The Year in Jazz: A Critics Roundtable—Thursday, Dec. 12th

It’s that time of year when you make a list and check it twice.
If you write about jazz, that means a Year-End Top 10 list of recordings. I’d much rather consider who was naughty and nice, and what to give them: I’m ambivalent at best about Top 10s when it comes to music. (Though I love them on ESPN.) And yet I do them when asked, usually by publishers—here‘s last year’s for this blog.
This year I gave one to Nate Chinen, who writes about jazz for The New York Times, and who invited me as a panelist for “The Year in Jazz: A Critics Roundtable,” on Thursday, Dec. 12 at 7pm.
It’s hosted by The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, where I just completed hosting a four-week series on HBO “Treme,” and will be presented at MIST Harlem.The event’s promotion says we’ll “talk about the music, the artists and the moments that shaped jazz in 2013, touching on a host of issues and ideas in the process — and answer a few burning questions from the audience.” If that means that my Top 10 is just a jumping-off point for a deeper conversation—and I think it does—well, that’s far more interesting than just seeing it in print later and wincing at the worthy stuff I left off.
My fellow panelists are: Greg Tate, writer, musician, producer and a former staff writer at The Village Voice; Seth Colter Walls, culture critic/reporter for Slate, and the London Review of Books; and Kevin Whitehead, jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air; Chinen will moderate.
I hear the museum will hold their year-end reception after the panel, too, with live music; since my birthday is the 13th; if you show up and stick around we can pretend they’ve thrown the thing for me.
Above are pictures of us five panelists; if you can’t match names to faces, come to Harlem and find out.