The Best Jazz Albums of 2024: Videos, CD covers

10. Jihye Lee Orchestra – Infinite Connections

The South Korean former pop singer and jazz composer Jihye Lee woke up the wider jazz world with a daring and sophisticated debut, 2021’s Daring Mind. This superb successor invites contemporary trumpet maestro Ambrose Akinmusire to add his own magic, as Lee mingles the traditional life story of her grandmother with her own more liberated one. Korean rhythms (played by Snarky Puppy drummer Keita Ogawa) shift to fast moving jazz; Born in 1935 lets Gil Evans-like chords unleash Maria Schneider alto-sax stalwart Dave Pietro, and Akinmusire’s vaulting solo on the ghostly You Are My Universe is exquisite.

9. Wadada Leo Smith/Amina Claudine Myers – Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens

In the 1960s, Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians helped to introduce a raft of young jazz originals, including multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and composer Henry Threadgill – along with Mississippi trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the gospel-influenced keyboardist Amina Claudine Myers. Now in their 80s, the latter two formed a duo to commemorate the roles of musicians including former enslaved people in shaping the landscape of New York’s Central Park. Hymnal harmonies suggest absent singers; early Miles-like figures drift amid harmonies and dissonances that bewitchingly cohere. It’s a quietly meditative tribute, but quietly playful too.

8. Alice Zawadzki/Fred Thomas/Misha Mullov – Abbado – Za Górami

Seven years after the Anglo-Polish singer, violinist and composer Alice Zawadzki was commissioned by the Bath festival to form any band she fancied playing with but hadn’t yet, her partnership with pianist-composer Fred Thomas and bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado produced this ethereal navigation of wistful European, Latin American and Sephardic Jewish songs. The Judaeo-Spanish traditional Suéltate las Cintas is a highlight, as is Polish folk song Za Górami (Behind the Mountains, beautifully expressed in Zawadzki’s cry for a young girl’s freedom), and Venezuelan composer Simón Díaz’s Tonada de Luna Llena. Lugano’s rarefied studio Auditorio Stelio Molo adds a voice of its own.

7. Mike Stern – Echoes

Mike Stern (el g, bv), Chris Potter (ts), Jim Beard (p, ky), Christian McBride (el b, db), Antonio Sanchez (d), Arto Tunçboyacian (perc) plus guests on tracks 4, 5 and 9 Leni Stern (ngoni), Richard Bona (el b, v), Dennis Chambers (d) and Bob Franceschini (ss, ts). Rec. date not stated

The death of keyboardist Jim Beard at the age of 63 in March this year left many in deep shock, such was his continuous presence in the highest echelons of jazz as both player and producer with everyone from Steely Dan, to John McLaughlin and Wayne Shorter. He appears here as both player and producer on this effusive latest set from another indefatigable jazz fusion figure, Mike Stern.

No stranger to adversity himself, Stern has made an emphatic comeback from a near career-ending fall in 2017 that broke both his arms, and if anything Echoes and Other Songs is something of a late-career high for the eternally energetic six-stringer, who’s now 71 years young.

Joined by one of his hardest hitting bands in recent years – the ubiquitous Chris Potter firing from the off, McBride and Sanchez the perfect simpatico rhythm section, there’s a suitably uplifting vibe permeating these sessions, with everyone sounding overjoyed to be backing up their guitar hero Mr Stern.

Opener ‘Connections’ begins with some plucked ngoni from Mike’s wife Leni, which soon gives way to Stern’s patented minor riffing and tight unison melody lines with Potter. Stern’s solos still beguile with his artfully in-n-out lines, with the blues and his overdrive pedal never far away. His association with Cameroonian bass star Richard Bona goes back to 2001’s Voices, and they’re reunited here on three songs: the grinding funk of ‘Space Bar’, skipping vocal-harmony soaked ‘I Hope So’ and vocal-infused ‘Curtis’ – this trio of tracks also replete with guesting old chums Chambers and Franceschini on drums and sax respectively.

Echoes and Other Songs also sounds superb – taped at Power Station at Berklee NYC – Beard’s skills steering this production also extends to mixing duties alongside engineer Roy Hendrickson; more reasons to feel his loss even more keenly.

