Compiling a list of the greatest works of the last ten years is an inherently difficult proposition. The first complication lies in the fact that so many of my musical memories from the last decade are tied to recordings released prior to the period. Some of my best memories include the Charlie Parker song from 1950 that played at my wedding, the New Year’s Eve I first stumbled … [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...]
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...]