GRAMMY-NOMINATED PIANIST AND COMPOSER SEAN MASON ANNOUNCES STATE OF THE ART, A BOLD NEW TRIO ALBUM CAPTURING THE POWER OF SPONTANEITY, COLLECTIVE CREATION AND HUMAN CONNECTION
RECORDED IN A SINGLE SESSION, FEATURING BASSIST FELIX MOSEHOLM, DRUMMER DOMO BRANCH AND MOVEMENT ARTISTS REYNA NUÑEZ AND LEANDRE DOUGLAS
OUT OCTOBER 16 VIA TAYLOR CHRISTIAN RECORDS
State of the Art, the new album by Grammy-nominated pianist, composer and producer Sean Mason, is out October 16, 2026 via Taylor Christian Records. On his third album as a bandleader, Mason reunites with bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Domo Branch, the rhythm section heard across his previous albums, and brings movement artists Reyna Nuñez and LeAndre Douglas directly into the music-making process. Mason composed and produced the seven-track program, which navigates swing, post-bop, soul, contemporary groove and rhythms rooted in social dance.
At the center of State of the Art is the joyful, spontaneous exchange between those five individuals: musicians and dancers responding to one another in real time, creating a shared experience that is both deeply personal and collective at once. Mason invited Nuñez and Douglas into the recording session as active collaborators, extending the long relationship between jazz and social dance while asking what that relationship might look like in the present. Their footsteps, voices, gestures and physical rhythms enter the performances themselves, influencing the trio’s decisions as the music unfolds.
For Mason, that openness is also a model of leadership. Rather than predetermining every outcome, he wanted to create conditions in which Moseholm, Branch, Nuñez and Douglas could become more fully themselves within the music. “I wanted the mission of the trio to help everyone become more like themselves,” Mason says. “I wanted to play with dancers instead of playing for dancers.”
The recording process was designed to make space for that kind of exchange. State of the Art was recorded in a single session, with no more than two takes of each studio composition, preserving the decisions, reactions and changes of direction that arose naturally between the performers.
The title refers both to the extraordinary level of technical achievement that technology can make possible and to a larger, more enduring question: What does it mean to create art at its highest level? In an era when the boundaries between live performance and post-production can become increasingly difficult to distinguish, Mason wanted the album to explicate this human exchange.
“The modern recording world seems pointed towards a perfect product,” Mason says. “The line between performance and production has become so blurred that it’s often hard to decipher what was being played live, or whether there were any human beings inside the recording at all. Technology and AI are tools that can be incredibly useful and educational, but I also believe we are entering an age where transparency matters deeply. Listeners deserve to know how something was made.”
The album continues an artistic inquiry Mason has pursued across music and dance. In 2022, he began working with Nuñez and Douglas on The Jazz Continuum, a production created and choreographed by LaTasha Barnes that explored the relationship between jazz and dance. It further deepened his understanding of jazz as an embodied culture in which dancers can actively affect musical decisions; Mason and Charles Turner received a 2023 Bessie Award for the production’s music and sound design.
Born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mason grew up hearing gospel in the Black church alongside Ray Charles, Earth, Wind & Fire, Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Brothers Johnson at home. His late grandfather, Raymond “Flat Tire” Mason was a jazz drummer and Charlotte club owner active in the city’s African-American music community during the 1950s and ’60s. Mason began playing piano at 13 and developed through the Jazz Arts Initiative, now JazzArts Charlotte, before studying at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After Branford Marsalis heard him play there and encouraged him to audition for The Juilliard School, Mason transferred to Juilliard in 2018.
Upon his arrival in New York, Mason worked across jazz, dance, film and interdisciplinary performance while developing a body of music that connects jazz history to the sound of the present. Wynton Marsalis has praised his “combination of soul and intelligence,” while NPR has called his music “exceptionally groovy.” A Steinway Artist, Mason received Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works support for State of the Art.
Mason introduced himself as a composer-bandleader on his 2023 debut, The Southern Suite, recorded with trumpeter Tony Glausi, tenor saxophonist Chris Lewis, Moseholm and Branch. The eight-part suite examined his Southern upbringing and the relationship between inherited culture, love of place and change, reaching No. 13 on JazzWeek. In 2024, Mason and poet Mahogany L. Browne released CHROME VALLEY, which premiered with dance and projected imagery at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. Later that year, Mason and Catherine Russell released the voice-and-piano duo album My Ideal, which received a 2025 GRAMMY nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album and a Bistro Award for Outstanding Recording.