And while this set doesn’t break much new musical ground for Stern, the sheer quality of the material and performances , which are fuelled by an obvious collective joy, all amount to one of the guitarist’s strongest sets in years. It’s the perfect tribute to a much-missed friend.

6. Ezra Collective – Dance, No One’s Watching

When Ezra Collective became the first jazz band to win the Mercury prize in 2023, it heralded the adventurousness of the contemporary UK jazz scene, and the long-running Tomorrow’s Warriors music education organisation that inspired them. They merge full-on jazz (their trumpet/sax frontline, and the blistering rhythm section of pianist Joe Armon-Jones and bass/drums siblings TJ and Femi Koleoso see to that) with afrobeat and highlife, hip-hop, Latin music and more. Dance, No One’s Watching is their most balanced mix of jazz and dance vibes yet, with the added hip, confiding neo-soul vocals of Yazmin Lacey and Olivia Dean.

5. Vijay Iyer/Linda May Han Oh/Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion

After decades of multi-generic acclaim, the polymathic pianist/composer Vijay Iyer continues to show how far one of the most familiar formats in jazz can evolve in his superb new trio with double-bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey – players who implicitly trust improvisation’s moment-by-moment revelations live and “out in the world”, as Iyer calls it. He plays a beautiful homage to Chick Corea (via Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed), and to composer Roscoe Mitchell, alongside fine originals including the moving It Goes, a tribute to murdered Mississippi teenager Emmett Till. Melodically alluring, rhythmically invigorating, deviously dazzling music.

4. Charles Lloyd – The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow

Charles Lloyd, last man standing of an American jazz saxophone generation that included Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and now-retired Sonny Rollins, has a voice-like horn sound identifiable from the first breaths. The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, released in Lloyd’s 86th year, features new and old material shared with an A-list quartet including the gifted multi-disciplinary pianist/composer Jason Moran. Thelonious Monk’s legacy gets a vivid swing-to-bop tribute, Lloyd’s flute sound is as captivating as his ethereal tenor, and the spiritual Balm in Gilead devotedly draws on his deepest roots.

3. Wayne Shorter – Celebration, Volume 1

This previously unreleased Wayne Shorter music from a 2014 Stockholm gig catches the empathy that made the then 81-year-old’s brilliant quartet with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade so globally and multi-generationally admired – a gig the saxophonist considered one of the group’s finest performances. Spacey Coltrane-esque brooding, call-and-response exchanges, big horn-and-drums crescendos, and an improv tour de force on the Irish folk song She Moves Through the Fair powerfully endorse that opinion. The release also marks the anniversary of Shorter’s first Blue Note recording session 60 years ago.

2. Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Paul Motian – The Old Country: More from the Deer Head Inn

In 1992, Keith Jarrett – with his Standards Trio bassist Gary Peacock, and with his vigilantly open-minded 1970s drums partner Paul Motian replacing the unavailable Jack DeJohnette – played a benefit for his local jazz venue, the Deer Head Inn. The star is audibly delighted by the home crowd, and by playing with the unfamiliar lineup. ECM released some tracks on At the Deer Head Inn in 1994, and The Old Country unveils more – including a thrilling foray into Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser, a Bill Evans-like homage on All of You, and an impassioned take on How Long Has This Been Going On?

1. Mary Halvorson – Cloudward

When the American composer/guitarist Mary Halvorson, a gifted alchemist of musical transmutations, released Cloudward in January, it already sounded bound for the best of the year – as her work had done in 2022 with the albums Amaryllis and Belladonna. Halvorson’s early inspirations were Jimi Hendrix and Anthony Braxton, and both the guitar as a sound source, and structural ideas on the cusp of improv and contemporary chamber music, continue to guide her. This enthralling sextet set mixes rich brass harmonies, rough-hewn distortion, jazzy riffing, intricate real-time jamming and subtle grooves and counterpoint; Laurie Anderson briefly guests on effects-violin. Cloudward was appropriately titled to celebrate the band’s sense of liberation about resuming live music after the pandemic – Halvorson’s joy at that rings out in these vivid pieces.