Images: © Youri Lenquette
The New Album Available Now
Three-time GRAMMY Award-winning pianist, composer, and bandleader Sullivan Fortner returns with his sixth album, Leave That In There, released August 28, 2026.
Co-produced by Derrick Hodge and Jack DeBoe, Leave That In There is Fortner’s most personal and self-referential recording to date. Across twelve original compositions and one cover, the album brings together family memories, spiritual traditions, musical history, and references to earlier works from throughout his catalog. Its sound moves fluidly between acoustic trio interplay, Hammond B3 organ, synthesizers, marimba, Bàtá drumming, and fully improvised passages.
The album is also Fortner’s first studio recording with his working trio of bassist Tyrone Allen II and drummer Kayvon Gordon. Developed through extensive live performance, the trio brings an instinctive balance of structure, spontaneity, precision, and freedom to the music.
Leave That In There follows Fortner’s GRAMMY-winning Southern Nights and continues a career that has included work with Samara Joy, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves, and John Scofield, along with recognition including The Gilmore’s inaugural 2026 Larry J. Bell Jazz Artist Award.
The album title comes from a line in Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. In the liner notes, writer Courtney-Savali L. Andrews connects the phrase to the record’s broader themes of memory, grief, humor, ancestry, survival, and resilience — ideas deeply rooted in Fortner’s New Orleans upbringing and carried throughout the album.
Opening track “Sugarcane” brings those connections immediately into focus, combining childhood memories with the cultural and historical landscape of southern Louisiana. Built around Gordon’s Bàtá drumming, piano, marimba, synthesizer textures, and layered percussion, the piece introduces musical ideas that reappear throughout the record and help create its interconnected structure.
Other highlights include “Swirl,” inspired by Thelonious Monk; the meditative “A Hymn for Linda”; “Aria II,” which revisits material from Fortner’s 2015 debut Aria; and the contemplative lead single “Que Diablos.” The album’s sole cover, “Number 3,” is a fast waltz by Detroit drummer-composer Lawrence Williams and a tribute to Marcus Belgrave, whom Fortner met while studying at Oberlin.
Throughout Leave That In There, Fortner revisits musical ideas from his past not as nostalgia, but as part of an evolving continuum — connecting memory, place, history, and improvisation within a deeply personal new chapter of his work.
“His fundamentals as a player could hardly be stronger, and his instincts as a composer and bandleader are almost startlingly mature.”
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“Fortner beautifully, slowly and deliberately asks the eternal question of the essence of love — his notes dance, come to a halt and resume the twirls.”
About
Sullivan Fortner is a pianist, composer and bandleader whose music moves between deep jazz tradition and an irrepressibly exploratory musical imagination. A New Orleans native known for his command of harmony, rhythm and improvisation, Fortner has emerged as one of the defining pianistic voices of his generation, equally distinctive as a solo artist, ensemble leader and collaborator.
His recent work captures the breadth of that musical identity. Following Aria (2015) and Moments Preserved (2018), Fortner released the expansive Solo Game in 2023, an investigation of the possibilities of solo performance that moved beyond acoustic piano to incorporate organ, percussion, electronics, voice and other instruments. Southern Nights followed in 2025, bringing Fortner together with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Marcus Gilmore in a recording deeply connected to his New Orleans roots. The album won the 2026 GRAMMY Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and followed his February 2025 appearance on the cover of DownBeat.
Fortner's work as a collaborator has been equally significant. His longstanding musical relationship with vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has produced some of contemporary jazz's most acclaimed recordings, including The Window, winner of the 2019 GRAMMY Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album. In 2025, Fortner earned another GRAMMY, this time for Best Jazz Performance with Samara Joy on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me.”
Across his career he has performed and recorded with artists including Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, John Scofield, Ambrose Akinmusire, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stefon Harris, Fred Hersch, Chief Adjuah and the late Roy Hargrove.
Fortner began playing piano at seven in New Orleans, growing within a musical culture in which rhythm, improvisation, blues and individual expression remain inseparable.
He later earned his Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory and a Master of Music in Jazz Performance from Manhattan School of Music. That combination of lineage and rigorous study continues to inform a musical language that respects tradition without treating it as fixed.
Whether working with a trio, accompanying a vocalist, performing solo or expanding the piano through electronics and other sound sources, Fortner approaches music as an active field of discovery.
That exploratory impulse is particularly apparent in Solo Game, where Fortner works alone in the studio while extending his musical vocabulary far beyond the conventional boundaries of solo piano.
Fortner's curiosity extends naturally to his work as an educator and mentor. He has taught and presented masterclasses at institutions including Manhattan School of Music, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Purdue University, Belmont University and Oberlin Conservatory, where he has served on the faculty and returned as visiting professor of jazz piano.
His relationship to the music is rooted not simply in technical command, but in sustained engagement with its history, language and evolving possibilities.
“[Sullivan] is one of the best pianists in the world today and he has all of the musical attributes I love: creativity, technique always in the service of expression, joy and humor, fearlessness and pianistic mastery.”
Recordings
“Fortner [displays] an ease of expression that stems from a longtime commitment to the music.”
Images
All images: © Youri Lenquette