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    Best Jazz Albums of 2023

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    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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      Kassa Overall Knows Artists Feel Pressure. His New Album Explores It.

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      The drummer whose genre-crossing work has brought acclaim here and abroad returns with “Animals,” an LP of jazz, rap and soul inspired by the struggle to be OK.On a cloudy afternoon, the drummer Kassa Overall strolled past his first New York City apartment, a second-floor room in a Fort Greene brownstone. He had moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin in 2006 to play in the local jazz scene while improving his chops as a beatmaker. To help him make ends meet, the drummer Billy Hart got him a gig playing the djembe for a physical therapy dance class at a nursing home in Harlem.“So I came into the game with a consistent paying thing, low rent, and it was just like, ‘Damn, I’m here,’” Overall, 40, said as he toured his old neighborhood in March. “So I just stayed.”Fast-forward to 2020: Overall had built himself into a noted musician here and abroad, with a multifaceted sound synthesizing jazz, rap and R&B, and an album called “I Think I’m Good” — on the British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label — poised to push him into wider circles. Or so he thought. “It really felt like this was about to pop,” Overall recalled. “We did Japan, then we did the West Coast, and we were selling out merch every show.”But the pandemic shut down the possibility of further touring. Overall flew back to his native Seattle and wondered what was next. “I went from being a touring musician and always having extra income to barely having enough,” he said over lunch, opening up about his hard times without any apprehension. “I felt like I wasn’t as successful as it felt like I was on the internet.”The anguish led him to start work on a new album, “Animals,” out May 26, about the struggles of surviving as an entertainer, and how the pressure to stand out can push an artist too far. “I’m one of those people that’s like, I had mental illness stuff back in the day, and I have a sensitivity,” he explained. “I can’t just walk through the world normal. I got to do a lot of [expletive] to keep my train on the track.”“I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it,” Overall said. “So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Michael Tyrone DelaneyOverall had challenges throughout college, while he was studying jazz performance; he couldn’t sleep and had bouts of what he called “super high energy.” Then he’d be depressed for days. “I remember even telling my mom one day, ‘I think I’m bipolar,’” he said, recalling a moment when he was in high school. “I had this period where I was getting real isolated.” He described a manic episode where he began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. “I started seeing stuff on me.”“I Think I’m Good” unpacked the experience of living with bipolar disorder through scant electroacoustic backing tracks and heavily modulated vocals. “Animals” takes a different approach, inspired by Overall’s feeling of kinship with unconventional musicians like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix — “artists that you could tell were special, but also couldn’t really handle the pressure,” he said.The album’s vigorous jazz, rap and soul blends live instruments with electronic drum tracks. Its formidable roster of collaborators includes the rappers Danny Brown, Lil B and Ish of Shabazz Palaces; the vocalists Nick Hakim and Laura Mvula; and the jazz instrumentalists Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer. “The Lava Is Calm” features chilling piano; “Maybe We Can Stay” spotlights sweeping strings and flutes darting across a bouncy backbeat.“It feels like you’re in a zoo — you can’t go full animal, you know?” Overall said. “I was feeling like, within this machine and within this whole organism, I can see within myself, I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it. So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Overall’s childhood in Seattle was filled with music and life lessons from his free-spirited parents. (His mother worked for the local PBS station, and his father did odd jobs and stayed at home with the children.) “Everybody else had Kraft singles and Coca-Cola,” he quipped, “we had soy milk and tofu.”He was a quick study who learned how to play drums as a young child, exploring a living room full of instruments that his father collected. There was a piano, saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, a broken violin, a four-track recorder and a beat machine that he said no one knew how to use. But Overall learned how to manipulate the electronic equipment; by fourth grade, he and his older brother, Carlos, started playing jazz songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “A Night in Tunisia.”“I’m coming home with a lot of dollar bills and ironing them,” he remembered of their early performances. “And my dad was super hands-on with us. He would take us to the spot and set up, we’d find a corner and make bread.”Overall grew up listening to a wide array of artists — John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Public Enemy and DJ Quik — which gave him a natural feel for all kinds of sounds. A turning point in his relationship to music came when he was a sophomore in high school and landed a $9 an hour job sweeping peanut shells and taking out trash at the Major League Baseball stadium in Seattle. After he and some friends were fired for smoking marijuana, he had a realization.“Wait a minute. I’m doing jazz gigs, getting a hundred a night, 150, sometimes 200 on a good gig,” Overall remembered thinking. “So I could either level this up or I could get better at sweeping peanuts and stuff. And I haven’t had a real job since then.”Hart, a mentor and one of Overall’s Oberlin professors, was taken by his student’s assertiveness. “I knew he had a certain amount of self-confidence that was obvious when he got there,” said Hart, who is also a noted Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner collaborator. “As far as I’m concerned, Kassa is a jazz musician who has excelled in the pop field,” he added. “He’s found a unique direction all his own. If he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to be a major star.”Peterson, the Brownswood Recordings founder, was one of Overall’s early supporters, and he said he was struck by Overall’s curiosity for sounds outside jazz. “He’s kind of incorporated all these elements and made something fresh and new, but with all the aspects of traditional music,” he said. “He has a really great sense of being able to push the audience to a point where they can’t take anymore before bringing the beat back in — it’s brave.”Speaking and writing candidly about his own struggles requires its own bravery, but Overall says the new album isn’t simply about one person’s trials.“We’re all aspiring to reach a higher place. And we’re all aspiring to do better,” he said. “But also have empathy for those who don’t. Because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to just do OK. There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK. So maybe those are the people we consider animals. But it could have been you, could have been me. May have been me in the past life, or in the next life.” More

