Growing up in Toronto, I was fortunate to live in a city that loved jazz. I knew, even as a boy, that Charlie Parker had recorded an album at Massey Hall, and that fact alone gave the city a kind of aura for me. However, it was not only the legends of the past that shaped my feeling for this music, I was lucky enough to see many of the great masters perform at Ontario Place and elsewhere — Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Mel Tormé, among others. I remember dragging my father to Seneca College more than once to see Buddy Rich and his big band, and being absolutely blown away by the sheer ferocity and brilliance of the music. I must have been thirteen or fourteen.
Later I saw one of Miles Davis’s last tours at Roy Thomson Hall, and I also had the unforgettable experience of seeing Keith Jarrett and his astonishing trio. Those performances were exceptional and remain luminous in memory.
However, the torch of music is not buried with the masters, but carried forward by their prodigies. That is the point that still seems to escape far too many people: Something miraculous is happening in jazz right now, and the wider culture scarcely seems aware of it. The talent out there is simply exploding with an unprecedented burst of creativity, exploration and transcendence. It is truly an unprecedented musical renaissance occurring in almost total obscurity. These young virtuoso musicians are not merely competent custodians of a noble past, they bring such technique, such depth of musical knowledge, such individuality, and such energy that one is tempted to say they are not merely keeping the form alive, but extending it beyond what even some of the original masters could have ever imagined.
It has always been a mystery to me that so much coarse, degenerate music commands stadiums while jazz — one of the highest achievements of modern art — still too often works in the shadows. Jazz ought to be celebrated as one of the pinnacles of musical expression. It asks more of the listener, perhaps, which may be part of the problem; it demands attention, curiosity, and some degree of surrender. However, what it returns for that attentiveness is immeasurable. A salubrious effect comes from being in the presence of real jazz: one feels the mind sharpen, the emotions deepen, and the spirit somehow lifted.
That is why I wanted to return to the subject as the first piece could only gesture toward the scale of what is happening. There are simply too many remarkable musicians out there to contain in one article. So here is a second international constellation of nascent jazz stars and supernovas.
Take Emmet Cohen who is not only a tremendous pianist, but one of the music’s great living ambassadors. His official bio quite rightly places him “at the vanguard of his generation’s advancement of the music,” and what makes him especially important is that he has understood jazz not as a private cult but as a living public art. During the pandemic, when musicians had nowhere to play, he created Live From Emmet’s Place out of his Harlem apartment. What began as an intimate livestream in lockdown became a global gathering place and has since amassed more than 100 million views across platforms. That is no small achievement: It proves that when jazz is given room to breathe in public, people respond. Proving that if you build it, they will come.
And one can hear why in performances such as “After You’ve Gone,” jazz sounds exactly as it should: exuberant, breathing, alive, and charged with vitality. The Youtube video of that exquisite performance has amassed an unprecedented 3.5 million views! Nothing about it feels antique or embalmed. It pulses in the present tense, and anyone who still imagines this music as some dusty museum piece has only to hear it to realize how fiercely flourishing it still is. Cohen’s circle has also brought extraordinary players into view — Bruce Harris, Patrick Bartley, and so many others — and in that sense Emmet’s Place has become more than a channel. It is a window into the jazz renaissance itself.
Then there is Hiromi, who is simply phenomenal testifies to Japan’s deep love affair with jazz – one of the great underappreciated cultural stories of the modern era. After the war, Japan embraced American music with unusual depth and seriousness, and over time that devotion produced extraordinary jazz musicians, many of them unnoticed outside Japan despite immense talent and discipline. Hiromi stands near the front of that lineage: dazzling, explosive, rhythmically alive, and possessed of an imagination that can make the piano seem almost orchestral. She does not play politely; she attacks the instrument with joy and cool aplomb.
Fumika Asari belongs in that Japanese section as well, though in a very different register. Her gift is more inward, poised, and unshowy in the best sense. There is no vulgar display in her guitar playing, no desperate effort to advertise her own cleverness. That precise restraint is part of what makes her compelling. Jazz does not always have to arrive in a blaze – sometimes it advances through touch, tone, and the quiet confidence of someone who has absorbed the language assiduously enough not to need tricks.
Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts belong in this wider field too because they remind us that jazz vitality can erupt in unexpected places. They are dynamic to the point of combustion. “Tank!” alone has enough voltage to silence anyone who thinks jazz can no longer kick down the door. It arrives with style, velocity, wit, and full-band electricity, and their work proves that jazz can still be theatrical, kinetic, and musically first-rate all at once.
Canada, too, continues to produce extraordinary artists. Caity Gyorgy is a brilliant vocalist with real swing intelligence, wit, and songcraft. She does not merely mimic the old vocal tradition; she inhabits it and refreshes it. While, Laila Biali, meanwhile, brings a different kind of radiance. Her official bio describes her as a multi-award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter, pianist, CBC Music host, and a 2026 Grammy nominee, and all of that honors what is plainly there in the music: intelligence, warmth, imagination, and range. Laila Biali’s rendition of Thad Jones’s “A Child Is Born” is transcendent, and part of its power surely lies in the fact that it came during her first Christmas with a baby. You can hear that personal meaning in the performance itself — not as sentimentality, but as something tender, lived, and deeply true. Her voice there is mellifluous without ever becoming cloying, and the result is genuinely moving as it soars to extraordinary heights.
Michael Kaeshammer brings still another kind of joy. He reminds us that virtuosity need not be sterile and that swing can still grin. “Shoo-Raa” has exactly the kind of buoyant keyboard bravura that makes you feel jazz can still dance. Alex Goodman, on guitar, brings lyricism and quiet seriousness. He does not come at the listener with noise or attitude. He brings musical intelligence that matters. In an age of endless display, there is something almost moral in musicians who let the line speak for itself. BadBadNotGood widened the field in yet another direction. They helped restore cultural voltage to jazz-inflected instrumental music and reached listeners who might never have found their way first into a more traditional jazz room.
The UK scene, meanwhile, remains one of the most exciting fronts in the larger renaissance. Musicians such as Nubya Garcia, Camilla George, Moses Boyd, and Theon Cross have created a sound that honors jazz while infusing it with Afrobeat, hip-hop, Caribbean rhythm, and the charged energy of contemporary London. That this has happened with help from organizations like Tomorrow’s Warriors only makes the story richer. A real scene has formed, and scenes matter.
Then there are artists like Gordon Goodwin, reviving the large-ensemble sound with swagger and contemporary force, and Mike Davis and The New Wonders, proving that even revival, if done with conviction and scholarship, can feel vividly alive rather than antiquarian. Jazz is not moving in only one direction. That is part of what makes this period so exciting. It is not one school, one orthodoxy, or one approved future; it is a great many futures at once moving in different directions like an exploding galaxy of phosphorescent stars.
That, finally, is what I hope people understand. This article is not meant to make anyone feel guilty, or dutiful, or obliged to support an artist in the manner of cultural homework. No. I want to ignite curiosity and send people out into this vast new world of incredible jazz to explore it for themselves. What waits there is not obligation but inspiration that will stir the soul and become one of those rare gifts that keeps on giving.
Nor does this article begin to exhaust the talent out there. There are many more extraordinary musicians than any one piece can name, and the point is not completeness, it is invitation. Get out there. Listen. Explore. Support these artists not from some pious sense of duty, but because this art form is one of the great living achievements of the modern world and it is still alive, still growing, still expanding, still surprising us a century on.
Do not miss this extraordinary harvest. Jazz is not over by any stretch of the imagination. It is not fading into the wallpaper of history; it’s not some archaic relic preserved behind glass; it’s alive now, today, throbbing with vitality, and in some of these young musicians it sounds better than ever.
If this article does anything, I hope it is simply to push open a door. Walk through it and enjoy the exceptional music waiting on the other side may change your life. It will surely bring you ample joy.
Aaron J. Shuster is an award-winning cinematist, writer, philosopher and analyst who examines politics, strategic culture, and the civilizational forces shaping modern society.
