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 excellent Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.
Opa’s Goldenwings is an influential Uruguayan jazz album that somehow got lost in the shuffle but is gloriously brought back to life with love and care.
André 3000’s surprise Album of the Year nod at the Grammys was only one of the many ambient/experimental highlights to happen in a wild year like 2024.
This new compilation celebrates Ukrainian musicians’ abilities to find alternate modes of creating in the face of Soviet state restrictions.
When the light hits the music just right, Tom Waits’ body of work unlocks and reveals itself: to be at home anywhere is to be at home nowhere at all.
From lush orchestral arrangements to frenetic fusion, Louis Cole’s nothing is arguably his most ambitious and wide-ranging album yet.
Igmar Thomas’ Revive Big Band meld classic jazz and modern hip-hop to great effect on ‘Like a Tree It Grows’ with its exciting textures and rock-solid grooves.
On Harlequin, a companion album to The Joker: Folie a Deux, Lady Gaga uses “vintage pop” to strengthen the mythology around her persona.
Elephant9’s new LP is a showpiece for what can happen when masterful instrumentalists follow the muse, fueled by an audience that locks into every twist.
Jazz singer Diana Panton’s voice suggests the present tenuousness is part of love’s charm. That’s vital to its truth and beauty (“soft winds and roses”).
From writing with Shawn Mendes to helping André 3000 break genre barriers, guitarist Nate Mercereau’s latest breaks ground by ignoring labels and limits.
