Five new albums I wouldn’t want to be without: Each of them offers jazz pushing the edge of its current possibilities: Videos, Photos

So much wrong in the world, and yet so much wonderful new music. How to explain the existence, amid the trauma and violence and chaos agents and the encroachment of threat, of all this beauty?

Here are five new albums I wouldn’t want to be without: Billy Hart’s Just (ECM), Yazz Ahmed’s A Paradise in the Hold (Night Time Stories), Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note), Vilhelm Bromander’s Jorden vi ärvde (Thanatosis), and — most of all — Ambrose Akinmusire’s Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch).

Each of them offers jazz pushing the edge of its current possibilities, moving forward as it has always done, drawing influences from wherever it sees potential, respecting the past, suggesting futures.

Hart’s album is full of beautifully balanced and flexible interplay between four masters: the drummer with Ethan Iverson (piano), Ben Street (bass) and Mark Turner (tenor saxophone).

Ahmed explores her Bahraini heritage in lustrous tunes with the help of singers including Natacha Atlas and Brigitte Beraha. Cline’s quartet, completed by the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the bassist Chris Lightcap and the drummer Tom Rainey, explores the guitarist’s bracing and multi-faceted compositions which, while offering nothing specifically unfamiliar, create an original and constantly stimulating sound-world. Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra, featuring the fantastic bass clarinetist Christer Bothén, extends the vision of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra with great success.

But for some time now Ambrose Akinmusire has moving towards a music that sounds completely new, finding ways of incorporating elements of hip-hop and contemporary classical music into his compositions. It could be gruesome. Instead, with Honey From a Winter Stone, it’s a quiet revelation.

Has anyone yet used the term Fourth Stream to describe such music? If not, its time might have come. Akinmusire /photo above/ takes the post-Bartókian astringency of the Mivos Quartet and brings to it an improvising musician’s fluency.

And weaving in and out is his own trumpet work, representing in its liquid grace and constant unpredictability a kind of celestial marriage of Booker Little and Don Cherry, supported by two familiar accomplices, the pianist Sam Harris and the drummer Justin Brown, plus the synthesiser and vocals of Chiquitamagic.

Akinmusire has found a way to make all this work, to create from it a coherent and entirely contemporary statement. The longest track, the 29-minute s-/Kinfolks, cycles through various dimensions, from an exploratory opening trumpet flight of sumptuous inventivness through deep grooves, a dramatic change of temperature as Kokayi freestyles, and a passage for the strings that sounds effortless but strikes deep.

As I listened, I found myself thinking back to 1969 and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow. What s-/Kinfolks shares with that epic from half a century ago is a combination of rarified beauty, emotional heft (its elegantly understated play of mourning and defiance), and relevance to the present condition. Probably the album of the year already, with the others not far behind.

by Richard Williams