{"id":5497,"date":"2015-12-17T21:45:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T21:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5497"},"modified":"2015-12-17T21:45:42","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T21:45:42","slug":"top-ten-jazz-recordings-of-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2015\/12\/17\/top-ten-jazz-recordings-of-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Top Ten Jazz Recordings of 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Steve<\/a>
Steve Coleman (left) and Henry Threadgill top my list and loom large on today’s jazz landscape. (photos: left-courtesy Pi Recordings; right\u2014Nhumi Threadgill)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThose who pine for a new big idea in jazz\u2014one that lends the music\u2019s next chapter a catchy name\u2014largely miss what\u2019s going on.
\nRadical thinkers\u2014seeming outliers\u2014are today\u2019s prime movers. If this has been the case throughout much of jazz\u2019s history, what is different today is that these innovators no longer beget clear schools. Jazz\u2019s forward flow is not well measured by stylistic monikers and pop-culture breakthroughs, but rather through profound ripples of impact. The most influential musicians now suggest less about how jazz should sound or be sold and more about how meaningful musical possibilities may be awakened within the context of jazz tradition.
\nOn those terms, two musicians\u2014 Henry Threadgill, 71 years old, and Steve Coleman, 59\u2014loom especially large right now. Threadgill and Coleman have achieved masterly and original voices as instrumentalists (both play alto saxophone; Mr. Threadgill is also a flutist). Leading unconventional ensembles, both are starkly authoritative yet also warmly nurturing presences. Both have successfully met one of jazz\u2019s central challenges: to synthesize the acts of composition and improvisation through personalized yet rigorous approaches to structure and form. Each has crafted and stuck to a unique process that can\u2019t really be imitated but can be shared.
\nAnd share they have. Their influence stands behind what I sometimes call \u201cthe quietest revolution you\u2019ve never heard of\u201d\u2014that is, a growing swath of distinguished musicians whose music owes to direct and indirect lessons learned from the music of Threadgill and Coleman and the bands they lead (sometimes, in Threadgill\u2019s case, conducts). These are subtle ideas with profound effects\u2014the “rhythm chants” that underlie most of Coleman\u2019s music, say, and the ways in which Threadgill liberates each instrument from its conventional role.
\nMy year-end Top 10 jazz albums list includes one musician whose close collaboration with Coleman formed essential inspiration, Jen Shyu. It includes a band that features Threadgill, led by drummer Jack DeJohnette, who absorbed essential influence in the same Chicago scene Threadgill rose from. It\u2019s topped by dazzling CDs from Coleman and Threadgill themselves.
\nAs I\u2019ve written many times, I don\u2019t particularly like this Top Ten game; it\u2019s reductive and in some ways beside the point of how I listen and express my ideas. There\u2019s always a swirl of recordings that could, should, or would on any other day have made the list that follows, including ones from musicians with formative\u00a0connections to\u00a0Coleman and Threadgill\u2014singer Cassandra Wilson\u2019s \u201cComing Forth By Day\u201d (Legacy), drummer Dafnis Prieto\u2019s \u201cTriangles and Circles\u201d (Dafnison), saxophonist Miguel Zen\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cIdentities Are Changeable\u201d (Miel Music),\u00a0among others.
\nIn jazz, some albums represent powerful crystallizations of concept and execution. Shyu\u2019s \u201cSounds and Cries of the World\u201d is one good example, synthesizing a decade\u2019s worth of musicological research and the final flowering of an ambitious idea (see below). Yet others merely mark moments in an ongoing evolution, as is the case with the CDs that top this list. You\u2019d have needed to hear Threadgill in concert during the past year with his Double Up ensemble (included two pianists and, more recently, three) to know where his sound has gone since he recorded 2015\u2019s \u201cIn for a Penny, in for a Pound.\u201d And you\u2019d have needed to catch Coleman\u2019s recent Village Vanguard date to hear how he\u2019s distilled the sprawling beauty of his \u201cSynovial Joints\u201d CD into a wondrous drummerless nonet.
\nThis was a good year for jazz singing. Shyu\u2019s album exploded ideas about what any singer in any tradition can do. Wilson\u2019s cast Billie Holidays\u2019 legacy (and her own) in new light. And C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant, whose album knocked hard on this list\u2019s door, persuaded me to feeling like the conventions of traditional jazz singing still form fertile soil.
\nThis year continued the best story in modern jazz for at least the past decade\u2014the resurgent and reimagined presence of Afro Latin influence. Two albums in this Top Ten attest to all that\u2014from pianist Arturo O\u2019Farrill\u2019s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and Cuban pianist Chucho Vald\u00e9s. Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba\u2019s duet with bassist Charlie Haden made this list. So could have Rubalcaba\u2019s own CD, \u201cFaith Live\u201d (5Passion) or the aforementioned albums by Prieto, who is Cuban, and Zen\u00f3n, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico. So could have \u201cL’\u00f3 d\u00e1 f\u00fan B\u00e0t\u00e1\u201d (Motema) from percussionist Rom\u00e1n D\u00edaz, whose fingerprints are all over much of New York\u2019s best music right now.
