Style: Avant-garde jazz, chamber jazz, new age (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Colin Stetson, Robin Guthrie, Shabaka, Enya
Country: United States
Release date: 20 March 2026

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The New England blazing star is a showy marvel of northeastern flora, with flowers that shoot up from its stems in pluming columns of purple and white. In the fall, the feathery spires wither and metamorphose into puffs of fractal detail, each stem housing an array of tiny white parachutes carrying a seed. When caught in the wind, the seeds lift off and tumble through the air in a showy display of solidarity before being separated and carried to their new homes.

Like the airy, fluffy seeds of the northern blazing star, John Zorn’s latest record, Sing Me Now Asleep, floats gracefully in a warm zephyr of post-minimalist, new-age-inspired chamber jazz. Each instrument is a seed unto its own: mellow guitars and a reverberant, oblique vibraphone lead the group along while harps twist and duck around them, with electronics adding the occasional jittering texture underneath. Sing Me Now Asleep is sparse, playing within ample negative space and often employing minimal evolution in its ideas, for better or for worse.

Placid guitar work anchors many of the shorter and more ‘conventional’ tracks. “He That Thy Knowest Thine” is a clear album highlight, breaching folk sensibilities in its rolling guitar melodies, blooming vibraphone interjections, and a strong development of ideas across its runtime. Opener “Such Sweet Sorrow” weaves delicate motifs among harp glissandos and undergoes a careful metamorphosis of feel and rhythm up to the ever-ascending arpeggios in its conclusion.

Mid-album cut “Soft You Now” is the first foray into experimental song structures, shaped by the warped meanderings of the vibraphone and not much else. Much of its mammoth runtime is characterized by both a lack of narrative and an unclear foundation, residing in a voidspace of melodic ramblings. “Spirits from the Vasty Deep” scatters itself the most freely as electronics warble anxiously underneath jumping vibraphone chords. The textural richness of the electronics starts the track off on a positive note, but the listen becomes nightmarishly grating by the end as the vibraphone endlessly stumbles around seemingly random intervals, giving little to hang on to as the seeds’ flight pattern is ruptured chaotically.

These more experimental forays could be forgiven if there was a distinct point of view that scaffolded Sing Me Now Asleep. Unfortunately, one gets the sense that the record is about absolutely nothing—”Nature’s Soft Nurse” and “Such Sweet Sorrow” manage to, at the minimum, string together a pleasant and coherent vibe with touches of psychedelia, but “Soft You Now” and “Spirits From the Vasty Deep” are more eager to see how different tones play with each other than to entertain any atmosphere or narrative.

Sing Me Now Asleep indulges readily in pleasant timbres and spacious compositions, but rarely transcends pleasantries. The sonic palette undoubtedly lends a sense of coherence even if the package as a whole feels aimless, and some of the shorter tracks even straddle the line between experimentation and soft, cozy indulgence. Ultimately, though, Sing Me Now Asleep reads at best as an ‘R&D record’ designed to explore tone and timbre and at worst as new-age spa music for people who do second inversion Cmaj7sus2add6 over F#’s instead of psychedelics.

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Recommended tracks: He That Thy Knowest Thine, Such Sweet Sorrow
You may also like: Craig Taborn, ZAÄAR, Kayo Dot (Stained Glass), Oleś Brothers, Ikue Mori
Final verdict: 4/10

Related links: Facebook

Label: Tzadik

John Zorn is:
– John Zorn: composition, arrangement
– Bill Frisell: guitar
– Carol Emanuel: harp
– Kenny Wollesen: vibraphone
– Ikue Mori: electronics