Best Jazz Albums of 2024
Musicians both established and up-and-coming stretched themselves in fresh ways over the last year, creating poignant moments of collaboration and challenge.In 2024, jazz continued to spiral out, looking both forward and backward and expanding to mingle with adjacent styles. The year’s most memorable releases in the genre are diverse, but they all share one key trait: a delight in intimate, real-time musical conversation.1. Tarbaby, ‘You Think This America’Orrin Evans’s original “Red Door” appears on the trio Tarbaby’s latest album, a record made with no additional featured musicians.Yana Paskova for The New York TimesThe pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits have each been indispensable to 21st-century jazz, both as bandleaders and sidemen. But despite a near-20-year history, their collective trio, Tarbaby, has flown under the radar. With “You Think This America,” the first Tarbaby album without any additional musicians, they stake their claim as an elite group capable of conveying the most guileless tenderness (on a version of the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow”), the deepest blues feeling (on the 1920s standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) and the hippest sort of post-bop looseness (on the Evans original “Red Door”). They did it all while cultivating a refreshingly non-hierarchical approach, where moment to moment each member has an equal sonic stake.2. David Murray Quartet, ‘Francesca’Even when David Murray first arrived in New York around 50 years ago as an upstart saxophonist and bandleader, he seemed like an old soul, communing with the roots of jazz while thriving on its cutting edge. So he’s a natural fit for the elder-statesman role he plays on “Francesca,” alongside three outstanding younger musicians — the pianist Marta Sánchez, the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Russell Carter — who seem intuitively connected to his love of vigorous swing and grittily exuberant improv. The results feel like quintessential Murray, whether on the swaggering, extroverted “Am Gone Get Some” or the title track, a waltz that starts off restrained but soon bursts with emotion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
