Sometimes it seems there are only about a dozen people listening to jazz and other kinds of creative improvised music. The community can feel small and insular. The music doesn’t deliver the sugar high of Sabrina Carpenter for most people, I know. When I see that a jazz-adjacent artist like Laufey is selling out arenas by steering away from the things I love most about the music, I wonder what that means.
However, for an art form that isn’t mainly pitched at the market, it is thriving. The Winter Jazzfest in New York plays to packed (if individually small) houses; the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, is a huge success — and it puts artists like David Byrne and Robert Plant in the same spaces with some of the most “avant-garde” creative musicians on the planet.
In 2025, jazz was a big tent. The list is long (20 recordings) and could have been longer without compromise. It not only contains artists making music that is hardly conventional jazz (Lex Korten) but also many artists who are fully connected to the worlds of classical “new music” (Peter Evans, Jacob Garchik), indie rock (Nels Cline), or the jam band scene (John Scofield).
A longer list would certainly have included more jazz that is somewhat traditional — played mainly by acoustic instruments working in the post-bop style. Saxophonist Jon Irabagon, for example, is represented here with a more post-modern release, but his acoustic quartet album Someone to Someone (with his band Plainspeak) was also a 2025 standout. The new recordings from drummers Billy Hart (Multidirectional) and Al Foster (Live at Smoke) on Smoke Session Records are amazing releases that swing a bit more conventionally, but they are coming later in the year.
However, there is plenty on this list for more traditional jazz fans to savor, including the duets from Scofiend and bassist Dave Holland, the brilliant Latin jazz take on the music of Carla Bley from Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble, and James Brandon Lewis’s quartet refracting the Coltrane legacy in a gently chiming mode.
I lean toward the vanguard not because it is “better” (all these lists are subjective in the extreme, of course) but because this is where jazz makes room for collaboration and conversation across styles, genres, and audiences. The future of the music is — and should be — in the place where it is both less insular and most artistically adventurous. The following 20 recordings are wonderful examples of that impulse.
20. Los Cinco Cardones – El Quinto Cardón (Some Other Planet)
The title track of Los Cinco Cardones’ debut, El Quinto Cardón, sits just about at the album’s center. It’s a spellbinding ten minutes of desert-tinged jazz, keys lifting like a midnight wind, guitar echoing over open sand, bass rolling along on a high-speed night drive, sax soaring into a cloudless midnight. That is both the record’s heart and its pinnacle: the quartet performing not just a piece but a cohesive landscape, breathtaking and dreamlike. Here is where the band move with the tightest fit, everything glowing, everyone creating. It is outstanding. – Adriane Pontecorvo
19. Lingyuan Yang – Cursed Month (Chaospace)
With Yang on guitar, Shinya Lin on piano, and Asher Herzog on drums, Cursed Month is an intoxicating sonic assault that combines both compositional precision and unhinged improvisation, despite its relatively simple instrumental setup. Orchestral sweeps or horn blasts that often wend their way into the jazz vernacular are absent here (there’s a modicum of guitar effects, but they are used sparingly). Lingyuan Yang, Shinya Lin, and Asher Herzog have crafted a brooding, often tumultuous beast that takes the best aspects of freeform jazz and turns it into something unique and beautiful. – Chris Ingalls
18. Webber/Morris Big Band – Unseparate (Out of Your Head)
Big band music never really left the jazz scene, but there is currently more adventure in the style than at any time since the 1950s. Anna Webber and Angela Morris are both superb woodwind players, but this superband is mainly about how they are rethinking the sound of an 18-piece large ensemble through their compositions. Experimentation with “just intonation” is featured in a suite by Webber, but the unity of purpose extends beyond a single methodology. Both composers explore sonority, rhythm, and form as if the band is their sandbox. And the quality of the improvisers they feature ensures that there is hot blood in every performance, even when the format is experimental. – Will Layman
17. Nels Cline – Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)
It is hardly news that Cline — one of the guitarists for the indie-rock giant Wilco — has always been a jazz composer and improviser of the first order. This new band, however, may be his best jazz unit. The rhythm team of bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey allows the band to go in any direction, from balladry to noise, from cinematic impressionism to groove music. And this may be the most organic setting yet for Ingrid Laubrock’s tenor and soprano saxophones. A track like “House of Steam” combines galloping jazz, keening guitar effects, and a knotted, unison tenor/guitar melody that could be from your favorite old fusion album. Every track is a pleasing discovery. – Will Layman
16. James Brandon Lewis – Abstraction Is Deliverance (Intakt)
James Brandon Lewis is one of the finest tenor saxophonists in jazz today, with a clear, pleasing tone, a sense of adventure rooted in tradition, and an ideal balance between logic and abandon. This quartet (with drummer Chad Taylor, bassist Brad Jones, and pianist Aruán Ortiz) has been his primary voice for quite a while, and this is their most meditative and focused recording.
