Michael Blake - LYDIALIEBMAN.COM

Halloween Tales
Release date: September 25, 2026

New York saxophonist Michael Blake stakes out fresh territory in holiday jazz with Halloween Tales. 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.

Combobulate
Release date: October 14, 2022
Label: Newvelle Records

Featuring all new arrangements by Michael Blake, Combobulate combines Blake originals with compositions both by his son, Roland, and old boss, John Lurie. Combobulate is due out October 14, 2022 via Newvelle Records.

“Michael Blake is always exploring the edge of so many different pockets of the New York jazz world. A ‘first call’ musician who prefers to call his own shots. Country, soul, “free,” swing, trad jazz, rock, musical traditions from Vietnam and India, southern blues …all of it rolling around in Michael’s bag but always with an ear tilted towards the joy of it.” –From the liner notes by Elan Mehler

“Bills in the Bell” and “Henry’s Boogaloo” (dedicated to New Orleans piano titan Henry Butler) were adapted here for the double tuba session and bring bluesy, bouncy joy to the proceedings. The title song, “Combobulate,” is a journey unto itself with both tubas bouncing along with drummer Allan Mednard’s static cross beat. A swinging and subtle “Focus Pocus” is a nod to tenor saxophone idol Stan Getz’s landmark album Focus. “Strange Affair” is a swinging waltz for soprano sax akin to John Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things.” “Anthem for No Country” is adapted from Michael’s 2002 album Elevated. Elan Mehler joins the band in memoriam to their fallen colleague Frank Kimbrough. With its polyrhythmic 12/8 groove, Michael’s fondness for Madagascar choral music is at the heart of “Malagasy”. The gorgeous tone poem “Cuyahoga Valley” was composed by Michael’s son Roland. Michael sought after his previous employer John Lurie’s approval to record “Bob the Bob”. Closing the album is a fine chorale arrangement of Robert Burns “The Parting Glass”.

For a more complete understanding of the framework for this recording please refer to the Liner Notes.

Newvelle Records is proud to present The Renewal Collection, a limited edition four-album series affirming the resilience of music through the anguish and loss of the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection, Newvelle’s first series release in two years, features original compositions from incredible artists, recorded over five months and pressed on the highest quality 180-gram vinyl. Now available for preorder, the full collection ships September 15 and individual albums will be released monthly between September and December 2022 while supplies last. Together, these records capture a wide range of musical reflections and celebrations on what it means to be jazz artists in this moment.

The Renewal Collection was recorded and mixed by Grammy-winning engineer Marc Urselli at New York’s East Side Sound between November 2021 and March 2022, and mastered by Josh Bonati. The four records are pressed on 180-gram vinyl, using patented Groovecoated Stampers by Matt Earley of Gotta Groove Records, and stored in incredible gatefolds designed by Studio Mococo, the multi-award winning team that designed Newvelle’s New Orleans Collection and KIMBROUGH tribute album. Given free rein to build the series in response to the music they heard, Mococo’s team designed covers featuring dramatic crops of stunning photography from the U.S. Library of Congress’s archives and timeless, yet unique typefaces.

Recognized for “its distinctive, brand-coherent album art” and for offering “a throwback to jazz’s midcentury glories” by The New York Times, Newvelle Records was founded in 2015 with a fundamentally different model for creating and distributing music in the digital age.

“Newvelle is arguably producing today’s best sounding new jazz recordings.”

—HI-FI+