHIP FROM T.S. MONK
OUT AUGUST 21, 2026 VIA SOARING RECORDS
Dishes Ain’t Clean is the forthcoming album by Sounds of April and Randall, the project led by vocalist, songwriter and 2024 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition winner April May Webb and Juilliard-trained trumpeter, composer and bandleader Randall Haywood.
Out August 21, 2026 via Soaring Records, the self-produced album gathers 13 original tracks that carry jazz into R&B, country, gospel, world-pop, hip-hop, strings-laced modern jazz and straight-ahead swing. Webb wrote all of the album’s songs, with Haywood contributing to the closing track. The project was developed with mentorship from T.S. Monk and made possible through Chamber Music America’s Performance Plus Program, funded by The Doris Duke Foundation, and New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy Program.
For Webb and Haywood, Dishes Ain’t Clean turns a household chore into an album-length metaphor. The title came from dirty dishes in their kitchen, then grew into Webb’s reflection on self-presentation — especially online — and the unfinished realities people hide from view.
“The dishes in our house were not clean,” Webb says. “Every time I walked into the kitchen, I’d see them and think, ‘Man, the dishes ain’t clean.’ Then I realized it could have another meaning. If I took a photo, I could crop out the stuff that didn’t look good and present the most polished version of myself. That became the meaning of the record: showing the unfinished parts, the parts you try to hide. I’ve come to learn that those are the parts that actually connect you to people when you are the realest version of yourself.”
Haywood hears the album as a passage from restlessness and private struggle toward self-possession. “If you are unsatisfied with your life, this record walks through those emotions,” he says. “It pulls out that feeling of wanting more, but it also brings you back to the fact that you do have something great. You should be happy about it, and you have the power to move forward.”
Terri Lyne Carrington has praised the results “Dishes Ain’t Clean is a superbly produced eclectic offering from the dynamic vocal/trumpet duo, giving strong cinematic, singer-songwriter, and R&B vibes along with beautifully swinging tracks for your staunch jazz and hybrid jazz fans,” she says.
Dishes Ain’t Clean arrives after a decade of work by a married bandleading team with national jazz credentials. Webb won the 13th Annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition at NJPAC in 2024 after years of applying while developing her own body of work. Haywood, a graduate of The Juilliard School and musical director for The T.S. Monk Band was named “Male Rising Star” by Hot House Jazz Magazine and Jazzmobile; in 2019, Sounds of A&R won “Best Jazz Group” in the same NYC Readers Jazz Awards.
The group has also served as U.S. Cultural Ambassadors through American Music Abroad, toured Fiji and Tonga through the State Department program, received support from Chamber Music America and South Arts, and earned national chart attention with prior releases including Questions Left Unanswered, which peaked at No. 12 on the National Jazz Week Charts.
The lineup on Dishes Ain’t Clean grows out of the group’s long-running circle. The album features Webb on vocals; Haywood on trumpet, flugelhorn, synthesizer, vocals and percussion; Dr. Ryan Tomski on piano and Rhodes; Jacob Webb on bass; Dr. Nathan Webb on drums; Charlie Sigler on electric guitar; Drew Cooper on nylon guitar; and Gabe Valle on violin, viola and cello. Webb’s brothers, Jacob and Nathan, have long anchored the group, while Tomski, Sigler, Cooper and Valle weave Rhodes, electric guitar, nylon guitar and strings into the core sound.
They recorded the album at Mozart Studios in Little Falls, New Jersey, with engineer Kostadin Kamcev; Paul Wickliffe at Skyline Productions in South Orange mixed and mastered it. Haywood describes the sessions as a hybrid of live-band recording and later studio construction.
“We took our band into the studio, but we also developed the record over time in the modern way,” he says. “We laid down the foundation with everybody together, then we added other textures and had musicians send in parts. It became a collection of both approaches — the traditional way of recording and the contemporary way.”
Chamber Music America’s Performance Plus Program gave Webb and Haywood the opportunity to bring T.S. Monk into the project as a mentor during rehearsals and recording, connecting the album directly to a living jazz lineage. “This is a record I’ll be proud to say I was in the studio when they made that record,” Monk says. Webb puts the album’s range plainly: “All of the songs are original compositions, and they take you through all of the spans of genres that we love,” she says. “But the through line is jazz.”
Webb grew up in Newton, Kansas, where her mother played classical piano and her parents placed all three children in music. Her brothers Jacob and Nathan became musicians themselves, and both appear throughout Dishes Ain’t Clean. Haywood also comes from a musical family: his father played with artists including Rufus Thomas, Al Green and the Bar-Kays, while his uncle performed with James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Betty Wright.
Webb carried the album’s title concept back to her family home in Newton, where she and Haywood staged the cover image in the kitchen. They stacked dishes around the room, Webb’s mother photographed the scene, and Webb later digitally added the grime.
Their partnership began at Moore’s Lounge in Jersey City, where they played together at a jam session before they had even spoken. That night launched both their musical partnership and their marriage. Webb, who studied jazz at William Paterson University, and Haywood, whose path runs through Juilliard, formed Sounds of April and Randall in 2014 and began building a sound that carried jazz through country, R&B, gospel, pop and soul.
