Best Jazz Recordings 2024

You say you want a revolution?

The Revolutionary Man and Endless History

Kahil El'Zabar. Photo by Sandro Miller

There’s likely a tight overlap between the records Nate Chinen and I’ve heard this year—he identified the trend “soft radicalism” ambient improvisation. I’ve heard this too, and I think it’s important to say I have an almost completely opposed reaction to it. This isn’t about liking/not-liking; music is easy to like, but the implications of that music may be problematic.

First, improvisation is not inherently radical, it’s one of the most fundamental ways to make music and has been for tens of thousands of years. What can make it radical is context and purpose. Improvising to get to gentle, ambient moods can be enjoyable but it isn’t radical, it’s reactionary.

Jazz constantly struggles with relying on the crutch of the past, and using spiritual/free jazz is no less dangerous than the reactionary crusade of Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch in the 1980s. With music and the world changing, and atavistic power threatening society, it’s socially and politically dangerous to flirt with the comforts of (inherently reactionary) nostalgia.

I get that people want music to calm their hearts and minds, I need that too, but that unexamined impulse means New Blue Sun, at best a middling and forgettable album, is set as an avatar. Praise driven by parasocial/critical attachment to André 3000’s celebrity is dangerous.

Jazz by nature is revolutionary, so to hear this trend troubles me. Sonic comfort as a tool is worthwhile, as an organizing aesthetic it’s limiting, and presented as something advancing aesthetics and expression it’s a sham. It’s like closing your eyes and hoping that will make the monsters go away. The revolutionary man builds and fights.

Fine Listening

Musically, jazz is healthier than any other genre. It attracts exceptional musicians who produce exceptional music as long as they can afford to feed themselves and have the time to work on their ideas and craft.

A list of satisfying albums would have dozens of titles. That’s not a practical number for any guide. Bottom line, this is not recordings I merely liked, but ones I think are the most critically outstanding. They have a balance of expressive and technical ambition and meet their own terms.

I’m a sensitive listener, open to how the heart responds and then using the mind to understand it. I listen for experience and take things on their own terms. An example of that is Aaron Park’s Little Big III. This is a fine, enjoyable album with a moment on the second track, “Locked Down,” where after the musical idea begins there’s a modulation to a major chord that broke my concentration, it took too much tension out of the phrase too soon. That’s how fine a line it is between excellent and extraordinary.

Best New Releases

This is a ranked list but the top choice is the only one that matters, the others could be rearranged depending on mood. Kahil El’Zabar’s latest is extraordinary, minimal means to maximal ends, tremendous soulfulness and sensuality, powerful wisdom. His Ethnic Heritage Ensemble is an ongoing argument for the real-time creation of Black modernist culture in America, which is at this country’s core. The album has an enormous force of history that it carries lightly. The best music collapses past, present, and future into a single moment and that’s what this does.

The last three in this baker’s dozen need a little context: as much as jazz stretches as a genre, there’s some things still outside it, like non-idiomatic improvisation and prog-rock. But those three albums are easily as great as everything on the list, so I want to advocate for them.

(There were a few highly hyped albums not listed. If there’s any question that I heard them, the answer is, yes, yes I did.)

1. Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (Spiritmuse)

2. Matthew Shipp, New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP’-Disk)

3. Joëlle Léandre, LIFETIME REBEL (RogueArt)

4. Tyshawn Sorey, The Susceptible Now (Pi Recordings)

5. Patricia Brennan Septet, Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic)

6. Tarbaby, You Think This America (Giant Steps Arts)

7. Alfredo Colón, Blood Burden (Out of Your Head)

8. Nicole Mitchell and Ballaké Sissoko, Bamako*Chicago Sound System (FPE Records)

9. Steve Coleman, Polytropos/Of Many Turns (Pi Recordings)

10. Lynne Arriale, Being Human (Challenge Records)

11. The Necks, Bleed (Northern Spy)

12. Berke Can Özcan & Jonah Parzen-Johnson, It Was Always Time (We Jazz Records)

13. Ben Monder, Planetarium (Sunnyside)

Best Vocal Releases

• Silvia Bolognesi/Dudú Kouate/Griffin Rodriguez, Timing Birds (Astral Spirits)

• Fay Victor/Herbie Nichols Sung, Life is Funny That Way (Tao Forms)

• Kurt Elling, Sullivan Fortner, Wildflowers Vol. 1 (Edition Records)

• Clarence Penn, Behind the Voice (Origin Records)

• Zacchae’us Paul, JAZZ MONEY (Candid)

Best Archival Release

1. Charles Gayle/Milford Graves/William Parker, WEBO (Black Editions)

2. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Centennial (Archeogroove)

3. Bobby Hutcherson, Classic Bobby Hutcherson Blue Note Sessions 1963-1970 (Mosaic)

4. Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Paul Motian, The Old Country (ECM)

5. Bill Evans, In Norway (The Kongsberg Concert) (Elemental)

6. Phil Haynes’ 4 Horns & What?, The Complete American Recordings (Corner Store Jazz)

7. Cecil Taylor Unit, Live at Fat Tuesday’s February 9/10 (Werner’s Ezz-Thetics)

8. Sonny Rollins, A Night at the Village Vanguard-Complete Masters (Blue Note)

9. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour (Resonance)

10. Art Tatum, Jewels in the Treasure Box (Resonance)

Honorable Mentions

Not my personal top choices, but strong records I enjoyed that are worth attention and will be someone else’s favorites.

• Michaël Attias, Quartet Music Vol. I & II (Out of Your Head)

• Gregg Belisle-Chi, Hum (AGS Recordings)

• Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few, The World is On Fire (Division 81)

• Kris Davis Trio, Run the Gauntlet (Pyroclastic)

• Philip Golub, Abiding Memory (Endectomorph)

• Darius Jones, Legend of e’Boi (AUM Fidelity)

• James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Transfiguration (Intakt)

• Hayoung Lyou, The Myth of Katabasis (Endectomorph)

• Terrence McManus, Music for Chamber Trio (Rowhouse Music)

• Jordina Milità & Barry Guy, Live in Munich (ECM)

• Simon Moullier, Elements of Light (Candid)

• David Murray Quartet, Francesca (Intakt)

• Aaron Parks, Little Big III (Blue Note)

• Ivo Perelman/Mark Helias/Tom Rainey, Truth Seeker (Fundacja Słuchaj)

• Jeremy Rose & Earshift Orchestra, Discordia (Earshift Music)

• Josh Sinton, Couloir/Book of Practitioners, Vol. 2 (FiP Recordings)

• Ches Smith, Laugh Ash (Pyroclastic Records)

• SticklerPhonics, Technicolor Ghost Parade (Jealous Butcher )

• Juanma Trujillo, Howl (Endectomorph)

• Benjamin Vergara & Amanda Irrazábal, último sosaiego (577)

• Nasheet Waits, New York Love Letter (Bittersweet) (Giant Steps Arts)

• Kamasi Washington, Fearless Movement (Young)

• Sam Weinberg Trio, Plays Quarter Notes and Other Notes

• Miguel Zenón, Golden City (Miel Music)

But really, nothing but bangers all the way through. Good listening to all.