This was another year of riches in the best jazz and creative music, with barriers between the tradition and the avant-garde melting away.
The 50 best albums of 2024 offer sublime music as major artists return with new work and brilliant new sounds bubble up from the underground and worldwide.
Imagine a train that seems to be going off the rails yet keeps on track, and you’ll get a sense of what The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis sounds like.
Dave Douglas’ recent jazz work has been highlighted by projects that dare him to write new music for novel musical encounters. Gifts is a spectacular success.
PopMatters presents the best new jazz recordings from the winter of 2024 and reflects on the relationship of the Grammys to jazz.
Among the considerable pleasures of the new James Brandon Lewis quartet record is how it insists on expanding how we think about the leader himself.
Ches Smith has real jazz chops, but he creatively blends tonal jazz, harmonic freedom, electronics, classical “new music”, and traditions from around the world.
Our jazz columnist chooses the best new jazz albums of Autumn 2023 while reflecting on a new documentary, Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity.
Some of it is conventionally beautiful and some thrills by rubbing against the edges of tonality. But all of the best jazz of 2023 serves a vision.
Creative, improvised music in the Black American tradition remains in a state of wonder and genre-crossing excitement in the best jazz albums of 2021.
James Brandon Lewis, a highly expressive young saxophonist, explores the meaning of George Washington Carver through a fresh quintet, earthy and free at once.