The rapport within the band has to be compared to the John Coltrane Quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, so that this album could be heard as a mash-up of the classics Ballads and A Love Supreme. Lewis crafts unique bass lines and compelling melodies. A song like “Remember Rosalind” is luminous with beauty and, as the leader solos, Taylor rises up into a duet with him, with Jones and Ortiz painting the edges of the canvas in pastels. – Will Layman
15. Lex Korten – Canopy (Sounderscore)
Pianist Lex Korten has made a sensational debut record. His training and the bandleaders he has played with tell you that he is a jazz player, but his first album defies categories with slippery sonic ease. It is mind-expanding, experimental, and beautiful. Korten has assembled a nothing-like-it quintet: keyboards, guitar, drums, alto saxophone, and the voice of Claire Dixon — pillowy, feathered, sometimes cracking apart — trembling with feeling and always ready to disappear into the landscape of the band. However, it is just one color among the many on Korten’s palette.
“Opening” is a groover, but more of Canopy is an extended tone poem. The titles of the compositions, such as “Winterlude” and “Solstice”, describe movement through seasons and natural habitats. The band create sumptuous landscapes that evoke mood and texture, using reverb-rich guitar, electric keyboards, vocal harmony, and David Leon’s alto sax in dancing conversation with Korten’s piano. – Will Layman
14. Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra – Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley (Zoho)
The late composer Carla Bley hired Arturo O’Farrill to play piano in her big band when he was just 19 — that’s called an ear for talent. In 2019, she completed “Blue Palestine”, her last commissioned work for his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. That four-part suite is the center of this set of three extended compositions (the other two by O’Farrill). The entire album is beautifully arranged for maximum contrast in style and tone.
For example, “Blue Palestine: Part Three” uses only vibes, piano, and a low-pitched harmonica for almost six minutes before a trumpet enters to dramatic effect. O’Farrill’s “Dia de Los Muertos” suite uses guitar, muted horns, and gauzy woodwinds as well as percussion and potent low brass. When it climaxes with “Mambo Cadaverous” in the album’s closing minutes, you go out dancing properly. – Will Layman
13. Brad Mehldau – Ride Into the Sun (Nonesuch)
Brad Mehldau‘s Ride Into the Sun covers many of Elliott Smith‘s songs, but also includes songs composed by Mehldau, which were inspired by Smith, in addition to a couple of non-Smith covers that Mehldau felt were appropriate to record for this project. The album is a far cry from the trio albums that make up so much of Mehldau’s discography.
Dan Coleman conducts a full orchestra on several tracks, and other musicians include Chris Thile, Daniel Rossen, Matt Chamberlain, Felix Moseholm, and John Davis, who plays bass and also recorded and engineered the record. It’s a unique take on the tribute album concept, brimming with incredible ideas and brilliant musicianship, and may also be one of the finest albums in Brad Mehldau’s illustrious discography. – Chris Ingalls
12. John Scofield and Dave Holland – Memories of Home (ECM)
John Scofield and Dave Holland are masters of jazz guitar and acoustic bass, respectively, each having contributed to bands led by Miles Davis. Their recording history before Memories of Home was surprisingly limited. This encounter, brilliantly recorded by ECM, comes after several years of gigs in a pure duet format, and it makes very sophisticated jazz sound easy. The tunes, evenly divided between the two composers, are a reminder that these are two of the most ingenious writers in jazz. Captivating licks, bass lines, and grooves are abundant, and one solo after another impresses as a classic. – Will Layman
11. Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner – The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi)
Anthony Braxton, now 80 years young, is one of a handful of American musicians with origins in jazz but whose careers have gone so far beyond the idiom that it barely applies anymore. (Another example of that is the composer Henry Threadgill, also associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, whose most recent album Listen Ship belongs on a 2025 “Best of” list but probably not one with “jazz” in the title.)