\nThat list, below:
\nSteve Coleman<\/strong>\u00a0Synovial Joints\u00a0<\/em>(Pi)
\nColeman has a gift for subtle rhythmic insistence, and for crafting ribbons of theme that snake and slither or float and unfurl in unexpected ways. He refers to his work as \u201ccommunity music.\u201d That community has some basic requirements\u2014an understanding of Charlie Parker\u2019s improvisational language, a fluency in multiple rhythmic traditions. Beyond that, it values bonding of a familial kind, and the willingness to follow Mr. Coleman\u2019s obsessions. Here he gathers 21 musicians, augmenting members of his core Five Elements band with strings, woodwinds and percussion, packing a great deal. It\u2019s a stunning leap, even from a musician whose music has moved forward consistently for three decades.
\nHenry Threadgill Zooid<\/strong>\u00a0In for a Penny, in for a Pound<\/em>\u00a0(Pi)
\nThreadgill focuses here on Zooid, the longest-running of his several celebrated ensembles, and spills across two CDs. His liner notes cite each piece as focused on a different instrument, yet his music\u2019s nature defies such analysis. The music here is born of group communion and speaks foremost of the landscapes of sound created by Threadgill, the greatest American composer of my lifetime in any form. And yet Threadgill\u2019s own playing\u2014full-throated and ripe on alto saxophone, airy yet declarative on flute and bass flute\u2014best defines the music\u2019s essence, often through short fanfare-like bursts or a judicious single note.
\nCharlie Haden\/Gonzalo Rubalcaba<\/strong>\u00a0Tokyo Adagio<\/em>\u00a0(Impulse!)
\nAs a bassist and bandleader, Haden, who died in 2014, was a towering musician. One of his gifts was for getting the best out of other musicians in duet (he recorded lots of them). He had a special relationship with Rubalcaba, who was 25 years his junior. Here\u2019s how Haden once described for me the beginning, at a 1986 festival in Havana, of his deep bond with Rubalcaba: \u201cGonzalo\u2019s band came on, he took a piano solo, and I nearly fell of my chair. I told the organizers, \u2018Take me back to meet him.\u2019 He spoke very little English at the time. But we arranged to meet the next day. We played for hours and hours.\u201d)\u00a0 Haden played on Rubalcaba\u2019s 1990 Blue Note Records debut; Rubalcaba played on and produced two Haden albums, \u201cNocturne\u201d and \u201cLand of the Sun,\u201d both Grammy winners.\u00a0The blissful intensity to these pieces, mostly ballads, recorded in 2005 at Tokyo\u2019s Blue Note club, would comes across even without that backstory.
\nJen Shyu & Jade Tongue<\/strong>\u00a0Sounds and Cries of the World<\/em>\u00a0(Pi)
\nHere, Shyu sings original lyrics in five languages: English, Korean, Javanese, Indonesian and Tetum, the language of East Timor. She plays instruments that originated in four different countries. Despite these facts and even the album\u2019s clinical-sounding title, this is neither world music nor fusion of any sort.\u00a0Shyu makes a statement of cultural preservation with her Jade Tongue ensemble, yet it arrives embedded gracefully within a quite natural, if startlingly distinctive, form of musical expression. These are ritual songs from afar, paddling gently through the ebb and flow of improvised jazz. Or jazz-ensemble pieces sailing past folkloric signposts. They suggest timeless qualities of specific Asian traditions but even more so the promise of present-day New York. Along with the five languages Shyu speaks here is an unspoken one\u2014the improvised lingua franca of jazz\u2019s most accomplished musicians that connects her influences and animates her ambitions.
\nFred Hersch<\/strong>\u00a0Solo<\/em>\u00a0(Palmetto)
\nIn some ways, it\u2019s remarkable that pianist Fred Hersch is with us to celebrate his 60th\u00a0birthday, which this solo CD marked. Hersch\u2019s brilliant multimedia piece, \u201cMy Coma Dreams,\u201d recalled and recast the two months he spent in a coma in 2008, the result of pneumonia run rampant, which followed a terrifying bout of dementia caused by the AIDS virus he has battled for 25 years. Five years ago, I sat the kitchen of Hersch\u2019s SoHo loft. \u201cPeople tell me that my playing is somehow deeper now since my recovery,\u201d he told me. \u201cI can\u2019t judge whether that\u2019s true or not. But I\u2019ve always been determined to be my own man at the piano. And now, I feel even more of a desire to just be Fred.\u201d It’s true. And being Fred means being one of the most distinctive and complete pianists in jazz.
