September 10, 2025
On Nov. 7, pianist Aaron Parks will release his latest musical offering, By All Means, his 3rd Blue Note album which expands his acclaimed trio with bassist Ben Street, and drummer Billy Hart into a quartet with the addition of tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon to explore a new color palette. The luminous set of new Parks original compositions includes poignant dedications to his wife and son, as well as the sly lead single “Parks Lope,” which is out today.
Over the past two decades, Parks has earned a reputation for pushing jazz’s aesthetic boundaries, applying his jazz training to music that boldly defies genre lines. On an album like his 2024 Blue Note return, Little Big III, the pianist led his band Little Big through electric music that blended jazz’s cutting edge with Radiohead, blues, electronica, krautrock and more.
Sometimes, in the midst of so much brilliant synthesis, it might seem easy to forget that Parks is still first and foremost a working jazz musician — a performer who adores a durable tune, a deeply swinging rhythm section and a great horn foil, and who feels most at peace in a dimly lit basement nightclub. By All Means is a gorgeous reminder of his lifelong devotion to swinging music, as well as an homage to a group he feels honored to share the bandstand with. It features one of today’s most soulfully connected rhythm sections (Hart and Street) along with a newcomer (Solomon).
Still, for all their wonderful evocations of 20th-century jazz, the seven original compositions that make up By All Means are unmistakably the work of Aaron Parks. “I don’t conceive of this as being so utterly distinct from past projects,” he says. “It’s another book of songs that felt like they were calling for their own context, for a certain group of musicians to bring them to life.”
“This is a record that loves the jazz tradition, the tradition of Black American Music,” he adds. “It’s not about nostalgia or preservation. It’s about being alive within that lineage, that continuum. That’s what the title points to — it’s a big yes, a way of saying ‘absolutely, let’s join that party.’”
Although the album — co-produced by Parks and Street — came together quickly following a fiery run at the Village Vanguard, its roots reach back decades. Parks, Street and Hart first came together on record for 2017’s Find the Way, which subsumed their chemistry into the well-defined aesthetic of the ECM label. When a new opportunity emerged with Blue Note, Parks decided to reorient the lineup so that this great piano trio could become a great rhythm section and enjoy the art of supporting a soloist. Or, as Parks says with a laugh, “I just wanted to comp. And I knew the special way that Billy played with horn players.”
Parks’ new album is a kind of heartfelt thank-you note: to his influences, his family, his bandmates — and to jazz itself. “More than anything it’s about the joys of playing together, improvising with one another over a song form,” Parks says. “This record is simply about loving the music.”
