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    Best Jazz Albums of 2023

    The year’s most thrilling albums were made by artists pushing beyond borders, teaming with new collaborators and making bold statements of their own.That thing we keep calling “jazz” refuses to stop overrunning its borders, reworking itself, showing up in new forms identifiable only by the most basic strands of their DNA. All of its subcultures churned out inspired work this year; many show up below.

    1. Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, ‘Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning’It’s fitting, in this moment, that the hardest-hitting album on this list would be a celebration of Indigenous identity, resilience and resistance. For Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning” is also his first hard break from jazz, a category he has been trying to slip his entire career. Here he sits with the other tradition that raised him: the “maroon” community of New Orleans’s Black masking Indians, commonly known as Mardi Gras Indians. This is Adjuah’s first LP without any trumpet. Instead he circles up with a group of family and longtime collaborators, revisiting classics from the call-and-response Black Indian repertoire and adding his own, newfangled rallying cries over plucked kora strings and charging drums.2. Jaimie Branch, ‘Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))’Jaimie Branch had nearly finished mixing this album — the third studio record from her trumpet-cello-bass-drums quartet, Fly or Die — when she died suddenly in 2022. It would be hard to imagine a more rousing and generous parting gift. Branch (like Adjuah) was a declarative trumpeter who had only recently embraced her unrefined-but-rewarding singing voice. With it she entreats us to love, to agitate and to put ourselves on the line.

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    Ambrose Akinmusire Learned to Let Go (With Help From Joni Mitchell)

