| Jazz |
Heather McKay’s Multicultural Jazz Journey Finds Its Voice in a Dazzling New Album.
By any measure, Heather McKay has lived several musical lives. She has wandered through rock and rhythm and blues, immersed herself in the grooves of gospel and Caribbean dance, explored the intricacies of Brazilian jazz, and joined ensembles that drew from African traditions or Persian classical structures. At the Kennedy Center, she lent her voice as a guitarist to projects that bridged cultures; at the Smithsonian, she became part of the story of American music itself. To say she is eclectic is true but insufficient. The more accurate description might be this: McKay is a collector of traditions, a careful listener who takes the essence of each style she encounters and, rather than imitating it, allows it to transform her own musical language.
That long journey arrives now at a milestone moment. At the end of September, McKay will release a new album that distills decades of curiosity, labor, and quiet conviction. On its surface, the project might be categorized as Latin jazz. But as soon as one listens, it becomes clear that this is not an album designed to fit into a box. The rhythms are unmistakably Latin-inflected, yet they serve more as a point of departure than a destination. Within these compositions, you hear the entire spectrum of McKay’s career, flashes of rock’s intensity, gospel’s warmth, fusion’s daring, Brazilian music’s rhythmic poetry. Even the ghost of Santana flickers at times, though what McKay borrows is less his flamboyance than his ability to fold cultures together into a seamless whole.
Part of what makes the record compelling is its balance between sophistication and accessibility. McKay does not write like a guitarist obsessed with her own instrument. Instead, she writes like a composer who understands the full orchestra of possibilities available to her. Each piece gives space to multiple voices, horns, percussion, piano, bass, woven into a fabric where her guitar line often slips in subtly, guiding without dominating. Her mastery lies not in virtuoso display, but in creating conversations among instruments, dialogues that seem to sparkle and expand as the music unfolds.
Listeners may find themselves smiling without realizing it. The tracks are vibrant, alive, and in their own way, invitations to travel. This is music that beckons you outward: to distant geographies, to cultures you may never have encountered, to rhythms that feel both foreign and familiar at once. It is also music that rewards repeated listening, each pass revealing new details, hidden turns, harmonic surprises that were tucked in carefully. One finishes the album with a sense of gratitude tinged with longing, gratitude for the artistry, and longing to experience it live, in the charged air of a performance hall.
McKay’s path to this record was anything but hurried. After twenty-five years of playing in groups, she made a conscious decision to slow down and focus on composition. She wanted to write music that captured the full sweep of her experience, an album that would allow her to integrate the many styles she had studied. The idea was not simply to record a Latin jazz project, but to craft something with rhythmic diversity and structural richness: pieces that could move with the swing of 4/4 or dance to more complex meters, pieces that could evolve over time rather than calcify into formulas.
The process took years. Compositions shifted, stretched, matured, sometimes abandoned only to return in new form. Along the way, McKay drew upon her connections in the Washington music scene, collaborating with some of the region’s finest players. Their fingerprints are all over the album, not overshadowing her voice, but enriching it, making the record as much a communal creation as a personal statement. In the end, several of these musicians became not just collaborators but partners, both in the studio and in the live Heather McKay Project that now brings this music to audiences.
What emerges is more than just a collection of tracks. It feels like the culmination of a lifetime of learning, and also like the beginning of a new chapter. McKay has always been a musician of range, as her résumé demonstrates: Alfredo Mojica in Latin jazz, 2 Funkin Heavy in rock and rhythm and blues, Trio de Janeiro in straight-ahead jazz, Windspirit in fusion, Origem in Brazilian jazz, Caribash in Afro-Caribbean grooves, Winfield Parker in gospel, the Said Orchestra in Persian classical forms. Few guitarists can point to such an expansive list, and fewer still can say they have studied each style deeply enough to understand its inner logic. But McKay has, and you hear the fruits of that study throughout this album.
Comparisons are tempting. One might point to Mike Stern, whose music is also defined by the layering of multiple traditions. But Stern often leans into intensity and firepower, while McKay approaches the same task with subtlety and restraint. Her work does not announce its multiculturalism with capital letters; it breathes it in naturally, as though this synthesis were the most obvious way to make music. To call it “Latin jazz” alone, in fact, does it a disservice. There are quiet homages to other idioms scattered throughout, acknowledgments folded so seamlessly into her phrasing that they become less reference and more resonance.
In the end, the album resists labels because it is not about genre, it is about vision. Heather McKay has taken the long road, and the reward is a record that is luminous, intelligent, and profoundly human. It is not “classic” in the sense of fitting neatly into the jazz canon, but it is classic in the older sense of the word: art that endures, that invites you to return, that deepens with time. Here, the beauty of art and the art of beauty meet, and the listener is invited to witness the encounter.
Open your ears. The journey is waiting.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 11th 2025
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Musicians :
Heather McKay, guitar
Peter Fraize, sax
Leland Nakamura, drums
Attila Molnar, Keuboard & Engineer
Leonardo Lucini, bass
Bruno Lucini, percussions
Track Listing :
You Make Me Smile
Boo
Narraguagus
Eleven Reasons Why
The Playground
Run
Things That Were Said
Kenyan Moon
Lucini in the Park