Gretchen Parlato releases the album The Wise Ones on Edition Records

Gretchen Parlato has released The Wise Ones, her third album for Edition Records after Flor in 2021 and Lean In in 2023. It arrived digitally on 28 August, with LP and CD following on 11 September, and comes some fifteen years after the award-winning In a Dream first made her name.

The album was recorded in Los Angeles in 2025 with a band most singers would not get near: Robert Glasper, Gerald Clayton, Mark Guiliana and Alan Hampton, with Becca Stevens, Amber Navran, Meshell Ndegeocello and Josh Mease also on the session. Reviewing it for UK Jazz News, David Shiers heard the same qualities as her earlier vocal work, a close-to-the-mic intimacy, exact phrasing and pitching that does not slip.

Opener Capricorn sets an easy, sunny tone with layered vocals and piano that Shiers put near the more jazz-leaning end of Stevie Wonder's catalogue. Her own Never Come Down goes for something more complex and hypnotic, and Glasper's Rainbow starts funky before settling into a groove that matches the lyric.

The title track, with words by Parlato and music by Amber Navran, leads straight into a reading of Stevie Wonder's If It's Magic, where Glasper's Fender Rhodes weaves around the vocal. Track seven is Roland Orzabal's Mad World, the Tears for Fears song best known now through its Donnie Darko cover, and it is arranged rather than simply performed.

The rest of the record spreads the writing around: Alan Hampton's It's You, Max Bryk's Already Gone, Block the Sun from Glasper, and two closing numbers penned by Josh Mease. Shiers used the album to make a point about repertoire, that writing a song well takes a different skill from playing one well, and that a record which knows the difference sets its bar higher.

The Wise Ones goes out on Edition as EDN 1300. UK Jazz News published its review the same day it ran one of Miguel Zenon and Luis Perdomo's third bolero volume, and both sit on the release calendar.