Microtonal jazz music recommendations for jazz fans and theory nerds
To some extent, you’ve already heard microtones: Consider the blues. Academic studies of early blues have established that its pitch scale contains “blue notes” — microtonal pitches not found in 12-TET. The most famous of these is the “neutral third,” a pitch sitting between the minor and major third that doesn’t cleanly exist on a piano. When a blues guitarist bends a string, or when a saxophonist smears into a note, or when a vocalist slides through a phrase, they’re often aiming for these in-between pitches — not the tempered approximations available on a keyboard.
As one researcher summarized it: when blues musicians bend notes, they aren’t playing out of tune. They’re playing more in tune, targeting the natural harmonics that 12-TET can only approximate.
Jazz has always lived in this space. Listen to Johnny Hodges’ alto saxophone gliding through a phrase, or Billie Holiday’s vocal inflections hovering between notes. As one critic at The Quietus put it succinctly: “Jazz has always been microtonal, with bends and glisses a fundamental part of its blues-based language.” The quarter-tone bass used by MonoNeon (Dywane Thomas Jr.) — who has twice the number of frets as a standard bass — is just a formalization of something saxophonists and vocalists have done intuitively for over a century.
The difference in the music featured in this guide is that these musicians are doing it deliberately, systematically, and harmonically — not just as expressive ornaments, but as the structural foundation of the music.
A Quick Word on Terms
A few concepts will keep coming up. Here’s a plain-English cheat sheet before we get into the music:
Equal temperament / EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave): Dividing the octave into equal slices. Standard Western tuning is 12-EDO. 24-EDO (quarter tones) is the most common microtonal equal temperament — it just adds one extra note between each existing semitone. Some of the musicians below use 31-EDO, which approximates just intonation very well, or even higher systems.
Just Intonation (JI): Tuning intervals to pure mathematical ratios derived from the overtone series, rather than the equal-tempered approximations. This is how a cappella choirs naturally tune when listening to each other, and why they can sound so resonant. Different JI systems are described by their “limit” — the highest prime number used in their ratios. A “7-limit” JI system includes pure intervals involving the 7th harmonic, a pitch that sounds nothing like anything in 12-TET.
Maqam: The modal system of the Middle East and North Africa, which includes quarter tones and other microtonal intervals as a core feature (not an ornament). Think of it as a collection of hundreds of scales, each with its own emotional character, many of which use pitches that fall between the cracks of the piano.
Harmonic series: The natural series of overtones that rings above any sustained note — a physical phenomenon baked into the acoustics of every instrument. The further up the series you go, the more notes appear that don’t correspond to anything on a standard keyboard. Many microtonal musicians treat this as their melodic and harmonic palette.
The Albums: A Guided Listening Path
The following records are roughly ordered from most accessible to most out-there. None of them require any theoretical knowledge to enjoy. Approach them as you’d approach any unfamiliar music: with curiosity, and a willingness to let your ears adjust.
1. Start Here: Jon Catler & Willie McBlind — Bad Thing (2009)
Why start here: It sounds like a blues record. Because it is.
Jon Catler has been one of the most persistent advocates for microtonal guitar in jazz and rock since the early 1980s. He plays custom guitars built by his company FreeNote Music, with necks fretted to just intonation tuning systems — his main instrument for this project features 64 tones per octave based on the pure intervals of the harmonic series.
Bad Thing is the second album by his just intonation blues band Willie McBlind. It features originals alongside covers of Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, and Blind Willie Johnson. The vocal and blues structures are completely familiar; it’s the guitar tone that’s different. Catler’s JI guitar has an oddly resonant, almost shimmering quality — intervals that should clash somehow ring with an unusual clarity, while other moments produce a dense, soulful dissonance unlike anything you’d hear from a regular electric guitar.
Downbeat Magazine named it one of the best albums of 2010. Listen to “Bad Thing” or “Stones in my Passway” and notice how the guitar feels both deeply bluesy and subtly alien. That uncanniness is the harmonic series talking.
Catler also leads the Fretless Brothers, a group he describes as “the world’s first Harmonic Series jazz group,” using guitars fretted in his own 12-Tone Ultra Plus system (36 notes per octave) to play post-bop jazz. Their album Footsteps(2012) is another solid next step. You can explore his custom instrument designs at freenotemusic.com.
Start with: “Bad Thing,” “Stones in my Passway”
2. Groove First, Theory Later: David Fiuczynski — Planet MicroJam (2012)
Why this next: The groove is irresistible. The context is helpful.
