JazzMatters: The Best New Jazz of April and May 2023
Our jazz columnist chooses the best new jazz albums of the past two months while reflecting on the passing of Ahmad Jamal and highlighting Walter Smith III.
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JazzMatters: The Best New Jazz of February and March 2023
Our jazz columnist chooses the best new jazz albums of the past two months while reflecting on the passing of Wayne Shorter and the Grammy Awards.
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The 20 Best Jazz Albums of 2022
Jazz, born of the creative brilliance of Black American culture and now wonderfully global, is passionately alive in 2022. These are the year’s best jazz albums.
JazzMatters: The Best New Jazz of Autumn 2022
PopMatters jazz critic Will Layman rounds up the best new jazz albums of recent vintage, including some thoughts about the US festival season and the undersung virtuoso Warren Wolf.
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JazzMatters: The Best New Jazz of Summer 2022
The best new jazz and creative music this summer features masters Charles Lloyd and Al Foster, experimentalist Tyshawn Sorey, and young cats DOMi and JD Beck.
The 13 Best Jazz Albums of 2021
Creative, improvised music in the Black American tradition remains in a state of wonder and genre-crossing excitement in the best jazz albums of 2021.
The 20 Best Jazz Albums of 2020
Here are six of the key jazz trends of the last 20 years, defined by 20 of the best 2020 recordings that made us see, again, why this music is in midst of such a thrilling patch of creativity.
The Best Jazz Albums of 2010
Jazz was working all the angles in 2010. Is there any other genre that has as much range -- from solo instruments to big bands, from instrumental to vocal, from European musicians to both North and South Americans, from truly pretty music to raucously avant-garde "noise"?
The Best Jazz of 2019
Our jazz critics create four quartets of great creative music, demonstrating four trends that keep "jazz" relevant in a new century.
The Best Jazz of 2017
The best and most exciting jazz of 2017 is increasingly happening at the intersection of different streams of music. Reveling in a diversity of influences and therefore a kind of complexity makes it "art music", inevitably.