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SELF RELEASED (RELEASED SEPTEMBER 25, 2026))

Every Halloween, I struggle to fill three hours of my weekly radio show with Halloween-inspired music. After Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s “Halloween Spooks,” Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts,” and George Benson’s “This Masquerade,” I turn to standards such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “Witchcraft,” and then I’m stuck. I have to stretch to include tunes such as Mercer Ellington’s “Jumpin’ Punkins’,” Herbie Hancock’s “The Sorcerer,” and Lee Morgan’s “Candy.” Now, thanks to saxophonist Michael Blake, I’ll no longer have to tax my musical knowledge to come up with Halloween-inspired selections. Halloween Tales offers nine tunes devoted to this trick-or-treating holiday. The set opens with a reimagined version of John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween. The film-noir atmosphere of the tune is perfectly suited to Blake’s dark tenor sound and Gary Versace’s ethereal piano textures. “Stalking Monster,” written for Duke Ellington’s Night Creature Suite in 1955, sounds every bit as menacing as its title suggests, with Ben Allison’s plodding bass line and Michael Sarin’s ominous beat establishing the mood for a howling Blake tenor solo. Blake, Allison, and Sarin echo one another in the opening lines of another Ellington composition, “Anatomy of a Murder,” before Blake breaks away for a rousing solo. Versace’s rubato playing and the prayer-like mood of “Transylvania Lullaby” from Young Frankenstein eventually give way to a straight-ahead jazz groove, as Allison settles into a walking bass line and Blake explores the tune’s melodic and harmonic possibilities. The album’s darker textures are offset by Blake’s soprano on Vince Guaraldi’s “Great Pumpkin Waltz,” given a graceful, lightly swinging interpretation. His soprano takes on a more searching character on “Sally’s Song” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, where the quartet occasionally evokes the intensity and spaciousness of a classic Coltrane quartet performance.  The full quartet brings an ethereal, almost Ran Blake-like quality to Cy Coleman’s “Witchcraft,” while the trio of Blake, Allison, and Sarin creates a ghoulish groove on the brief but compelling “Breathless.” The session concludes with the Blake original “The Creep,” a slow-burning meditation that references Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus.” Thanks to Halloween Tales, I now have more tunes to choose from for my annual Halloween show. But the album’s unusual selections and consistently masterful playing will make it a “treat” any time of the year.

BOTTOM LINE: The tunes saxophonist Michael Blake has curated for Halloween Tales can best be described by borrowing the opening lyrics of The Addams Family television theme: “They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky.” After hearing Blake, pianist Gary Versace, bassist Ben Allison, and drummer Michael Sarin bring these nine selections to life, I might change the ending of that familiar TV theme to: “They’re all together groovy—the Michael Blake Quartet!”