    For arguably the most technically gifted trumpeter of his generation, a lot of Ambrose Akinmusire’s breakthroughs actually come from letting go of standards and structures.Take the moment about 10 years ago when, shortly after becoming friends with his lifelong creative idol, Joni Mitchell, Akinmusire found himself in a bathroom at her Los Angeles home, playing into a microphone. She’d suggested that he record trumpet for a new version of her song “Borderline,” and he was struggling to find a part that fit.“I wasn’t getting it right. And she was like, ‘I know what you need: You need an egg shaker,’” he said recently in a video interview, still a touch amazed to be telling this story. Mitchell started rattling the shakers wildly, way outside the time signature. His hopes darkened. “But I played the track with her doing that, and for some reason it locked it in for me,” Akinmusire said. Suddenly, “I was able to play.”And there was the time, just after the pandemic began, when Akinmusire decided to finally take the advice of Bennie Maupin — a multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock — who had once told him to try improvising with only a drummer. “You can get to some new stuff if you just set up with a drummer and practice,” Maupin had told him. So in 2020, when life slowed to a standstill, Akinmusire started getting together with the young drummer Timothy Angulo at a grocery store parking lot near where he lived in Oakland, Calif. Five or six days a week for over a year, they would set a timer and improvise freely for a solid hour.“I don’t think I’ve ever grown more as a musician than in that time,” said Akinmusire, 41, speaking from a messily ordered room in the Berkeley home he now shares with his partner, the poet and novelist Shabnam Piryaei, and their young son.Lately Akinmusire has been making some of the most intimate, spellbinding music of his career. In June he self-released “Beauty Is Enough,” a solo trumpet album, gentle of breath and tender of phrase, recorded at a Paris cathedral. And in early December, Nonesuch Records will release “Owl Song,” an achingly spartan LP, on which Akinmusire leads a trio featuring the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Herlin Riley through a handful of line-drawn original tunes.Frisell, a 72-year-old jazz eminence and a regular collaborator with Akinmusire, said he’s bowled over by the trumpeter’s restraint these days. “There’s this clarity in everything that he plays,” Frisell said recently. “The architecture of it has this incredible power.” Even in its simplicity, Akinmusire’s trumpet can feel almost dangerously tender: “like an exposed nerve,” Frisell said.If his style has grown increasingly spare, the same cannot be said of his workload. Akinmusire recently held down residencies at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at SFJazz, where he convened the Riley-Frisell trio for the first time; he’s been writing the score for the Starz show “Blindspotting,” which is written by his old Berkeley High School classmate Daveed Diggs; he recently completed an hourlong electronic composition to accompany a dance piece by Aszure Barton; he is working on the music for a Will Smith-produced podcast on hip-hop; he is completing a commission for chamber orchestra; and he has two more albums already in the pipeline, due for release on Nonesuch next year.Starting this fall, all of that will have to fit around Akinmusire’s new role as artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at U.C.L.A.A product of the academic age in jazz, Akinmusire’s creative life has been intertwined with the Hancock institute nearly from the start. He grew up nurtured by Oakland’s local jazz scene and the music of his family’s church and put in a formative early stint in the saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman’s band, then enrolled in the two-year program at what was known at the time as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. He won its king-making trumpet competition in 2007, with a style so elliptical and distinct — glancing on Fats Navarro and Lee Morgan and Terence Blanchard, but not mimicking anyone — that it quickly changed the game for young trumpeters in New York.“Watching him develop over the years has been really exciting,” Herbie Hancock, the institute’s chairman, said in a statement when the appointment was announced in July.Akinmusire could represent a contemporary jazz ideal: the scholarly composer-improviser, working across media while keeping a number of small groups together, refining a personal inflection on his instrument all the while. But the closer he gets to institutional leadership, the more he tends to pull away from the passive role of ambassadorship. After a decade with Blue Note, jazz’s most iconic label, he said he wanted to enjoy not knowing exactly “what type of records I was going to make,” and the genre-blind Nonesuch seemed like a place to be agnostic.“Heart Emerges Glistening” was released in 2011 to wide acclaim, and Akinmusire became the No. 1 rising star artist in the DownBeat critics’ poll. And his life seemed to go a little screwy. “People are starting to interact with me a little weird, my friends are being strange,” he remembered thinking. “I don’t want any part of this.” So he moved to Los Angeles, where the jazz scene is smaller and more spread out, and did some hibernating. He stopped writing music for a while, leaned on Piryaei a bit. And he reconnected with Mitchell, whom he’d met, as it happens, via the institute.He first ran into her backstage after his winning performance at the trumpet competition. “I thought I was about to faint, because I thought I was seeing things,” he said. She told him she’d made everyone in the dressing room stop talking during his set; she’d loved his playing. Then she asked who his favorite artists were. “I was like: You,” Akinmusire said. “And she’s like, ‘Yeah, I thought so!’” Mitchell guessed the exact tracks of hers that he liked best, including his very favorite, “Jericho.” (She includes Akinmusire in an appendix titled “Stuff Joni Likes or Even Loves” in Michelle Mercer’s book “Will You Take Me as I Am: Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ Period.” He is near the top of the list, between “some Dylan” and Friedrich Nietzsche.)Soon after moving to Los Angeles, he reached out to her. They started spending afternoons together, taking rides in his Honda Civic to pick up Italian food or playing music at her place. Akinmusire began to see a future for himself that might exist both in and outside of jazz.As we spoke I noticed him using “creative music” more often than jazz. “Creative is one thing that it has to be for me. And the other thing is beautiful,” he said. “I really believe in creativity, I believe in innovation, I believe in submitting to something higher than yourself.”He has been thinking about how to bring this ethic into his teaching, especially at a titular jazz institute. “When we’re teaching jazz history, maybe we should start from current day,” he said, looking for anyone who’s “creating creative music.” This would mean taking jazz out of its historical packaging, and paying attention to where contemporary ears are at — while also challenging them.He envisioned a class that might invite students to hear Noname’s new album, “Sundial,” and dissect its component parts. “Starting from something like that, and walking it back to Louis Armstrong, really incrementally,” he said. “I think it would allow younger people to feel some type of ownership, like they can relate to this music.” More

