In 2024, jazz continued to spiral out, looking both forward and backward and expanding to mingle with adjacent styles. The year’s most memorable releases in the genre are diverse, but they all share one key trait: a delight in intimate, real-time musical conversation.
1. Tarbaby, ‘You Think This America’
The pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits have each been indispensable to 21st-century jazz, both as bandleaders and sidemen. But despite a near-20-year history, their collective trio, Tarbaby, has flown under the radar. With “You Think This America,” the first Tarbaby album without any additional musicians, they stake their claim as an elite group capable of conveying the most guileless tenderness (on a version of the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow”), the deepest blues feeling (on the 1920s standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) and the hippest sort of post-bop looseness (on the Evans original “Red Door”). They did it all while cultivating a refreshingly non-hierarchical approach, where moment to moment each member has an equal sonic stake.
2. David Murray Quartet, ‘Francesca’
Even when David Murray first arrived in New York around 50 years ago as an upstart saxophonist and bandleader, he seemed like an old soul, communing with the roots of jazz while thriving on its cutting edge. So he’s a natural fit for the elder-statesman role he plays on “Francesca,” alongside three outstanding younger musicians — the pianist Marta Sánchez, the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Russell Carter — who seem intuitively connected to his love of vigorous swing and grittily exuberant improv. The results feel like quintessential Murray, whether on the swaggering, extroverted “Am Gone Get Some” or the title track, a waltz that starts off restrained but soon bursts with emotion.
3. Tyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘The Susceptible Now’
Tyshawn Sorey’s current working group — featuring the pianist Aaron Diehl and the bassist Harish Raghavan — might seem like one of the most straightforward projects yet from the drummer-composer, a trailblazer in both the jazz and classical avant-gardes. But on the trio’s quietly stunning third album, a series of extended and reimagined covers that pull you in with a tractor-beam intensity, Sorey’s love of Morton Feldman’s radical sparseness is just as evident as his appreciation for the classic piano-bass-drums format, which has rarely felt so patient or enveloping.
4. Louis Hayes, ‘Artform Revisited’
A prime pleasure this year was hearing Louis Hayes — a working drummer for around 70 years, who helped lay the foundations for hard bop through his early work with Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley and others — dig into “G,” the slow blues that ends “Artform Revisited,” the latest in a string of albums he has released as a bandleader stretching back to 1960. Throughout this record, a tribute to the golden age of bebop featuring a sharp intergenerational cast, Hayes’s loose yet insistent ride-cymbal beat acts as a red carpet, ushering the listener back to an earlier era in style.
5. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, ‘The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis’
In a post-Nels Cline world, it’s not so uncommon to find a guitarist equally versed in jazz and punk rock. But few bridge those worlds as gracefully as Anthony Pirog, who acts as the fulcrum in this trio-plus-one formation uniting the Messthetics — his group with Joe Lally and Brendan Canty, the rhythm section of Fugazi — with James Brandon Lewis, the consistently riveting saxophonist. The alliance feels natural and unfussy, marked by sturdily memorable compositions and inspired, often incendiary improvising.
6. Patricia Brennan Septet, ‘Breaking Stretch’
Across three albums in four years, the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan has built up her sound from a sparse and reflective solo statement to a teeming sonic metropolis. Her latest is a septet effort that’s as challenging as it is danceable, recalling the fantastical constructions of big thinkers such as Henry Threadgill and Steve Lehman as it interweaves dazzling ensemble passages with bracing solos from the leader, the saxophonists Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon, and the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill.
7. Luke Stewart Silt Trio, ‘Unknown Rivers’
Stewart is the bedrock of a new wave of jazz, anchoring powerhouse collectives like Irreversible Entanglements along with the stellar Murray outfit above. On the third album from the bassist’s Silt Trio, he steers the music from groove to abstraction and back, inciting fierce yet lyrical statements from the underrated tenor saxophonist Brian Settles.
8. Frank London / The Elders, ‘Spirit Stronger Than Blood’
One of several albums released this year by Frank London — a veteran trumpeter adept at klezmer, jazz and all manner of brass music — “Spirit Stronger Than Blood” addresses personal hardship: the eclectic trumpeter’s ongoing battle with the rare blood cancer myelofibrosis. Never maudlin, the record brims with feeling and conviction, encompassing laid-back swing, roof-raising vamps and achingly poignant balladry.
9. Melissa Aldana, ‘Echoes of the Inner Prophet’
In a year of powerful statements by saxophonists from multiple generations, the latest from Melissa Aldana stands out thanks to the harmonious mesh of a few key elements: ambitious yet approachable writing; a distinctive band texture featuring the guitar of Lage Lund (also the album’s co-producer) and the piano of Fabian Almazan; and the leader’s remarkable tenor sound, smoky yet quicksilver fluid.
10. Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few, ‘The Almighty’
It’s been around a decade since Kamasi Washington helped reignite interest in the beseeching tones and solemn messaging of 1960s spiritual jazz. And while that term has devolved from touchstone to buzzword, the first of two albums this year by the rising Chicago saxophonist Isaiah Collier and his band the Chosen Few showed how the aesthetic it connotes can still thrill. On a pair of marathon tracks here, he summons awe-inspiring fervor, propelled by the white-water explosions of the drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode; elsewhere he joins forces with the hometown elders Dee Alexander (on vocals) and Ari Brown (on saxophone) in earnest pleas for harmony.
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