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