This collection of quartet performances of Braxton’s music, however, certainly is jazz: Steve Lehman’s alto saxophone and Mark Turner’s tenor saxophone riding above a swinging rhythm section in playful, alert improvisation. The Braxton themes here once seemed odd or quirky, but the passage of time — and this superb reading of them — reveals how deeply they advance the music of Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, and a few others. Lehman’s regular trio works at high intuition, shifting patterns and tempos on a dime.
Maybe the coolest thing is seeing how effortlessly Mark Turner — typically perceived as a more conventional and mainstream player — fits into the magic and angularity of this program, recorded in concert. – Will Layman
10. Jacob Garchik – Ye Olde II — At the End of Time (Yestereve)
Jacob Garchik is a trombonist, composer, and arranger who works in daring formats, such as a full jazz big band but with no rhythm section. Ye Olde’s At the End of Time is the second outing from his so-called heavy metal ensemble, with three guitars and a Zappa-esque approach to attack and arrangement. “Caro Ortolano” brings to mind FZ’s classic The Grand Wazoo — a blend of rock, jazz, and parade music that is the soundtrack to a B-movie.
Like its 2015 predecessor, this music is couched as accompaniment to a sci-fi narrative set both 500 years in the past and 100 billion years in the future. However, you don’t have to care about the high-concept elements to appreciate how great a trombone solo sounds when it is lifted by three of the best guitarists in New York City. This isn’t easy listening jazz, but it is a hoot while being daring. – Will Layman
9. Mary Halvorson – About Ghosts (Nonesuch)
About Ghosts is the third recording from Mary Halvorson‘s band Amaryllis, a sextet of New Jazz all-stars: Jacob Garchik (trombone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), in addition to the leader’s bendy-assertive electric guitar. The music finds ways to feel fresh even when it is beautiful in sonority and melody.
Halvorson writes outside the tradition when it comes to harmonic progressions, but her horn arrangements are lush within that structure. She adds other elements to About Ghosts that thicken the sound: saxophonists Brian Settles and Immanuel Wilkins and her own small synth. Sometimes jagged and sometimes creamy, this music sounds like nothing else out there. Thank goodness. – Will Layman
8. Matt Mitchell – Sacrosancticity (Obliquity)
Pianist Matt Mitchell put out a mind-blowing album of entirely improvised solo piano last year: Illimitiable. Sacrosanctity is from the same recording session but is slightly more approachable, being a group of seven tracks at ballad tempo. Comparisons to Keith Jarrett’s entirely improvised solo piano albums are inevitably facile, but Mitchell’s knottier and more abstract playing contains some of Jarrett’s musical DNA.
“Fillip Leaps” is an eight-minute track that begins with compulsive patterns expressed as cycled melodic phrases (not quite arpeggios, but leaping melodic patterns that rise and fall) that outline harmonic movement. Like Jarrett, Mitchell establishes the form and feeling and then shifts to other, related episodes. Mitchell turns his two hands into independent melodic lines, which allows him to begin spinning a rhapsodic right-hand melody that takes flight with as much drama and virtuosity as any on a Jarrett solo album. Is there a more complete pianist in jazz over the last 20 years? – Will Layman
7. Peter Evans / Being & Becoming – Ars Ludicra (More Is More)
Peter Evans is a trumpet player of extraordinary range, facility, and imagination. Jazz is too narrow a category to capture all his work, though many may know him from being a founding member of the meta-jazz group Mostly Other People Do the Killing. This is the third studio album from this quartet, featuring Evans on trumpets, piano, and electronics, Joel Ross on vibraphone and synth, Nick Jozwiak on bass and synth, and Michael Shekwoaga Ode on drums (as well as a guest flautist on one track).
The span of music is considerable, from pastoral balladry to slamming grooves, with improvisation that doesn’t obey many standard harmonic rules. However, the band’s core sound gives them focus. Joel Ross, known for brilliant but more mainstream modern jazz on his Blue Note dates as a leader, is utterly unleashed here — is there such a thing as a nu-metal vibraphonist? The sharp metallic quality of his instrument reverberates joyously with Evans’ clarion tones. The use of electronics and synthesizers is done with unusual creativity. – Will Layman
6. Amir ElSaffar – New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal (Maqām)
Amir ElSaffar has been having a good year. After launching his label, Maqām Records (named after the Middle Eastern musical language that employs a microtonal tuning system), the trumpeter released an album by legendary Iraqi Maqām vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi, and, for the imprint’s second album, ElSaffar teamed up with three other musicians for a stunning new live album that places Maqām in a modern jazz setting.
