As we reach the end of another season of year-end lists, I still find it just as difficult to find some thread to move through this year as when I started this endeavor some weeks ago. Yes, there is a boldness in these albums, in the works that have been created this year. There have been folks like Ben Allison or Darryl Reeves who made inspiring work and produced & released it … [Read more...]
Nextbop/The Art of Cool Project’s Favorite Jazz Albums of 2013, #20-12
One major reason why I so enjoy this time at the end of the year is not only to reassess what this past year has looked like musically, not only to be able to look at a multitude of truly great works from great artists and say stuff like "oh, wow, Darcy James Argue gave us another album this year" or "hey, Wayne Shorter came back to Blue Note" and "how do David Weiss and Point … [Read more...]
Nextbop/The Art of Cool Project’s Favorite Everything Else Albums of 2013, #10-1
I spent quite a while looking through our staff list to find some sort of theme for the music we liked this year, but try as I might, there was nothing I could say. There was no overarching, coalessing word I could lasso around these albums other than what we could probably say about the rest of the albums we're discussing this week, or this time of year, or what we hope to do … [Read more...]
Nextbop/The Art of Cool Project’s Favorite Everything Else Albums of 2013, #18-12
The Everything Else lists don't get nearly as much web traffic as our jazz lists do. Of course, this makes sense-- this is a jazz and fringe jazz website. People visit this site to learn about what's going on in this specific genre. Talking about music that doesn't fit in this genre is a move outside of the format and purview of Nextbop, and eventually of The Art of Cool … [Read more...]
Anthony Dean-Harris’ Favorite Jazz Albums of 2013
I had a discussion with some folks at KRTU about the importance of year-end lists as moments of assessment, of looking at this moment in time in a century-year-old genre of music and say this is where the music was at this point of the narrative. At a time where we're analyzing the culture at large at a rate as fast as the lives we're living in it, it's sometimes necessary to … [Read more...]