In a year that saw the deaths of two leading drummers, Jack DeJohnette and Al Foster, other drummers both young and old — including Billy Hart, Kassa Overall, Joe Farnsworth and Marcus Gilmore, the M.V.P. of 2025 — shone as elite bandleaders. The trend was just one indicator of the way jazz is constantly renewing via an ongoing intergenerational conversation.
1. Marcus Gilmore, ‘Journey to the New: Live at the Village Vanguard’
Despite appearing on dozens of recordings with major bandleaders throughout a two-decade career, Marcus Gilmore had never released an album under his own name until this one. The drumming is typically breathtaking; even more impressive is the sturdiness and freshness of the collective vision. Striking voices like Morgan Guerin’s swooping EWI (electronic wind instrument) and Emmanuel Michael’s stealthily mind-melting guitar combine to set a new benchmark for stylish, listener-friendly virtuosity.
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2. Amina Claudine Myers, ‘Solace of the Mind’
The entirety of American music — spirituals, R&B, the full spectrum of jazz and more — courses through the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, and it all figured into this remarkable solo-piano set (with one track featuring organ and spoken word). These versions of new and old pieces touch on meditative solemnity, warm nostalgia and stately exploration, offering a quintessential portrait of a veteran beyond category.
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3. Jacob Garchik, ‘Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time’
Ten years after debuting his guitar-centric quintet, Ye Olde, the trombonist Jacob Garchik brought it back for a sequel that turns its three wild-card six-stringers (Jonathan Goldberger, Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook) loose in an elaborate jazz-prog fantasy. Unapologetically geeky, the results are also compositionally stunning, with moments of crystalline beauty offsetting frequent explosive peaks.
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4. Trio of Bloom, ‘Trio of Bloom’
Channeling Power Tools, a trio he convened on a cult-favorite 1987 LP, the producer David Breskin drafted three new players — Gilmore on drums, the guitarist Nels Cline and the keyboardist Craig Taborn — for a similarly venturesome team-up. Each participant is a valued progressive-jazz mainstay, but together, they hit on an unclassifiable sound incorporating outré improv, futuristic funk and placid ambience.
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5. Kassa Overall, ‘Cream’
On earlier albums, Kassa Overall, a drummer, producer and M.C., refined an admirably seamless fusion of jazz and hip-hop. He continued the project here but from a different vantage: While sourcing most of the material from the ’90s rap canon, including hits from Dr. Dre, the Notorious B.I.G. and Wu-Tang Clan, he eschews the sampled beats and rhyming that have been central to his sound. The resulting versions — a bossa-infused “Big Poppa”; a ballad-style, flute-led “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang”; a barreling post-bop take on Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” — bridge sounds and schools in elegantly guileless fashion.
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6. Billy Hart Quartet, ‘Just’
The drummer Billy Hart’s quartet is a rarity in 21st-century jazz: an old-school working band, intact with stable personnel (the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street) for 20 years. Encompassing knotty post-bop, billowy rubato balladry and, on the Hart-penned title track, a dash of snappy funk, their latest effort showcases the strength of the ensemble while highlighting the leader’s uncanny versatility and coloristic genius.
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7. Brandee Younger, ‘Gadabout Season’
The harpist Brandee Younger has often paid direct homage to two pioneers of her instrument, Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, and while their spirits informed her latest LP — on which she played Coltrane’s actual Lyon & Healy — her own aesthetic prevails. Sublime slow jams share space with supple instrumental funk as she unleashes the harp’s full expressive range.
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8. Chicago Underground Duo, ‘Hyperglyph’
Much of the borderless spirit emanating from the vital Chicago label International Anthem was already evident a quarter century back in the early work of this tandem, which has expanded into various larger groups while always orbiting around the multi-instrumentalists Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor. On their first album as a two-piece in 11 years — and, aptly, their International Anthem debut — they reassert their folk-rooted futurism, setting free-form trumpet-drums duets alongside pulsing electroacoustic grooves and blissful thumb-piano interludes, imbuing it all with surreal wonder.
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9. Joe Farnsworth, ‘The Big Room’
The drummer Joe Farnsworth is an exemplary sideman; in recent years, he has also stepped forward as a highly effective bandleader. His latest album captures his potent chemistry with players decades younger (the saxophonist Sarah Hanahan, the vibraphonist Joel Ross and the pianist Emmet Cohen) and fellow midcareer greats (the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, the bassist Yasushi Nakamura) — as well as his undiminished zest for the no-frills hard bop he learned alongside immortals such as Harold Mabern and Benny Golson.
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10. Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, ‘Live in Philadelphia’
At age 101, Marshall Allen still travels the world spreading the interplanetary gospel of Sun Ra, whose Arkestra the saxophonist joined close to 70 years ago. But back home in Philly, on regular gigs at the cozy club Solar Myth with his ever-morphing Ghost Horizons project, he feeds an appetite for ad hoc collaboration. An epic debut, distilled from those shows, finds Allen sounding marvelously engaged, meshing wondrously whether it’s with noise and indie-rock adventurers or improv aces.
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