In 2017, they released both Let’s Stay Forever — a smooth-jazz-leaning album produced by Jacob Webb for Trippin ’N’ Rhythm Records — and Sounds of A&R, their band debut as a self-defined creative unit. In 2021, Questions Left Unanswered pushed the group’s reach outward with originals, standards and reimagined material, including “Jolene,” “Killing Me Softly,” “Social Call” and the title track. Inspired by the success of earlier releases — the debut single from Let’s Stay Forever peaking at #17 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Charts — Haywood describes Dishes Ain’t Clean simply as: “Who we are.”
The album opens with “I’m Never Satisfied,” a bright, world-pop-inflected statement with traces of amapiano, Afro-pop and Latin rhythm. Under the groove, the song asks why people keep wanting more even when they already have food, shelter, money, attention and love — and why that desire can dull their compassion toward those with less.
“We wanted to start the record with that question,” Webb says. “Why do we feel like we have to continue to have more and more? Even when you reach a certain goal, you start looking around for the next one. It becomes this never-ending cycle of wanting.”
“Everybody Ain’t Gonna Like You” follows its prelude like a classic standard setting up its own verse. Webb wrote it after a difficult family situation, but the point reaches beyond the original trigger: some people reject you for conflicts you did not create, and freedom begins when you stop begging for approval from the wrong room. “The moral of the story is that there is a community that is for you,” she says. “When you find that community, you won’t have to try so hard.”
“I’d Spend It With You” shifts the record into a country-tinged, Americana-colored space, with acoustic and slide textures framing a simple question: if you knew it was your last day on earth, who would you spend it with? Webb first heard the melody in a dream and captured it immediately on her phone before it disappeared.
“Cottonwood Tree,” introduced by its own prelude, brings the album back to Webb’s Kansas roots. She wrote the song while visiting her parents in Newton, sitting in the backyard beneath the large cottonwood tree she grew up with. The song became one of her signatures and one of the defining pieces of her Sarah Vaughan Competition victory. When producers hesitated over her plan to close with an original, Webb trusted the song and her own story.
“I was sitting underneath that tree, and I thought, ‘I’m finding what I need sitting underneath this cottonwood tree,’” she says. “I knew that had to become a song. So many people leave where they come from to pursue their dreams, and they understand that feeling of longing for home. I wanted to share who I was.”
“The Way Life Used to Be” and “Life’s Continuum” form a pandemic-era pair. Webb began the first tune while thinking about the world before lockdown — and the simple freedoms people only recognized once they were gone. “You didn’t realize you had it good until you didn’t,” she says. Haywood and the band placed the song in an open, string-framed jazz setting, with Gabe Valle’s orchestration bringing beauty and space into a memory of confinement. “Life’s Continuum” extends that feeling into a loop that builds and builds, with Nathan Webb’s drums pushing the emotion toward release.
The title track, “Dishes Ain’t Clean,” arrives as the album’s central thesis and its heaviest R&B statement. Haywood drew on the laid-back adult R&B and hip-hop-inflected feel of Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales, while Webb turned the dirty-dishes image into a song about performance, concealment and the pressure to look whole.
“We wanted to go hard R&B,” Haywood says. “There are hip-hop elements, some old-school adult R&B, some neo-soul flavor, and I’m rapping in there. It starts dark, but as the record progresses, it brightens. There is beauty in it. There is hope.”
“He Fell in Love” tells the story of Webb and Haywood’s first meeting at Moore’s Lounge in Jersey City — at a jam session led by legendary jazz drummer Winard Harper — where music came before conversation. Webb wanted the song to unfold like a story rather than a hook-driven sketch, tracing the night they met as both the beginning of the group and the beginning of their life together. “We were performing with each other before we had spoken to one another,” she says. “That was the catalyst for us as a group, but also for us as a love story.”
“The Sunken Place” draws its title and emotional frame from Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Webb wrote from the feeling of falling into dark mental spaces that other people cannot see. In the lyric, she imagines the interior mind as “a dismal space” that might frighten someone away if they could fully witness it. Musically, Haywood frames the song in an avant-garde jazz setting with strings and an ambient classical edge.
“Learning the Hard Way” strips the band back to Webb and Haywood. After recording it with the full group, they wiped the slate clean and rebuilt the track themselves with electronic instruments, dance-pop rhythm, Middle Eastern percussion colors and a global-pop feel that echoes the opening track. The theme is blunt: no one reaches a difficult goal without bruises. “You don’t get where you’re trying to go without falling,” Webb says. “You have to fail before you prevail.”
The album closes with “You Are Everything,” Haywood’s contribution to the writing and the record’s clearest statement of resolve. “You are everything you need,” Webb says. “You can accomplish your wildest dreams, but it has to start with you. Once you know what you’re trying to do, you can find the tools within yourself. Finding meaning and purpose in your everyday life — in the bad times as well as the good — really makes up the fabric of your life.”
“There are things that are not quite right socially, and maybe things that are not right within yourself,” Haywood says. “But you have the power. You are everything you need to elevate yourself.”
Tracklisting
- I’m Never Satisfied
- Everybody Ain’t Gonna Like You (Prelude)
- Everybody Ain’t Gonna Like You
- I’d Spend It With You
- Cottonwood Tree (Prelude)
- Cottonwood Tree
- The Way Life Used to Be
- Life’s Continuum
- Dishes Ain’t Clean
- He Fell in Love
- The Sunken Place
- Learning the Hard Way
- You Are Everything