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      Chloë Tangles With Future, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bettye LaVette, Abra, Tyler, the Creator 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.Chlöe and Future, ‘Cheatback’Chloe Bailey contemplates getting even for infidelity — “pulling a you on you” — in “Cheatback,” an almost-country ballad like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from her debut album, “In Pieces.” Backed at first by basic acoustic guitar chords, she thinks through the details. “Say I’m with my girls while he spendin’ the night,” she sings, and “I might make a video.” Future semi-apologizes — “Should’ve never let you down, feelin’ embarrassed/Temptation haunting me” — and asks her to “Make love, not revenge,” knowing he hasn’t lost her yet. JON PARELESGeorgia, ‘It’s Euphoric’“You don’t have to say nothing when you start to feel something,” the British pop musician Georgia sings on this dreamy, upbeat reverie, co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, which captures the buzz of new love. She settles for a simple, repeated refrain of “it’s euphoric,” giving that last word a prismatic luminosity. LINDSAY ZOLADZAbra, ‘FKA Mess’Save for recent, one-off collaborations with Bad Bunny and Playboi Carti, the self-proclaimed “darkwave duchess” Abra has been quiet since her head-turning 2016 EP “Princess.” The throbbing, six-minute “FKA Mess,” though, is a promising return to form: The bass-heavy track is murky and echoing but cut through with infectious melody and a kinetic beat. It sounds, in the best way possible, like a strobe-lit, after-dark dance party in an abandoned mall. ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Plan B’Bettye LaVette taps into deep blues and the anxiety of age in “Plan B,” a Randall Bramblett song from her coming album, “LaVette,” produced by the drummer and roots-rock expert Steve Jordan. “Plan B” is wrapped around a minor-key guitar riff and a production that harks back to both Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and, yes, Pink Floyd’s “Money.” LaVette, as always, is raspy and indomitable. Even as she sings “My mojo’s busted and I ain’t got a spare,” it’s clear she’s tough enough to keep going. PARELESKassa Overall featuring Nick Hakim and Theo Croker, ‘Make My Way Back Home’The drummer, singer and rapper Kassa Overall wishes for the “family that I never knew” and a place “where the love is real” in “Make My Way Back Home,” a dizzying jazz-hip-hop production that never finds a resting place. Multitracked trumpets, flutes, keyboards and voices cascade across the drummer’s light, ever-shifting beat, building chromatic harmonies that continually elude resolution — a structure of endless longing. PARELESTyler, the Creator, ‘Sorry Not Sorry’Repentance turns to belligerence in “Sorry Not Sorry,” a new song from “Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale,” the expanded version of Tyler, the Creator’s 2021 album. At first, over a sumptuous 1970s soul vamp (from “He Made You Mine” by Brighter Shade of Darkness), Tyler admits to mistakes: “Sorry to my old friends/the stories we could’ve wrote if our egos didn’t take the pen.” But he’s definitely not abandoning that ego; as the track builds, remorse turns to pride and sarcasm: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” PARELESMadison McFerrin, ‘God Herself’In “God Herself,” Madison McFerrin — like her father, Bobby McFerrin — revels in all the music that can be made without instruments: vocals, breaths, percussive syllables, finger snaps. “God Herself” is a multitracked, close-harmony construction that draws on gospel to equate carnality and spirituality: “Make you want to come inside and pray to stay for life,” McFerrin vows. “You gonna see me and believe in God herself.” It’s meticulously calculated to promise delight. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)’Kelsea Ballerini promises to give a friend an alibi — paying attention to both the physical and the digital — in “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” It’s a foot-stomping country tune about friendship and perjury. “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband/Hand on the Bible, I’d be lyin’ through my teeth,” Ballerini sings, with bluegrassy fiddle and slide guitar backing her up. It’s a successor to songs like the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” but it’s no direct threat, just a contingency plan. PARELESJess Williamson, ‘Hunter’The Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — who released a collaborative album last year with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, under the name Plains — yearns for connection on the bracing, country-tinged “Hunter,” the first single from her upcoming album, “Time Ain’t Accidental.” The song oscillates between muted disappointment and, on a surging chorus, defiant hope: “I’ve been known to move a little fast,” Williamson sings. “I’m a hunter for the real thing.” ZOLADZ More