David “FuZe” Fiuczynski is arguably the central figure in microtonal jazz today. A Guggenheim Fellow and professor at Berklee College of Music, he founded the Planet MicroJam Institute there in 2012 — a first-of-its-kind academic program dedicated to exploring microtones in jazz, groove, and world music contexts. He plays both fretted and fretless double-neck guitars, using a loose, fluid fretless technique to navigate the spaces between standard pitches.
Planet MicroJam is his debut for RareNoise Records and a genuine landmark. The album draws on Mexican quarter-tone classical music (a piece by Julian Carrillo), Sun Ra, traditional Chinese melodies, Beethoven fragments, and original compositions — all run through a funky, jazz-fusion sensibility and grounded by guest drummer Jack DeJohnette. One review described “Micro Emperor” as “a carnival ride through Beethoven, bluegrass, straight jazz, funk, and even a Miles Davis ‘Jean Pierre’ quote tossed in for good measure.”
His philosophy is additive rather than revolutionary: not replacing 12-TET, but expanding it. His microtonal moves are grounded in tight rhythms, and the album has a playful, exploratory energy that never disappears into abstraction. An earlier album, KiF Express (2008), is arguably slightly more accessible for rock and jazz-fusion listeners — the first track, “Shiraz,” alternates clearly between quarter-tone sections and standard-tuning sections, making it a useful training exercise for the ear.
Start with: “Mystic Microjam,” “Micro Emperor”
3. Going Deeper: Philipp Gerschlauer & David Fiuczynski — Mikrojazz: Neue Expressionistische Musik (2017)
Why this next: This is where it gets genuinely strange, and genuinely beautiful.
Mikrojazz is a collaboration between Fiuczynski and Berlin-based alto saxophonist Philipp Gerschlauer — a musician who has developed a method for dividing an octave into 128 notes on the alto saxophone, using alternate fingerings, embouchure adjustments, and systematic microtonal technique. You can read about Gerschlauer’s work on his website at gerschlauermusic.com.
The band for this session is remarkable: Jack DeJohnette on drums, Matthew Garrison (son of John Coltrane’s bassist Jimmy Garrison) on fretless electric bass, and Georgian keyboardist Giorgi Mikadze on specially tuned microtonal keyboards. The result is an hour of music that swings, grooves, and explores — always engaging, rarely predictable.
Gerschlauer was inspired by French spectral composer Gérard Grisey and by jazz altoist Paul Desmond. That combination — austere European modernism and swinging American lyricism — runs through the record. Track titles like “MiCrOY Tyner” (imagining McCoy Tyner’s piano style stretched into microtonal harmony) and “Micro Steps” (a microtonal take on Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” changes) signal the humor and the ambition.
“When you play microtonal melodies and then stack them in harmony,” Fiuczynski noted in an interview, “it can certainly throw you for a loop.” He’s right — but it’s a loop worth going around. Reviewer Matthias Entreß of DeutschlandRadio Kultur called it “a haunting and benchmark-setting masterpiece which will in 40, 60, 100 years still be seen as revolutionary.”
Start with: “Mikro Steps,” “MiCrOY Tyner,” “Walking Not Flying”
4. The Cultural Fusion Path: Giorgi Mikadze — Georgian Microjamz (2020)
Why this: It shows microtonality as cultural identity, not just theory.
Keyboardist Giorgi Mikadze — the same musician heard on Mikrojazz — released his debut album as a leader in 2020, and it’s a special document. Georgian Microjamz is a hybrid of traditional Georgian folk polyphony and progressive microtonal jazz-rock fusion. Fiuczynski returns on fretless guitars, alongside Greek bassist Panagiotis Andreou and drummer Sean Wright.
Georgian folk music has one of the oldest and richest polyphonic traditions in the world, largely unknown outside its own region. (The Georgian folk song “Chakrulo” was one of only 29 musical works chosen for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space in 1977.) Mikadze brings this tradition into contact with modern microtonal jazz, and the results are often stunning — particularly on tracks like “Kartlos Blues,” “Elesa,” and “Moaning,” which features vocalist Nana Valishvili over psychedelic fretless guitar.
Igor Stravinsky reportedly once said that Georgian folk music contains “more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.” Georgian Microjamz tests that claim and makes a strong case for it.
You can explore Mikadze’s work at giorgimikadze.com.
Start with: “Kartlos Blues,” “Dumba Damba,” “Elesa”
5. The Maqam Gateway: Amir ElSaffar — Two Rivers (2007) and Not Two (2017)
Why this: Microtones rooted in one of the world’s great living musical traditions.
Iraqi-American trumpeter and vocalist Amir ElSaffar is one of the most important figures in contemporary jazz, period. In the early 2000s, he paused a promising career as a jazz and classical trumpeter in New York to travel to Baghdad and study the Iraqi maqam tradition with its surviving masters — spending five years immersed in this centuries-old oral tradition of sung poetry and improvisation.
