For those still unaware, the title of Alexis Cole’s new album, Taking My Seat: A Musical Inheritance (due out November 6th, 2026), is both literal and deeply personal.

Cole comes from singing pianists on both sides of her family: her father, Mark Finkin, still performs as a singer and pianist, while her late maternal grandmother, Estelle Cole, accompanied herself at the piano and helped shape Alexis’s earliest understanding of how a singer tells a story.

Piano has been part of Cole’s own musical life since childhood, but throughout an international career spanning fourteen recordings, it was her voice the world heard.

Now, at 50, Cole releases the first album on which she is both the singer and the pianist. “Taking my seat at the piano isn’t a departure from my musical history — it’s an acceptance of it,” Cole says. “The inheritance was there all along. It just took me fifty years to recognize it.”

Joined by longtime collaborators David Finck on bass and Kenny Hassler on drums, Cole recorded Taking My Seat in September 2020, during the uncertainty of the pandemic and shortly before leaving for an extended stay in South Korea.

At the time, the sessions were a way to preserve the particular chemistry the three musicians had developed together. Heard again several years later, the recording revealed something larger: an honest document of the moment when Cole’s identities as singer, pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader had begun to converge.

The eleven-track program reflects the breadth of Cole’s musical life, moving naturally among the Great American Songbook, Brazilian music and original compositions. The repertoire makes the album’s larger point: Cole is no longer separating singer, pianist, arranger and composer into different roles. On Taking My Seat, they belong to the same musical identity.

1. Bye Bye Blackbird — 6:30 (Dixon/Henderson)
2. Get Out of Town — 4:38 (Porter)
3. My Little Boat — 3:31 (Menescal/Bôscoli/Kaye)
4. Blues for All Us — 4:18 (Cole)
5. Momentary Lapse of Happiness — 3:47 (Cole)
6. The Girl from Ipanema — 3:41 (Jobim/de Moraes/Gimbel)
7. My Funny Valentine — 6:03 (Rodgers/Hart)
8. Jitterbug Waltz — 5:01 (Waller/Maltby Jr.)
9. Here’s to Life — 6:29 (Butler/Molinary)
10. Night and Day — 5:17 (Porter)
11. Yesterdays — 5:21 (Kern/Harbach)

Having built an international career that has taken her from intimate jazz clubs to major concert stages throughout the United States and Asia, Alexis opens her new album on the sumptuous Bye Bye Blackbird and the confidently jaunty Get Out of Town and then we are gifted the rhythmically alluring My Little Boat, an earthy Blues for All Us and an elegantly decadent Momentary Lapse of Happiness.

Along next is her foreign-tongued rendition of the infectiously-toned The Girl from Ipanema and the sweepingly beholden My Funny Valentine and they are in turn backed seamlessly by the veritably spoken-word, breathily invoked Jitterbug Waltz, the sheer elegance of Here’s to Life, the set rounding out on the free-flowing beauty of Night and Day, coming to a close on an all-embracing ambiance within Yesterdays.

Musicians/Instruments:
Alexis Cole — piano, vocals
David Finck — bass
Kenny Hassler — drums

www.alexiscole.com