Inspired by his travels to Africa and interactions with African diaspora communities, Jasper “The Jazzmaster” Myers delivers a sprawling 17-track album: “Diaspora.” The scale of this project shows that this isn’t merely a side project; The Jazzmaster is trying to turn an idea into a world.
Myers’ catalog has long positioned him as a stylistic blender who moves between jazz, soul, funk, and contemporary hybrid forms rather than treating genre as a fence line. The opening track is proof of this, as he dives into traditional African drum beats with “Africa (Where it all Started).”
Diaspora carries more weight than most records can casually hold invoking senses of dispersal, memory, migration, inheritance, and continuity all at once. With covers of classics like “Oye Como Va” and renewed versions of Myers’ earlier work like “Never Meant to Cause You Pain” the album acts as both a promise and a burden.
It’s clear that The Jazzmaster wants the listener to expect more than atmosphere. With tracks like “Dare” and “And What May I Do For Her,” Diaspora asks to be heard as a work of identity and connection, one that tries to pull scattered feelings into a single musical frame.
This album is best approached not as a purist jazz record but as a contemporary hybrid album made by a musician whose instincts are fundamentally synthetic. The production is where an album like this either coheres or collapses, because a seventeen-track project needs architecture. The production on this record does it perfectly, as every track creates the sense of different locations, moods, and inheritances touching each other.
Seen against Myers’ broader profile, Diaspora looks like the kind of album meant to consolidate his identity as more than a niche jazz player. His public-facing catalog and credits suggest an artist comfortable with crossover; one whose music is shaped by composition and feel as much as by instrumental display. That makes Diaspora read like an attempt to make a big-tent statement: a record where jazz vocabulary, groove music, and cultural framing all feed the same argument.