Fred Kaplan's Best Jazz Albums of 2024
Plus sound quality bonus section
My main job in real life (to the extent any of our lives are real) is national-security columnist for Slate. Around this time every year, since 2003, its indulgent editors have let me write a piece on what I see as the year’s best jazz albums, usually the 10 best new recordings and the three best historical releases (which I have usually confined to music that for the most part hasn’t been issued before—in other words, excluding mere reissues).
This past Wednesday, December 4th, Slate published my article for the best of 2024. Here’s the list of what I picked:
New Albums
1. Charles Lloyd, The Sky Will Still Be Here Tomorrow (Blue Note).
2. Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (Spiritmuse).
3. Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaic of Reservoir, Lake, Paths, and Gardens (Red Hook).
4. David Murray, Francesca (Intakt).
5. Ben Allison, Steve Cardenas, Ted Nash, Tell the Birds I Said Hello (Sonic Camera).
6. Matthew Shipp, New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP Disk).
7. Ethan Iverson, Technically Acceptable (Blue Note).
8. Chris Potter, Eagle’s Point (Edition).
9. Ben Wolfe, The Understated (Resident Arts).
10. John Hollenbeck & the NDR Bigband, Colouring Hockets (Flexatonic).
Historical Albums
1. Miles Davis, Miles in France, 1963 & 1964 (Columbia Legacy).
2. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance).
3. McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson, Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs (Blue Note).
My full Slate article includes a mini-review of each album, along with an audio sample.
As an exclusive bonus for Tracking Angle readers, I will now elaborate on issues of sound quality. First, some of you may notice that, in this space, I reviewed all of the new albums listed, except for the Shipp and the Hollenbeck. (I’ve hyperlinked those listed to the original reviews.) Second, many of these albums are available not just on CD and streaming platforms but also as vinyl LPs: specifically, among the new albums, Nos. 1-3, 8, and 9; among the historical issues, No. 2, 3, and the last of the six discs on No. 1.
Third, and most remarkable, most of the new albums sound very good. By a total coincidence (because I chose the albums and their order on strictly musical criteria), the top three picks are the three best-sounding—are, in fact, great-sounding by any standard. When I reviewed them in this space, I gave a 10 for Sound to the Lloyd—and an 11 for Sound to both the El’Zabar and the Smith-Myers. (These ratings apply to the vinyl pressings; I should note that the Smith-Myers LP is mastered at 45rpm.) All three were recorded digitally; the Lloyd and the Smith/Myers were mixed on analog consoles, but the El’Zabar was all-digital—an encouraging sign of how much that once-harsh medium has come along.
The three historical albums are of varying sound quality—generally good enough not to get in the way of the music. If I were to recast this section to place a premium on sonics, and to drop the bar on mere reissues, I would recommend two different Miles Davis releases: Birth of the Blue (Analogue Productions), the first studio session (which has never been released as a stand-alone album) of the sextet that one year later made Kind of Blue, mixed down from the original three-track master tapes, to two tracks at 30 ips, then pressed on UHQR vinyl; and Miles 54 (Craft), a 4-LP set of all the sessions the trumpeter recorded for Prestige in the transformative year of 1954, climaxing with the Christmas Eve session that included Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson. As for great-sounding Sonny Rollins, I would substitute Blue Note’s 3-LP expansion of A Night at the Village Vanguard, mastered from Rudy Van Gelder’s newly discovered original analog tapes (all other issues, including the original, were from a 2nd-generation transfer). And I would add to the list the Maria Schneider Orchestra’s Decades, a 3-LP greatest-hits collection of our era’s greatest big band composer—the first time any of her music has been pressed to vinyl.
I would also make one sonic substitution on the list of new albums. David Murray’s Francesca is, as noted, a terrific album, but the sound is just okay. Murray made another album this year, Plumb (J.M.I.), a 4-LP all-analogue box-set of mostly improvised music with drummer QuestLove and keyboardist Ray Angry. As I noted in my TA review, there’s a great album in here, if the producers had cut it down to two, trimming away the meandering passages. Still, this is a half-great album and the best-sounding Murray perhaps ever.
