Saxophonist Michael Blake sets his album Halloween Tales for 25 September

Michael Blake has spent decades looking for corners of the repertoire other players leave alone, and Halloween Tales is the clearest example yet. The saxophonist releases it independently on 25 September with Gary Versace on piano, Ben Allison on bass and Michael Sarin on drums.

The premise is simple enough to state and rarely attempted: holiday jazz almost always means Christmas, so Blake went to the other end of the calendar. The programme takes in horror film themes, harvest season music, Vince Guaraldi, Duke Ellington and one of his own tunes. "The musicians are like a bunch of kids around a campfire sharing ghost stories," he said of the result.

The choices are specific rather than generic spookiness. Transylvanian Lullaby from Young Frankenstein turns out to have an AABA form close to a jazz standard, so the quartet plays it as a ballad before pushing it toward a Coltrane quartet feel. Sally's Song from The Nightmare Before Christmas is here, along with Ellington's Anatomy of a Murder and Stalking Monster, and John Carpenter's Halloween theme taken at an uptempo drive. Blake described that last arrangement as Versace playing a babysitter to his own unrelenting pursuer.

From the Charlie Brown catalogue the group took Great Pumpkin Waltz and Breathless, and they played Witchcraft very slowly. The closer, The Creep, is one of Blake's oldest compositions, assembled out of Fables of Faubus, East St. Louis Toodle-Oo and an Ornette Coleman style free swing.

The idea started with a Halloween gig in Canada around 2018, played with keyboardist and producer Chris Gestrin, who already had charts ready. Plans for an album stalled when the pandemic arrived, and Blake kept returning to it.

Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, Blake moved to New York in 1986 and spent much of the 1990s touring and recording with John Lurie's Lounge Lizards before joining the Jazz Composers Collective. His own catalogue runs from Kingdom of Champa through Tiddy Boom and Combobulate to 2023's Dance of the Mystic Bliss.

Halloween Tales is his 20th record, cut in a day by three musicians who have played together for 30 years. Elsewhere in jazz this season, Moster! have a new album called Bolts and Blue Note opens its first UK club in London. Upcoming records are listed on the release calendar.