He returned with a singular ability to combine maqam’s microtonal modal language with American jazz, and has developed new extended techniques on the trumpet to play the ornaments and microtonal inflections idiomatic to Arabic music. He is also a vocalist and plays the santur (Iraqi hammered dulcimer). You can learn more at amirelsaffar.com.
Two Rivers (2007) is his debut, featuring alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa alongside Iraqi musicians playing buzuq, oud, and violin. It frames maqam melodies within heavy grooves and free-jazz ensemble textures. The album closes with “The Blues in E Half-Flat” — an explicit bridge between the microtonal blues tradition and the microtonal maqam tradition, pointing out that these seemingly distant musical cultures are actually reaching for very similar things.
Not Two (2017) is the debut album of his 17-piece Rivers of Sound Orchestra, combining Western jazz musicians with musicians from Middle Eastern backgrounds. The scale is larger and the vision is more ambitious — this is a genuinely new orchestral language, using maqam as a structural basis rather than a local color. The album won significant critical acclaim and has aged remarkably well.
Start with: Two Rivers — “Menba’ (Maqam Bayat)” or “The Blues in E Half-Flat.” Then graduate to Not Two.
6. The Newest Frontier: Anna Webber — Shimmer Wince (2023)
Why this: The most rigorous, and perhaps the most beautiful, of the modern generation.
Saxophonist and flutist Anna Webber is a Guggenheim Fellow and a central figure in the New York avant-garde jazz scene. Each of her albums has tackled a completely different compositional framework — rhythmic games, percussion-inspired structures, woodwind extended techniques. Shimmer Wince (2023, Intakt Records) is her most radical: it applies just intonation systematically to jazz improvisation, treating the natural harmonics of notes as the primary harmonic language rather than equal-tempered chord scales.
The quintet features Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mariel Roberts on cello, Elias Stemeseder on synthesizer, and Lesley Mok on drums. In preparation for writing the album, Webber spent months practicing hearing just intonation intervals against drones and keeping a notebook of the intervals she wanted to explore. The result is music that sounds “a bit off” in a way that quickly reveals itself as deeply coherent — as if the music is breathing, rather than clocking.
“Her work using this non-equal tempered tuning system is a continuation of her research into using timbre and sound as organizing forces that are as important as harmony, melody, and rhythm,” notes her label bio. This is a good description: on Shimmer Wince, the color of intervals is structural. You can learn about her work at annakristinwebber.com.
Start with: “Swell,” “Wince,” “Squirmy”
A Note on Instruments
One question that always comes up: how do you play this music? A few approaches:
Fretless instruments — fretless bass, fretless guitar, violin, cello, trombone, voice, and the like — naturally allow continuous pitch variation. Players like Matthew Garrison (bass) and David Fiuczynski (guitar) use this freedom extensively.
Custom-fretted guitars — FreeNote Music builds guitar necks with anywhere from 19 to 64 frets per octave, allowing precise access to just intonation or equal-tempered microtonal tunings. These can be installed on standard guitar bodies.
Modified/retuned keyboards — Giorgi Mikadze plays standard-looking keyboards that have been retuned in software to output microtonal pitches. Philipp Gerschlauer prepared the keyboards for the Mikrojazz sessions this way.
The Lumatone — a hexagonal isomorphic MIDI controller with 280 illuminated keys, designed specifically for microtonal composition and performance. Each key is individually programmable to any pitch, tuning, or temperament, with polyphonic aftertouch. It’s become a popular choice for contemporary microtonal keyboardists.
Extended saxophone technique — As Philipp Gerschlauer has demonstrated, the saxophone is capable of far more pitch flexibility than most players use. Through alternate fingerings and embouchure control, he has developed access to 128 pitches per octave on the alto saxophone.
Where to Go Next
Once these albums have opened your ears, a few further directions:
The historical classical thread: Julian Carrillo (Mexico), Alois Hába (Czech Republic), and Ivan Wyschnegradsky (Russia/France) were all writing quarter-tone and microtonal classical music in the early 20th century. Fiuczynski draws directly on their work. Harry Partch’s recordings (he built an entire orchestra of custom instruments to play his 43-tone system) are genuinely unlike anything else in music history.
The theoretical rabbit hole: The Xenharmonic Wiki is an extraordinary community resource covering virtually every aspect of microtonal theory, from introductory concepts to highly advanced tuning mathematics. It’s where online microtonal communities share their research, compositions, and instrument designs.
The online community: The xenharmonic and microtonal community is surprisingly active and welcoming online. YouTube has a wealth of performances and tutorials, and forums like the Xenharmonic Alliance on Facebook are full of practitioners ranging from curious amateurs to serious composers.
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