Saxophonist Michael Blake Reimagines Halloween Classics with a Seasoned New York Quartet on Halloween Tales, out September 25, 2026
New York saxophonist Michael Blake stakes out fresh territory in holiday jazz with Halloween Tales, out September 25, 2026. While the genre has typically belonged to the winter holidays, Blake’s new release claims the mystery, humor and cinematic atmosphere of Halloween and the harvest season instead, channeled through inventive arrangements and inspired improvisation.
Blake conceived the project as a way to explore a different corner of the holiday jazz tradition – one that had gone largely untapped. Halloween, he notes, is a holiday of imagination and transformation that is built around costumes, community and a shared love of the unexpected. “Despite having no lyrics to guide the listener, every song tells a story,” Blake reflects. “The musicians are like a bunch of kids around a campfire sharing ghost stories” The concept crystallized during the pandemic, when Blake found himself drawn to music that could capture that same spirit of uncertainty and mystery.
Joined by Gary Versace on piano, Ben Allison on bass and Michael Sarin on drums, Blake leads a classic quartet lineup as a deliberate choice meant to echo the instrumentation of the holiday jazz records that shaped his own listening. The chemistry among the musicians runs deep: Blake and Allison first played together in New York in the late 1980s and went on to collaborate for years in the Jazz Composers Collective, while Sarin and Versace each logged extensive time with Blake and Allison across various bands and tours in the decades since.
The album opens with a reimagining of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, its irregular pulse and dark harmonies repurposed as a launching pad for group improvisation, acting as a fitting entry point for a band built on decades of real-time interplay. Blake, Versace, Allison and Sarin have each spent years at the center of New York’s creative jazz scene, and that shared history shows in how they handle the material. Rather than treating these songs as seasonal novelties, the quartet digs into them with the same rigor and risk-taking they’d bring to original compositions, finding new harmonic and rhythmic possibilities in music most listeners think they already know.
That approach carries through throughout. “Transylvanian Lullaby” from Young Frankenstein and “Sally’s Song” from The Nightmare Before Christmas sit alongside two pieces by Duke Ellington: the Grammy-winning “Anatomy of a Murder” and the seldom-heard “Stalking Monster.” Vince Guaraldi’s “Great Pumpkin Waltz” and “Breathless,” drawn from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and a rendition of the standard “Witchcraft” round out the covers. The sole original, “The Creep,” was first conceived in the late 1980s as a satirical political tune and has since evolved into a slow-burning meditation in C minor, drawing on Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus.”
A Montreal-born, Vancouver-raised saxophonist, Blake has called New York home since 1986 and has built one of the more wide-ranging discographies in modern jazz, moving fluidly between straight-ahead and experimental settings. The New York Times called him “an endlessly engaging improviser, and an inquisitive one.” He spent a decade touring and recording with John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards and has led his own bands and projects steadily since, including a long-running collaborative relationship with Ben Allison, who also mixed and mastered Halloween Tales. His 2023 release Dance of the Mystic Bliss landed at No. 3 on The Guardian’s list of the year’s best jazz albums, following Combobulate (2022) and Tiddy Boom (2014), both of which drew similar critical notice. Halloween Tales marks a return to the classic quartet format that first brought Blake wide attention on his 2002 album Elevated.
For Blake, who grew up celebrating Halloween in Canada with pillowcases full of candy and streets full of firecrackers, the holiday has always meant something closer to freedom: an invitation to wave your freak flag and enjoy the unexpected. Over the past century, that spirit has produced a rich and often overlooked musical tradition. Halloween Tales is Blake’s curated take on that tradition, a record made in the same spirit as the holiday itself: playful, communal and never quite what you expect.
Halloween Tales will be available September 25, 2026.