January 21, 2026
On March 6, Walter Smith III reprises his acclaimed Twio concept with the long-awaited release of Twio, Vol. 2, a 10-track set of classic jazz songs that exudes a playful sense of joyful freedom. The album is introduced today with the lead track “My Ideal” and is available to pre-order now on vinyl, CD, or digital download along with a special merch offering on the Blue Note Store.
Smith ranks among the most impressive tenor saxophonists of our time, equally powerful and articulate. As an improviser, he suggests how jazz can continue to evolve in the most organic, authentic way possible; he’s thoroughly of this moment but steeped in the wisdom he’s gained through working with giants. Over the past two decades, he’s come of age with a generation of masterful players who double as visionary composers, writing modern, ambitious original music. But sometimes Smith and his colleagues just want to play. No fuss, no multi-page scores, no intensive rehearsals. Sometimes, they’d rather grab a bunch of smart, durable tunes they grew up loving and go to work.
That’s the spirit behind Twio, Vol. 2, Smith’s third album for Blue Note Records. It features a core trio of Smith, bassist Joe Sanders, and drummer Kendrick Scott, along with a pair of bucket-list guests: the bassist Ron Carter, who plays on half of the album’s 10 tracks, and the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who appears on two. Of the latter, Smith said, “That’s my guy from the time I got serious about playing saxophone.” Carter is also a personal and musical hero to Smith, who remarks on how accommodating but also collaborative the famously prolific bassist was during the sessions. “Ron’s input is like, ‘Don’t just play what you want. Listen to what I’m doing,’” says Smith. “’I have some ideas that may take you in different directions.’”
The album is a more-than-worthy complement to the first Twio volume, released in 2018, which showcased bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Eric Harlan, plus guests Christian McBride and Joshua Redman, another of Smith’s favorite saxophonists. “On Twio, you can tell he’s been peeling back the layers of his art form to focus on the essence,” DownBeat raved.
Vol. 2 carries that remarkable distillation forward. To start, the instrumentation is once again spare and compelling: In a Sonny Rollins-style strolling trio sans piano, the unit can communicate with extrasensory tact, and with seemingly limitless harmonic options up for grabs. Perhaps most inspired is the smartly curated and versatile repertoire, which avoids blowing-session clichés with aplomb. “The goal was to find tunes that are in the standard repertoire, but not the ones that everybody plays all the time,” Smith says. “Tunes that are adjacent to those, that would allow us to play the way we play without trying to be too traditional with it.”
While there’s plenty of melodic and harmonic radiance here, perhaps what’s most staggering is the collective temperament and feel for texture, the way the group’s volume and intensity are held in perfect balance throughout every interaction. These performances are at once thrilling and lived-in, comfortable. “We’ve done a lot of gigs with this trio, and we don’t talk about what we’re gonna play,” says Smith. “We don’t call tunes. You just start playing and then see where it goes.”
