I can scarcely believe we’ve arrived at another year-end column. Every month is a deluge of wonderful new music, each album with the potential to captivate me and make time stand still. Seemingly, it’s an endless experience—and then suddenly, it’s over. As with each of these year-end column intros, I lead with the suggestion that this column is not meant to behave as a full encapsulation of the year’s best jazz, but, instead, serves as a launching point to discover more of what the year gifted us. Because it is and it did. And with that as our guiding thought… Let’s begin.
Tomin
A Willed and Conscious Balance
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
In my original write-up about Tomin Perea-Chamblee’s debut, I spoke of wanting to play this music from the rooftops for the benefit of everyone who listened—for the benefit of us all. Kind of sappy fanboy talk, kind of an over-the-top response; yet even after having the opportunity to reconsider my dramatic display, I still feel no different. I’ll still put myself out there with that same unabashed sincerity: This is the kind of music that can make the world a better place, with harmonies that lift us up to the heavens and melodies that bring heaven down to earth. This is celebratory music, healing music, music that redeems us at a time when so much of humanity seems beyond such a gift. Joining the multi-instrumentalist are keyboardist Teiana Davis; cellists Clérida Eltimé and Lester St. Louis; trumpeter Linton Smith II; bassist Luke Stewart; and drummer Tcheser Holmes.
William Parker & Ellen Christi
Cereal Music
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The music of William Parker possesses gravitas and lands with an impact, and this quality shines brightly on the bassist’s first spoken-word recording. Collaborating with sound designer Ellen Christi, Parker reads from his own texts, eliciting an atmosphere that I originally described as haunting, and with an intensity contradictory to its seemingly buttoned-up nature. On Cereal Music, Parker and Christi show that speaking softly can generate sufficient power to make a big stick entirely unnecessary. This album truly is stunning.
Tyshawn Sorey
The Susceptible Now
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Tyshawn Sorey treats the Great American Songbook as an evolving entity, emphasizing the importance of capturing the spirit of a music and its people as much as documenting the specific notes and lyrics. The drummer’s 2024 release The Susceptible Now is arguably the finest—and most enjoyable—installment in that project. Adapting the compositions of McCoy Tyner; Joni Mitchell and Charles Mingus; Brad Mehldau; and Vividry; Sorey—along with pianist Aaron Diehl and double bassist Harish Raghavan—doesn’t so much as present different versions of the originals as give glimpses of how they’d sound had the compositions lived a different life in an alternate timeline. In my original write-up, I conclude with the statement that Sorey’s latest is absolutely sublime; it’s a sentiment that rings no less true today.
Cassie Kinoshi’s seed
Gratitude
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Cassie Kinoshi’s commissioned suite is nothing short of majestic. Gratitude radiates a presence that transcends its jazz, orchestral, and electronic influences—eliciting a grand artistry from which dance, theater, visuals (and more) can effortlessly springboard. With a turntablist (NikNak) situated at one end of the music spectrum and an orchestra (London Contemporary Orchestra) at the other, composer, arranger, and alto saxophonist Kinoshi crosses the distance with a modern jazz framework, navigating a path that is as impressive as it is breathtaking.
Patricia Brennan Septet
Breaking Stretch
Compact Disc (CD)
Part of what makes the forward-thinking music of Patricia Brennan so compelling is the vibraphonist’s approach of viewing their influences as more than merely facets of the past. It’s why the musics of Mexico and New York City, the rhythmic crosscurrents of Afro-Caribbean music, American funk, rock, and salsa are never present just as foundational components but, instead, as a vision of the future, the same as any element that might get tagged “modern jazz.†The vibraphonist’s music sounds like everything and nothing at all, which is the reason why Breaking Stretch is such a compulsive listen, making the listener want to both break it down and extrapolate it out to the future. Brennan is joined on this session by saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Mark Shim; trumpeter Adam O’Farrill; drummer Marcus Gilmore; percussionist Mauricio Herrera; and bassist Kim Cass.
Peggy Lee, Julien Wilson, Theo Carbo & Dylan van der Schyff
Open Thread
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
The music of Peggy Lee is a mystery. The cellist’s melodic offerings are never fully revealed—it’s as if they’re cloaked in shadows—yet they always find the most direct path to the listener’s heart. It’s not difficult to catch glimpses of the music’s personality—strains of folk, flashes of chamber music, grumblings of avant-garde; it’s an impressionistic view so grand that it’s staggering at times to conceive. This session with tenor saxophonist Julien Wilson, guitarist Theo Carbo, and drummer-percussionist Dylan van der Schyff runs the spectrum of Lee’s expressionism perhaps more than any other recording of recent vintage, with the byproduct that more of the picture is revealed and the mystery of the music deepens.
La La Lars
La La Lars IV
Vinyl LP
The music of La La Lars is a suspended moment of springtime. Every sound is a celebration of rebirth, every motion free and effortless and full of grace. Colors are more vivid than they ere one day earlier, and an optimism exists that things will only get better. Released too late in 2023 to qualify for last year’s list, the fourth album from the quintet of drummer Lars Skoglund (also on guitar, harmonica, cymbals, and keyboards), trumpeter Goran Kajfeš, tenor saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar (also on flute), pianist Carl Bagge (also on Fender Rhodes, Philicorda, and Moog), and bassist Johan Berthling, carries the same dynamic as the three that preceded it, along with a burgeoning sense that all is right with the world. There’s a balance of old-school and modern Swedish jazz, a folkloric quality that inspires both nostalgia and wonder. This album is amazing, and yet, it only barely overshadowed another outstanding 2024 recording from Goran Kajfeš.
