Lisa Marie Simmons and Marco Cremaschini have spent years building toward this moment, and you feel it the instant “In a Word” starts playing. This is not background music. This is work that demands your attention and rewards it completely.

The album opens with a gong, deep and resonant, and from there it refuses to settle. Jazz breathes into spoken word, electronica folds into gospel, hip-hop sits next to free verse and cinematic orchestration. Nothing here is trying to be one thing. Simmons, who grew up in Boulder and made her name in New York before landing in Italy, moves between singing and speaking with the kind of ease that makes you forget those are even separate acts. Cremaschini’s piano work carries a distinctly European sensibility, and together they’ve created something their peers have started calling global jazz hybrid. That’s accurate, but it also feels too small a description for what’s actually happening.

There are moments of genuine tenderness, passages that move quietly through interior space. Then without warning the music blazes with real urgency, and the words shift between the deeply personal and the unmistakably political. You have to keep up. The album demands that of you, and most music today doesn’t have the confidence to ask.

The collaborators here are staggering. Jamaaladeen Tacuma, whose bass work has been essential to avant-garde jazz since his days with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, appears on “Taijitu.” Vernon Reid of Living Colour brings his singular presence to “Solid Ground (Meet Me There)” and the closing track. Charu Suri, the first Indian-born jazz composer to perform at Carnegie Hall, adds something quietly powerful to “Winner Takes All.” And then there’s “Solid Ground” again, featuring The Flamingos’ Theresa Trigg and Terry Isaiah Johnson. Johnson passed away in October, just twelve days after this album came out, and his appearance here matters in ways that will only deepen over time.

The core band moves through the record with real intuition. Cremaschini on piano, Manuel Caliumi on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, Marco Cocconi on electric bass, Federico Negri on drums. You can hear how they listen to each other, how much trust lives between them.

DownBeat gave this five stars. All About Jazz called it top-end poetry and top-end jazz in equal measure. Chris Slawecki placed NoteSpeak in a lineage that runs from Ishmael Reed through Queen Latifah, which is the kind of frame that matters. The influences here span from Nina Simone and Gil Scott-Heron to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan to Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding. This music knows where it comes from.

Simmons made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2025, sold out. The project has extended into contemporary art, with her collaborating on Phoebe Boswell’s exhibition at Wentrup Gallery in Berlin. That felt like two artists recognizing something essential in each other’s work.

You can listen here.