\nJack DeJohnette<\/strong>\u00a0Made in Chicago<\/em>\u00a0(ECM)
\nDeJohnette returned to his roots when he convening a band featuring all-star musicians from his early days in Chicago\u2014 including saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams\u2014for the 2013 concert at which these tracks were recorded. It\u2019s a fitting tribute to the legacy of Abrams\u2019s Experimental Band, in which the other three played, and to \u00a0the deeply influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) which Abrams’ band helped seed and which this year turned 50 (and is still going strong). Not all such reunions make for satisfying listening; this one does so, and more: It suggests the sort of conversational air that forms only among dear and longtime friends.
\nWilliam Parker<\/strong>\u00a0For Those Who Are, Still<\/em>\u00a0(Aum Fidelity)
\nParker favors grand gestures. His 2013 release, \u201cWood Flute Songs,\u201d spanned eight CDs and six years of live recordings. His most ambitious work to date, this release presents four long-form works including Parker\u2019s first recorded composition for symphony orchestra, and a commissioned piece for the standing ensemble of the Kitchen, a Lower East Side Manhattan arts collective with its own deep avant-garde tradition. The news here is that Mr. Parker can write fluently and inventively for strings. More familiar are what Parker creates in any context: entrancing ebbs-and-flows; the sparkle of a silence after a crescendo; and layer upon layer of motifs that complement one another and shift subtly over time.
\nCharles Lloyd<\/strong>\u00a0Wild Man Dance<\/em>\u00a0(Blue Note)
\nAt 77, tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd is both jazz\u2019s wise old mystic and its wild child. His music evolves without ever losing its timeless bluesy core; it remains accessible while growing increasingly nuanced and sophisticated. This six-movement work, recorded in its premiere performance at a Polish jazz festival and features, introduces new Lloyd collaborators (pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Joe Sanders, and drummer Gerald Cleaver) and deepens his ongoing associations with Greek lyra virtuoso Sokratis Sinopoulos and Hungarian cimbalom maestro Mikl\u00f3s Luk\u00e1cs.
\nArturo O’Farrill Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra <\/strong>Cuba: The Conversation Continued<\/em> (Motema)
\nO\u2019Farrill\u2019s powerhouse orchestra was in the midst of recording at Havana\u2019s Abdala Studios when Presidents Barack Obama and Ra\u00fal Castro announced a historic policy shift in December 2014. By January of this year, the U.S. and Cuba opened their highest-level diplomatic talks in nearly 40 years, beginning a process, as Obama described, \u201cto move beyond a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.\u201d O\u2019Farrill has been working on the musical equivalent of all that for more than a decade. Here, his collaborators include Cuban guests: trumpeters Yasek Manzano and Kal\u00ed Rodr\u00edguez-Pe\u00f1a; pianist and composer Alexis Bosch; and Juan de la Cruz Antomarchi, a master of the guitarlike Cuban tres who is better known as simply \u201cCot\u00f3.\u201d\u00a0\u201cAll this began in 2002, when an idea took root in my heart,\u201d O\u2019Farrill told me. \u201cI wanted to create an ongoing conversation between musicians, to continue the one started decades ago by Dizzy Gillespie and [Cuban percussionist] Chano Pozo. People think revolution and ideological differences put an end to this conversation, but we\u2019re pursuing this thing that Dizzy called a \u2018global music,\u2019 which has a multiplicity of opinions.\u201d
\nChucho Vald\u00e9s<\/strong>\u00a0Tribute to Irakere (Live in Marciac)<\/em>\u00a0(Jazz Village\/Harmonia Mundi)
\nWhen pianist Vald\u00e9s presented \u201cIrakere 40\u201d at Manhattan\u2019s Town Hall earlier this month, he rekindled the sound of a band with which he changed the course of Cuban music four decades ago. Older audience members might have attended Irakere\u2019s U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall during the 1978 Newport Jazz Festival. Appearing unannounced on a program that featured jazz pianists Mary Lou Williams, McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans, Irakere stole that show. Then, Vald\u00e9s introduced New Yorkers to a bold and subversive music, both a response to Cuba’s post-revolution rejection of American jazz and rock and a seed for Cuban dance music now known as timb\u00e1. His tight band with a huge sound expressed a sweep of influences that ranged from Afro Cuban folkloric music to bebop, from Vald\u00e9s\u2019 father, Bebo (a towering Cuban pianist and composer in his own right) to Blood, Sweat & Tears. His current ten-piece group is less reconstituted Irakere than expanded Messengers, featuring three trumpets and two saxophones; the musicians are, for the most part, roughly half Vald\u00e9s\u2019 age. Vald\u00e9s call this album a tribute to Irakere. It sounds more like testimony to the continuity and vitality of a vision that has always spanned borders and genres, conflated centuries, defied politics and, by now, having influenced generations, is bigger than any one band.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those who pine for a new big idea in jazz\u2014one that lends the music\u2019s next chapter a catchy name\u2014largely miss what\u2019s going on. Radical thinkers\u2014seeming outliers\u2014are today\u2019s prime movers. If this has been the case throughout much of jazz\u2019s history, what is different today is that these innovators no longer beget clear schools. Jazz\u2019s forward … <\/p>\n

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