The result is a performance that is graceful, deliberate, and often intense, fueled by somewhat unusual instrumentation – the lack of a bass, not common in a jazz recording, may seem jarring at first. Still, it allows the rest of the musicians to explore a wide-open space. – Adriane Pontecorvo
5. Linda May Han Oh – Strange Heavens (Biophilia)
Strange Heavens is a rare “trumpet trio” recording, but led by the prolific and versatile bassist-composer Linda May Han Oh. It is also a mostly straight-ahead jazz record with ten new songs by the leader that flex and breathe in the jazz tradition, some uptempo and some as lovely ballads. There are also tunes by Geri Allen and Melba Liston.
Oh’s acoustic bass often plays the melodies in octaves or harmony with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. She also anchors the rhythm section by locking into a breathtaking swing, a funky backbeat, or colorful orchestration with drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The ballads are among the set’s highlights, especially “Just Waiting”, a deep-blue torch song that could serve as a dangerous theme for a modern film noir that sonically describes an atmospheric alley in a city you are dreaming about. – Will Layman
4. Jon Irabagon – Server Farm (Irabbagast)
Irabagon is a magician and shapeshifter, a composer whose imagination goes from lyrical grace to controlled chaos and back again. His first stellar album of 2025 was this one, featuring a powerfully unconventional ten-piece band of cutting-edge improvisers — two guitars, mad keyboards (piano, Rhodes, and Prophet synth from Matt Mitchell), trumpeter Peter Evans, vocals and violin, both electric and acoustic basses, drummer Dan Weiss, and percussion/laptop from Levy Lorenzo.
There are brass licks that sound like Count Basie, free improvisation, dreamy tenor playing over dancing figures for vibraphone, and hooky melodies galore. My favorite track sounds very nearly like the accessible jazz CTI Records released in the 1970s. There is no better 2025 jazz album to demonstrate how the vanguard of the art also appeals to your backside. – Will Layman
3. Mourning [A] BLKstar – Flowers for the Living (Don Giovanni)
Mourning [A] BLKstar are an Afrofuturist collective from Cleveland, weaving a fascinating tapestry of jazz, soul, hip-hop, and experimental music to investigate the shifting shape of Black music and culture in the 21st century. Obviously, this will include far too much pain, hardship, injustice, and inequality. A lot of media reduces the Black experience to suffering, flattening the beauty, strength, and complexity into just more trauma porn.
Cleveland soul jazz collective Mourning [A] BLKstar give voice to Black joy and excellence on Flowers for the Living without succumbing to saccharine corniness. Lyrically, thematically, it’s incredibly positive, powerful, and uplifting. Musically, it’s got shadows as well as light, delivering a rich, nuanced album that lives and breathes, dancing and singing as well as shouting and occasionally throwing stones. – Adriane Pontecorvo
2. Patricia Brennan – Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic)
Last year’s Breaking Stretch by mallet percussionist Patricia Brennan was my favorite of the year, and the follow-up very nearly repeated at the top. This recording is even more astonishing and bold: fusing a killer jazz quintet (piano, guitar, vibes, drums, and bass), a string quartet, and a turntablist. The result is music that is experimental at times but also thrilling and flashy. I came away from tunes like “Andromeda” with my head spun around, the same way my adolescent ears reacted to Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Which is not to say that this sounds like 1970s fusion, but rather that the music is exciting, new, and powerful. Some of the electronics-enhanced material does sizzle with fire. – Will Layman
1. Fieldwork – Thereupon (Pi)
This trio — Tyshawn Sorey on drums, Vijay Iyer on piano, and alto saxophonist Steve Lehman — last released an album in 2008. Since then, each has become a highly influential figure in 21st-century jazz. Their recorded reunion, however, is not “heavier” for all of their weight on the scene. It is better described as buoyant and open, building on the idea that animated the three previous recordings: that daring music in the jazz tradition can be propulsive and carefully structured even as it radically expands that tradition. This is the best of the four albums: ferociously focused and remarkably accessible for music that remains abstract and harmonically dense. Indeed, parts of this record are exceptionally grooving and full of joy. – Will Layman