David Remnick of the New Yorker offers this list of 100 essential jazz albums. Note that many of them are not albums but mammoth multi-disc retrospectives covering vast spans of time. It would be interesting to see what a list like this would look like if you decided to only include actual albums of original material: i.e., all things like “Dexter Gordon, Our Man in Paris (Blue Note, 1963)” and no “Django Reinhardt, The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order (JSP, 2000; tracks recorded 1934-39)”. Is there a case to be made for a jazz album qua album? Probably a better one than can be made for rock records.