10. Tom Smith Big Band – A Year in the Life
UK saxophonist, composer and bandleader Tom Smith was dropping clues to his distinctively contemporary take on jazz traditions as a BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year finalist in 2014 and 2016, and later as a leader of groups including the sax trio Gecko and the LGBTQI+ ensemble Queertet. But his powerful big band’s 2025 release, A Year in the Life, unveiled how exultantly Smith’s writing mingles orchestral influences from Maria Schneider and Carla Bley with slamming groovers from the big-band swing era, and a deep grasp of bebop chordal acrobatics, with raw and metallic guitar interventions thrown in.
9. Artemis – Arboresque
Arboresque is the Artemis collective’s third and best release for the Blue Note label, evolved from an ensemble formed for International Women’s Day in 2016 by the acclaimed Canadian pianist and composer Renee Rosnes. All five members compose; standouts include saxist Nicole Glover’s ethereal Petrichor for its theme and her tenor improv, and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen’s snappy Sights Unseen with its vivacious post-bop dialogue with Rosnes. There are typically evocative Rosnes arrangements of her former employer Wayne Shorter’s Footprints, and the standard What the World Needs Now is Love. Cliche-free individuality and congenial collective spirit radiantly combined.
8. Jakob Bro – Taking Turns
Danish guitarist Jakob Bro is an undisguised admirer of Bill Frisell, but also of the unique melodic imagination of legendary Birth of the Cool alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. In 2014, ECM recorded this mini-masterpiece with Bro, an 86-year-old Konitz, and an avant-jazz supergroup of Frisell, pianist Jason Moran, bassist Thomas Morgan and former Cecil Taylor drummer Andrew Cyrille – and then unaccountably sat on it. This belated release reveals softly chiming harmonies and songlike waltzes for the inimitable Konitz to gleam and breathe through, alongside Cyrille’s and Morgan’s free-floating conceptions of swing, and the minimalist, interwoven delicacies of two sound-painting contemporary guitar masters. Read the full review
7. أحمد [Ahmed] – Sama’aa
Keyboardist Pat Thomas has been an idiomatically diverse creative maverick in UK jazz and improv for over three decades, and this two-album set features his أحمد [Ahmed] quartet’s stormily percussive, sonically abstract work, dedicated to sometime Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a pioneering merger of jazz and Middle Eastern music. Saxophonist Seymour Wright (an awesome inheritor of the methods of Albert Ayler and Evan Parker) and bassist Joel Grip often entwine raw multiphonics with melodious bowed sounds, while Thomas’s sometimes Cecil Taylor-esque chording and drummer Antonin Gerbal’s racing uptempo patterns rock between boiling free-jazz squalls and rattling folk-dances, on a session of fearless but infectiously compelling free jazz. Read the full review
6. Cécile McLorin Salvant – Oh Snap
Twelve originals and one quirky cover, first created alone with a computer by the French/Haitian/US vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, and then studio-layered with some longtime vocal and instrumental partners. Salvant draws on teenage pop memories, on folk and classical music, and the rich jazz life of her years in France. Fragile song-lines drift over drum loops, sleek jazz pianist Sullivan Fortner drives old-school swingers, while genre-spanning vocal partners June McDoom and Kate Davis join hauntingly empathic harmonies. What Does Blue Mean to You?, inspired by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is the standout of a memorably bold and personal venture. Read the full review
5. Linda May Han Oh – Strange Heavens
The Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh has long played for stars (Vijay Iyer and Pat Metheny among them); her own ventures have been few, but special. Strange Heavens revisits the partnership first launched in 2009 with Miles-influenced but lyrically inimitable trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The pair are joined here by Tyshawn Sorey, one of the great drummer-composers – and improvisational listeners – in contemporary music. Whisper-quiet melodies blossom out of bass caresses and Sorey’s spacey rimshots, Miles-like trumpet improv glides over hip-hoppish grooves, and Geri Allen’s Skin and Melba Liston’s Just Waiting get respectfully startling reinventions. Read the full review
4. Joshua Redman – Words Fall Short
US improvising saxophone master Joshua Redman’s 2023 debut for Blue Note (three decades after his spectacular 1993 emergence) was atypically and unsuitably focused on covers and vocals. But this year’s release features one vocal, an all-original repertoire and a new road band, and acclaimed Chilean saxophonist Melissa Aldana and 19-year-old west coast trumpeter Skylar Tang guesting. Both of them improvise with Redman as if they were soulmates, the ballad Borrowed Eyes develops exquisitely in spacey Redman whispers against softly plucked bass sounds, and the captivatingly ghostly voice of Gabrielle Cavassa shares a spellbinding vocal/tenor sax exchange on the closing Era’s End. Read the full review
3. Anthony Braxton – Quartet (England) 1985
The influence of the now 80-year-old Anthony Braxton, one of the great instrumental and conceptual jazz and new-music pioneers, has spanned music from free-improv to symphonies and operas. But his small jazz groups have often best showcased his multi-reeds virtuosity and the imagination that drives it. These live recordings from Braxton’s superb 1985 quartet tour of the UK feature headlong avant-bebop storms, free-collective passages, captivating warm-ups on standard songs, and the power and precision of pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Gerry Hemingway. The cassette-recorded audio is understandably patchy, but the sense of being present at its creation is vivid. Read the full review
2. Mary Halvorson – About Ghosts
About Ghosts expands New York guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis ensemble who partnered with her on 2024’s acclaimed Cloudward release. They are augmented here by two soulful saxophonists in altoist Immanuel Wilkins, and tenorist Brian Settles, whose arrival swells the surprises that Halvorson’s pieces constantly play with. Full of Neon’s march-like pulse and rich ensemble harmonies are squawked at by indignant horn exclamations, taut guitar figures mix with whooping alto improv on Carved From, and beboppish outbursts travel so fast as to sound hyper-compressed. Halvorson has said she loves singer-songwriter Robert Wyatt’s music for blending “the weird with the beautiful”. She certainly knows all about how that’s done. Read the full review
1. Michael Wollny Trio – Living Ghosts
The brilliant German pianist/composer Michael Wollny’s 10-year-old group with David Bowie Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre, and genre-busting drummer Eric Schaefer, goes from strength to strength. Living Ghosts is a live recording featuring the group’s favoured eschewal of setlists or arrangements, letting go to what the pianist has called “seances where the ghosts of the trio’s songbook visit us at their will”. Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith miniatures turn into rock-powered stomps or bass-walking bebop, swing turns into raw improv, Nick Cave’s Hand of God becomes Guillaume de Machaut’s Lasse! But governing it all is what types of music have in common, not what divides them. Read the full review