This was another year of riches in the best jazz and creative music, with barriers between the tradition and the avant-garde melting away.
PopMatters presents the best new jazz recordings from the winter of 2024 and reflects on the relationship of the Grammys to jazz.
The Vijay Iyer Trio’s new album Compassion contains some of the pianist’s most immediately enjoyable music without sacrificing any of his usual complexity.
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.
The year has offered a mountainous feast of sublime music. The 50 best albums of 2021 so far are an eclectic, forward-looking, and increasingly “woke” bunch.
Vijay Iyer Trio’s Uneasy is a set of modern piano jazz covering a remarkable range, featuring three brilliant musical imaginations playing well together.
Jazz was working all the angles in 2010. Is there any other genre that has as much range -- from solo instruments to big bands, from instrumental to vocal, from European musicians to both North and South Americans, from truly pretty music to raucously avant-garde "noise"?
2010's best albums are highlighted by the emergence of a future superstar, two veteran and virtuoso rappers, and a Dream Team of indie bands releasing career peaks.
The Transitory Poems is a live recording of two jazz masters, Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, playing four-handed, exploratory improvisations on two pianos.
The best and most exciting jazz of 2017 is increasingly happening at the intersection of different streams of music. Reveling in a diversity of influences and therefore a kind of complexity makes it "art music", inevitably.
Guitarist Rez Abbasi's third look at various South Asian musics, with his band Invocation (including Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer), is one of the best of the year in jazz.