Mason returned to the quintet on 2025’s A Breath of Fresh Air, recorded with Glausi, Lewis, Moseholm and Branch. The album inaugurated Taylor Christian Records, an independent label founded by Mason, and reached No. 4 on JazzWeek and No. 3 on the NACC Jazz chart. With State of the Art, he returns to the trio — a format that shaped his early years in New York — while expanding its possibilities through collaboration with movement.
Mason sent Moseholm and Branch solo-piano recordings of the new State of the Art compositions less than a week before their live premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club. Once the trio began rehearsing and performing, the musicians’ interpretations began expanding the pieces beyond Mason’s original conception.
“For me, the compositions are living organisms,” he says. “The first step is the conception of them in solitude, the second is bringing them into a room with other musicians, and the third is performing them live and continuing to watch them grow in the moment.”
Two days after the Dizzy’s premiere, Mason, Moseholm and Branch entered the studio with Nuñez and Douglas. The limited number of takes kept that sense of discovery close to the surface, giving the five collaborators room to respond instinctively to what was happening around them. The result is less a demonstration of a recording method than a document of relationships taking shape: melodies changing character, rhythms shifting beneath the dancers and musicians answering sounds that did not exist until the moment they were made.
The opening track and lead single, “Secure the Bag,” establishes that collective method. Moseholm’s opening bass vamp sets the foundation for a groove that Mason hears as both wide and airy, recalling Duke Ellington’s “Chinoiserie,” and tight and dry, almost like a street beat. Branch’s brushwork gives the groove a distinctive character, while Nuñez eventually finds a tambourine and incorporates it into her movement.
“That’s one of the central ideas of the record,” Mason says. “The same musical material can become something entirely different depending on collective interpretation. Reyna was literally hitting different parts of her body with that tambourine. We were having a great time.”
“A Good Day” draws upon the feel-good records Mason heard at home in Charlotte. When he first played it for Nuñez, she connected the composition to hearing Mary J. Blige while growing up in Brooklyn. “I love that connection,” Mason says, “because the tune really does evoke that sense of warmth and optimism.”
“Honey Pie” places the language of Lindy Hop in the present. Mason built the piece around a melody that first appeared during a freely improvised trio concert, then added a shout chorus that asks three musicians to perform a function commonly assigned to a big band. As the arrangement quiets, the movement artists’ feet become clearly audible. “There’s a clear connection to Lindy Hop, but I wanted it to feel alive instead of nostalgic,” Mason says. “It’s like they became part of the arrangement.”
“Carolina Waltz” opens with Moseholm’s ostinato and Branch’s hand percussion, gradually building toward a quiet embrace between Nuñez and Douglas. Mason calls it “one of the more tender tunes on the album.”
“This or That” was the first piece recorded that day, and the album preserves its first and only take. Moseholm takes a walking bass solo while Mason lays out completely, and Nuñez and Douglas can be heard encouraging the musicians. “You can hear the freshness in the recording,” Mason says. “At the end, you can hear Reyna saying, ‘Okay!’ in this deeply soulful and encouraging way. There was so much love in the room.”
“Nightcap” expresses the feeling of exhaling at the end of a day, when time becomes more reflective, personal, and spontaneous, and a shared sense of ease and warmth settles in. “A nightcap is generally a drink someone has at the end of the night, so it’s about that late-night intimacy: a warm, nocturnal mood.”
The album closes with a performance of “One United,” captured live at Dizzy’s Club. Originally recorded on Mason’s 2023 debut The Southern Suite, this live version demonstrates how the tune has developed over time. “When we first recorded this tune, we were capturing the process of discovery” Mason says, “but this live version captures the other side: what happens after a tune has spent years living on the bandstand.”
Across State of the Art, Mason draws from a century of jazz — from stride, swing and social-dance music through post-bop, soul and contemporary groove — while treating that history as something that remains alive through use, exchange and reinterpretation. He hopes the music can contribute new repertoire to that continuum while bringing different generations, traditions and communities into conversation.
“I want to be part of a movement that creates new jazz standards for this generation,” Mason says. More broadly, he sees his work as “bridging this 100-year jazz history and uniting musicians, listeners and people around the world in a way that brings positivity, understanding and a renewed sense of community.”
Tracklisting
- Secure the Bag
- A Good Day
- Honey Pie
- Carolina Waltz
- This or That
- Nightcap
- One United (Live at Dizzy’s Club)