You know how rewarding it can be to approach a menu leaving the most delicious treats for last? Well that is how we like to approach our daily search for new music, selecting great tunes for our weekly programming, but saving for later the very best of them, so that twice a year we can organize retrospective on the best of the best. Here are some of these delicious sonic treats.

Welcome to the third part of our retrospective on some of the tunes we have loved the most in the first half of the year. We hope you do too!

Here is an edition of Mondo Jazz dedicated to the cream of the crop among the songs we have had the pleasure of listening to this year, so far!

It’s July already! And so here is the first installment of Mondo Jazz in which we start sharing some of our favorite tunes from the first six months of a 2024 that has been quite generous with jazz fans!

Taylor Eigsti opens the set with his exciting new album, and then a focus on large and medium ensembles from New York and New Orleans.

A compelling playlist thanks to two generations of drummers who get themselves in very good trouble addressing politics, the environment, and our cultural past, plenty of strings, and young talents.

Guitar/bass/drum trios for the win, the endless relevance of Max Roach, Abdul Wadud and Morphine, and more in six remarkable albums!

Dynamic elegance may be the trait that the albums featured in this set have in common, so we hope you'll be elegantly surprised!

"Two" is the thread running through this episode of Mondo Jazz, two albums of rare depth by Stephen Crump, two members of the Koppel family, two remarkable musicians at the center of the new LA scene, Josh Johnson and Julien Knowles, and two trumpeter player to keep an eye, and ear, on: Knowles and Tomasz Dabrowski

Four musicians, Jacky Terrasson; Etienne Charles; Brent Birckhead; Isaiah Collier, and their individual takes on how to both celebrate the canon and innovate it.

In our final look into the basketball & jazz interconnectedness, we focus on several jazz, or funk-jazz soundtracks for movies dedicated to the game, on jazz musicians with a basketball career, like Cab Calloway and Wayman Tisdale, a composition inspired by the elegant and creative crossover dribble known as the Shammgod, and more...

This time we focus on compositions inspired by iconic athletes like LeBron James, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Michael Jordan, George Gervin, Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. At the top of the set a collaboration between Quincy Jones and Shaquille O'Neal.

This time we felt like exploring the interplay of basketball and jazz, focusing in particular on a great jazz advocate like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, on the soundtrack of "The Winning Time", on an oneiric game played with a basketball fish, and on Stanley Clarke's tribute to this sport

This time we focus on the unique voice of Lizz Wright, and the distinctive instrumental voices of Charles Lloyd, Matthieu Bordenave, Greg Osby, Nicole Glover and Jon Gordon, in a set that brings together soul, M-Base and ECM echoes, and the legacy of Seventh Avenue South, the iconic jazz club run by the Brecker Brothers in Greenwich Village

As if the return of Goran Kajfes' Tropiques and of Elliott Sharp's Terraplane were not enough to make you want to play this episode of Mondo Jazz, its playlist features also two fascinating releases by Idit Shner, Michelangelo Scandroglio and the excellent debut album by Nicola Caminiti.

They say that three is the perfect number, and so we have decided to go "three-by-three", focusing on three musicians, Nicole McCabe, Herbie Nichols and John Hadfield, and featuring three recent tracks associated with each one of them.

Enjoy a set featuring Wadada Leo Smith's and Amina Claudine Myers' [pictured] magical collaboration, the return of Flukten and a number of really exciting collaboration between forward looking European and US musicians

A playlist dedicated to the cross-pollination between jazz and classical music or opera, with jazz musicians inspired by classical music and classical music composers and pianists nodding to jazz.

As if 88 keys were not enough, here are 440 keys, played by the five exciting pianists featured on today's show, Fergus McCreadie, Marta Sánchez, Noam Duboille, Benoit Delbecq and Rob Clearfield.

New releases and re-releases to remember Harold Land open this epsidoe which then continues with a tribute to Paul Auster, a writer admired by many musicians who wrote music with him, for him, to accompany some of his writings, or inspired by him.

This week we pay tribute to David Sanborn selecting projects from his extensive discography, which showcase both his versatility and his signature, sweetly blistering, sound. In this hour we will hop back and forth between some of his more forward looking projects and some of his best collaborations with pop, funk and rock stars

Enjoy a set spotlighting fascinating South African projects and artists, and their new albums which do a really great job at showing both where they are coming from and how they experiment with their roots in unconventional ways

Here is an edition of Mondo Jazz featuring tributes and rembrances of Curtis Fowlkes, Ron Miles and Johnny Hodges, Bill Frisell in an orchestral duo with Wayne Horvitz and with an actual orchestra, the exciting new albums by Rosa Brunello and Kenny Wollesen and more.

More un-earthed gems and special edition re-issues released for Record Store Day in this set, which also focuses on two wonderful Sun Ra tribute albumss produced by the Red Hot Organization.

This is a special edition of Mondo Jazz focusing on soon-to-be collector's items which were released on the occasion of the first Record Store Day of 2024.