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    Beck and Phoenix’s Bouncy Synth-Pop Team-up, and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Palehound, Jaimie Branch, Aphex Twin and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Beck and Phoenix, ‘Odyssey’Double bill challenge: write a song with the act sharing the tour to prove compatibility. Beck and the French electro-pop band Phoenix, who will hit the road together this summer, have done just that. Their collaboration, “Odyssey,” finds common ground in synthesizer-centered 1980s pop, specifically Talking Heads’ 1980 “Once in a Lifetime” plus a lot of marimba or xylophone overdubs. Homer’s “Odyssey” was a long, brutal journey home. This “Odyssey” is much more comfortable. JON PARELESMaisie Peters, ‘Run’“If the man says that he wants you in his life forever — run!” That’s what the English songwriter Maisie Peters advises after a relationship with someone who was “too good to be true.” It’s a brisk, beat-driven battle-of-the-sexes song that could be a slogan. PARELESAphex Twin, ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f’Brooding synthesizer chords and dependable but ever-shifting drumbeats run through Aphex Twin’s first official release in five years, the inscrutably titled (as usual) “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f,” from an EP due July 28. Melodically, the track is a dirge, but until the rhythm drops away at the end, the percussion is there to party no matter how grim the surroundings. PARELESJaimie Branch, ‘Take Over the World’The trumpeter and bandleader Jaimie Branch, who was 39 when she died last year, left behind raucous, defiant recordings that will be released in August as a posthumous album, “Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)).” Branch determinedly fused jazz, electronics and punk spirit, and in “Take Over the World” she starts out chanting “Gonna gonna take over the world/and give it back-back-back-back to the l-l-land,” whooping up high as she’s joined by pummeling, New Orleans-flavored drums and rhythmically droning cello and bass. She plays a taunting, growling trumpet solo; she puts her vocals through an electronic warp. Her fury gathers a fierce, joyful momentum. PARELESPalehound, ‘Independence Day’“We broke up on Independence Day, crying while the next door neighbors raged,” El Kempner begins on this single from indie-rockers Palehound’s forthcoming album “Eye on the Bat,” atop a chord progression that chugs wearily, like Wilco’s “Kamera.” That memorable line sets the scene for this bleary, blurred snapshot of a relationship’s end, full of wry humor and hard-won wisdom. “Even if I could, it would kill me to look back,” Kempner sings, musing on the sadness of the road not taken. “No, I don’t wanna see the other path.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAmanda Shires and Bobbie Nelson, ‘Waltz Across Texas’The country artists Amanda Shires and Bobbie Nelson recorded the generation-bridging album “Loving You” shortly before Nelson’s 2022 death at age 91, and the result is a testament to the collaborative spirit and light, intuitive touch as a pianist that she retained up until the very end of her life. The album’s opening number “Waltz Across Texas,” the Western swing classic made famous by Ernest Tubb, showcases their easy musical chemistry: Shires’s fluttery voice is playful but reverent to the source material, and Nelson’s notes are as elegantly spaced and glimmering as stars in a night sky. ZOLADZFaye Webster, ‘But Not Kiss’Faye Webster trades in deceptive nonchalance. She brings her sly, sleepy voice to “But Not Kiss,” singing about the wary, ambivalent beginnings of a relationship: “I want to see you in my dreams but then forget,” she sings, “We’re meant to be — but not yet.” Each quiet, folky declaration is answered by a rich burst of instruments: physical responses outpacing rational decisions. PARELESThe Smile, ‘Bending Hectic’What would it feel like to drive off a Mediterranean mountainside? Leave it to the Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead with the jazz drummer Tom Skinner — to consider that possibility in this nerve-racking eight-minute track. “Bending Hectic” moves from contemplating the view to getting suicidal on curvy Italian mountain roads, from quiet guitar picking and contemplation to disaster scored by Greenwood’s dissonant string arrangements. Takeaway: Choose that van driver carefully. PARELESAmbrose Akinmusire, ‘Cora Campbell’Ambrose Akinmusire recorded his newest album, “Beauty Is Enough,” at Paris’s towering Saint-Eustache cathedral, without an audience or a band — just his trumpet and the natural reverb of the hall. He approached the album, which is entirely improvised, as something of a rite of passage: So many of his horn-playing heroes had done solo albums at crucial career junctures, he’d known he would at some point too. Akinmusire has a huge knowledge of jazz history, but he pushes himself to avoid relaxing within it; you’ll never hear him falling back on references. Instead he’s built one of the most ineffable styles in jazz, full of smoldering feeling, but with a startling quietness at its core. (The LP’s cover art approximates this well: a faint, almost bodily shape, barely emerging from an all-black background.) On “Cora Campbell,” the last of the LP’s 16 tracks, you’ll hear him squeeze his notes tightly, letting them tremor and wriggle a bit. Seventy seconds in, he turns the notes he’s been toying with into a steady pattern, then challenges himself to splice higher pitches and glissandos into its gaps. It’s not overloaded, but he’s never at rest. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More