Tony Lepore's Jazz Conjunctio - Unannounced (2026)

Tracklist

01. Uptown in the Lincoln
02. Azara
03. Morning Railyard
04. Sparito
05. Therion and the Dove
06. Axios

Unannounced is a debut album of six original compositions recorded at Atomic Sound in Brooklyn, New York during the Great Blizzard of February 2026.

The music is rooted in the tradition of hard bop and post-bop — 32-bar AABA and ABAC forms, a classic quintet instrumentation, the swing feel that pays homage to the traditional lineage — but the compositions carry the weight of specific lived experience. A midnight ride uptown in a Lincoln Town Car. A railyard at dawn, the tracks still cold, the first light coming. A ballad whose melody arrived in a single sitting on the day everything changed. A poem that began on the subway when an intriguing woman got on and got off three stops later, leaving the air permanently different. These are not abstract musical exercises. They are dispatches from a life.

The ensemble features David Ambrosio on upright bass, Dave Scott on trumpet, Adam Kolker on tenor saxophone, and Benjamin Barantschik on piano. Ambrosio just released his Civil Disobedience project and has a two-decade discography; Scott is an NEA grant recipient and New School faculty member whose records appear on the SteepleChase label. Kolker has performed and recorded with the Maria Schneider Orchestra, the Village Vanguard Orchestra, and Fred Hersch. Barantschik was someone Lepore worked in an ensemble with playing Wayne Shorter; he knew immediately he wanted to record with him. Tony Lepore played drums on the recording and wrote the tunes.

The record was engineered and mixed by Tyler Ward — a guitarist Lepore taught as a boy, who later trained in music production and interned at Atomic Sound before going on to studio work in Nashville. It was mastered by Joe Lambert Mastering. Cover art is by Kara Silvestri, for whom Lepore composed the score to the 2019 short film *Lipstick Ladies*, executive produced by Bob Giraldi.

Jazz Conjunctio takes its name from the Jungian idea of conjunctio — the meeting of opposites. Lepore spent twenty-five years in the theatre before spending the last dozen returning to jazz and for a long time those felt like different lives. On this record, the immediacy of the theatre and the cinematic language of film scoring meet inside a classic jazz quintet.