Mary Halvorson
Cloudward
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
As with any Mary Halvorson recording, Cloudward maps out a meticulous system of moving parts, displays patterns of motion that sometimes resemble rush hour traffic and sometimes the wide open freeway, and is struck through with unpredictable changes and a curious melodicism. But there is something inimitably personable about this recording, too. It’s not that past Halvorson recordings were mean or unfriendly; but they did require the listener to meet the music halfway. There’s a warmth to Halvorson’s latest—reuniting the guitarist’s Amaryllis sextet with bassist Nick Dunston, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, trombonist Jacob Garchik, trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, and vibraphonist Patricia Brennan—that brings a disarming quality to music that is no less complex or challenging than any other Halvorson recording, but holds the door open to the listener to walk through and greet it.
Christopher Hoffman
Vision is the Identity
Vinyl LP, Sweater/Hoodie,
It’s always a delight when a musician with a history of unconventional music surprises by instigating even more unconventional behavior, but of an entirely different sort. The cellist’s 2021 release Asp Nimbus had plenty in common with the music he’d contributed to Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, and it would’ve been forgivable to think Christopher Hoffman’s 2024 release, Vision is the Identity, would offer up more of that good stuff. But not so. Leading with a heavy electronic music foundation, and a rhythmic approach one suspects fueled by a white-hot core of intensity, Hoffman’s trio with keyboardist Frank LoCrasto and drummer Bill Campbell attains an unstoppable locomotion that, nevertheless, is resplendent with an idiosyncratic grace.
Rebecca Trescher Tentet
Character Pieces
Compact Disc (CD)
There’s a tantalizing subtlety to the music of Rebecca Tresher that pairs exquisitely with an immaculate grace. These subtleties resonate presence and loom large, conveying the sense that the music cannot be contained. It would be accurate to state that the music of Rebecca Trescher is chamber jazz indulging tendencies for symphonic liftoff and in-flight turbulence. That’s certainly the case with the clarinetist’s 2024 release, Character Pieces. Harmonies are rich with color and texture. The melody doesn’t always make itself heard, but remains as a stabilizing presence. And rhythmically, the tale is told with the heart of a storyteller. Dissonance is not discouraged, only well-placed. Emotionally? You can’t help but be affected.
Carlos Bica
11:11
Back when I wrote about this album in June’s column, I led with the admission that I was addicted to it, and found it difficult to put it aside for other music. At the end of the year, I find I am still facing that challenge. Carlos Bica has historically displayed a talent at situating his music in that incongruous place where an abiding serenity coexists peacefully with wild dissonance, as if balanced precariously at the very edge of the eye of the storm, touched both by chaos and calm. But never to this degree and resonating with such force. The double bassist—joined by alto saxophonist José Soares, vibraphonist Eduardo Cardinho, and guitarist Gonçalo Neto (who adds some banjo, to boot)—conjures powerful magic on 11:11, one of the most vivid albums of 2024.
Alexi Tuomarila Trio
Departing the Wasteland
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Witnessing the evolution of an established ensemble is like being able to simultaneously admire a flower through the lens of both seed and bloom at the same point in time. On 2024’s Departing the Wasteland, by adding guitarist Andre Fernandes (plus guests on trombone, saxophones, and flute) to his core trio of bassist Mats Eilertsen and drummer Olavi Louhivuori, pianist Alexi Tuomarila takes full advantage of the harmonic potential, creating a more expansive sound that leaves no space unfilled, but one that still conjures the same magic and crisp melodicism that made the trio sessions so special.
Sylvaine Hélary & Orchestre Incandescent
Rare Birds
Compact Disc (CD)
Poetry exists both as the foundation and execution of Sylvaine Hélary’s 2024 release. The words of Emily Dickinson and P.J. Harvey grace Rare Birds, but there’s also some similarity to magnetic poetry in the way the music unfolds in stylized patterns—charting out meandering paths before suddenly coalescing into one, disparate elements with tangential relationships that come together in startling moments of synchronicity and majesty. Hélary’s nonet of strings, wind instruments, percussion, and voices brings together elements of modern jazz, chamber, post-rock, baroque and electronic musics, utilizing all of their facets, often inventive, and always compelling.
divr
Is This Water
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
It’s a different kind of cohesion set in motion by pianist Philipp Eden, double bassist Raphael Walser, and drummer Jonas Ruther. As a piano trio, they move at staggered intervals, with a sense of maintaining a close, consistent distance, of remaining within reach of a common melody, but never deigning to grasp it simultaneously. The bonds forged by this approach unleash a rippling melodic flow that holds its form even when the path narrows to a pinpoint, or grows jagged or jarring or circuitous. Is This Water is nothing less than mesmerizing.
Other Outstanding Albums of 2024
Ambrose Akinmusire’s trio session with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley is going to get some album-of-the-year votes, as well it should. The emotional expanse traversed by cellist Tomeka Reid on 3+3 is breathtaking—from the sound of children playing in the street to one of celestial objects crossing the heavens. Fay Victor’s reinterpretation of the music of Herbie Nichols is new-school music that would’ve been adored back in the day; old-school music that is adored by the new schoolers. Emilio Reyna’s Los Niños Perdidos is an uplifting experience that captures the breadth of his travels from Mexico City to NYC to Montreal. Ben Monder’s Planetarium recording was a project 10 years in the making, a grand statement that deserves at least that much time to fully explore. And we’ll close out 2024’s final Best of Jazz column by mentioning Jeff Parker’s The Way Out of Easy, selections from the guitarist’s seven-year residency at the now-shuttered Los Angeles venue ETA, and a testament to how all of this music, mercifully, perseveres through even life’s unpleasant changes.
