by Tom Hull
There is a lot of extraordinary jazz out there that few of us are noticing, myself included.
Francis Davis’s Annual Jazz Critics Poll organizer extraordinaire Tom Hull. Photo: courtesy of the author
I’ve been contributing to Francis Davis’s annual Jazz Critics Poll since it began in 2006 — voting, expanding my own ballot lists, collating and publishing ballots, checking counts, eventually taking over the time-consuming work of organizing voters and writing essays — but this is the first year where I’ve felt the responsibility for continuing the poll resting totally on my shoulders. It’s also the first poll that I could have simply walked away from, writing it off as history and trivia as I moved on to other long-dreamt-of projects.
That I didn’t, I attribute to the vanity, cruelty, and myopia of a slim plurality of the American people, as expressed in the 2024 presidential election. All year long, I’d been consumed with writing up a weekly pair of blog posts: the lesser of those I called Music Week, which chronicled all the music I listened to while I spent most of my time researching and writing my political rants, which also appeared in weekly digests, asSpeaking of Which. Actually, that’s been a big part of my life for most of twenty years, but the political stakes have never before seemed so severe. My politics were largely formed in opposition to the Vietnam War, another time when well-meaning liberals exposed themselves as genocidal megalomaniacs, albeit also a time when their more conservative opposition seemed much less ominous.
I responded to the election by working through the usual stages of nausea, disgust, fear, and loathing, but fairly rapidly I drew several conclusions: that my efforts to sway voters had totally missed their mark (with the corollary that, however brilliant I thought I was, hardly anyone noticed); that it would be months before anything actually changed, and possibly years before it would affect me; and that I had a jazz critics poll to run, for a community that actually appreciated my work. So I wrapped up one last massive (37k words) columnand signed off. After that, I went to work on the poll, setting up thearchive website, sending out invites to vote (initially 220, ultimately 280), and counting177 ballots, for our biggest, broadest, and deepest poll ever (+18 from2023).
I might apologize for injecting dreaded politics into discussion here, but I suspect that very few people who care enough about jazz to investigate this poll will object to me airing my views (briefly, anyhow). While it’s possible to be a leftist and have no interest in or appreciation of jazz, I’ve often been surprised to find readers who came to my website looking for jazz tips not only tolerated my politics but approved. From that, I suspect that a large majority of jazz fans lean left (or maybe they’re just anti-fascist?). Jazz was the first major music to transcend race — and pretty much every other category anyone has attempted to saddle it with. It’s become a truly global music, with fans and creators coming from all over the world. It has prospered in academia, increasingly becoming the language in which modern composition is forged. The main knock against jazz is that it may demand too much thought to be truly popular, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Like most art, you can push it as hard, or take it as easy, as you want. But it does seem fair to state that very few people who think with any precision beyond their own concepts fall for the sort of snake oil peddled by Trump and his ilk.
Of course, that may just be a pipe dream. Innovative artists have driven jazz away from the mass market ever since the arrival of bebop and the avant-garde — which shaped the context in which ’70s fusion seemed like a desperate marketing move. Meanwhile, popular music fragmented into dozens or hundreds of narrow niches, increasingly isolated from and ignorant of one another. Accordingly, few people noticed jazz’s worldwide revival from the ’90s on. I’ve long felt that many more people would enjoy jazz if they just had more exposure, but given the structure of popular media — I hesitate to even call it “mass media” any more — that’s very unlikely to happen.
I jump straight into presenting and commenting on the poll results in my other essay —The Shape of Jazz That Keeps Us Going. Here I want to take a more circuitous, and perhaps a more personal, route to understanding what the poll measures, and perhaps what it misses — or at least to how it works, and why it works this way. The poll is, of course, a product of historical contingencies, but I’ve already written a fair amount about that: see myMemoirs of a Pollwatcherfrom 2022. What’s happened since then is that Francis Davis has receded into the background — for more on him, see his own essay this year —Now and Then and Then and Now. I have had to take charge of the whole operation to keep it going.
This is the first year I felt secure enough to fiddle with the rules and format Davis established in2006— the only significant change he made since then was the decision in2014to expand Reissues to include older but previously unreleased recordings, a grouping he chose to call Rara Avis. I started tinkering back in June, when I ran aMid-Year Jazz Critics Poll(see my essay,Diversity Brings Riches). I saw that jazz was garnering very little recognition in the plethora of mid-year (“so far”) lists, but figured that with my mailing list and website software, it would be easy to pick up the slack. I also thought I might try out a few experiments, like fiddling with the point scheme: I’ve long suspected that the previous scheme, which gave a 1st place album 10 times as many points as a 10th place album, would distort the totals (especially in a poll with fewer voters: I expected mid-year participation to drop, and it did from 159 to 90). I also allowed more picks in our Reissues/Historical category (while keeping Davis’s Rara Avis name), which is something some voters had advocated. And I decided not to bother with the extra categories (Vocal, Latin, Debut), which many voters had trouble with, and didn’t strike me as being worth the trouble. I also changed some wording, hoping to make voting easier and less contentious than in the past. I stressed that voters didn’t have to fill up their lists, that they shouldn’t overthink them — they’re just recommending their favorite albums to friends, not trying to weigh the world.
Percussionist/composer Kahil El’Zabar. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
For the most part, I thought those changes worked reasonably well. I kept the new point scheme (which I will comment more on below), and also the expansion of the Rara Avis list (while emphasizing that short lists are acceptable). Davis objected to eliminating the Vocal, Latin, and Debut categories, so I resurrected them, but with a couple of changes. Whereas he only allowed one pick in each and insisted that, if a top-ten album belonged in a category, it had to be picked over any alternative choice. I loosened these restrictions, figuring that if many voters skipped the category, we should make more use of the voters who do want to engage it. (Latin is the most polarizing in this regard). So I’m allowing three extra picks in each category, plus any top-ten albums so designated. So while fewer people voted in those categories than before, the total number of albums mentioned in each increased significantly.
The category changes worked pretty much as I expected. The trend toward fewer people voting in them continued, probably because I stressed that voting in them was optional, and that they certainly did not need to max out their lists. Avoidance would have been even greater had I not reminded voters that listing an Arooj Aftab or Samara Joy in their top-ten implied that their vote should also be counted under Vocal. I didn’t make that suggestion for every possible vocalist because I didn’t want to make unwarranted assumptions. For instance, Kahil El’Zabar finished 17 overall, but no one thought enough of his vocals to list him there.
The categories not only wound up with more albums voted for than ever before, but were more competitive at the top of the scale. Vocal split 34-31 with a 3-way tie for 3rd at 16; Latin 18-16-16-15-14-13; Debut 19-16-11-8-7. While 77 (43.5%) of voters couldn’t think of a Debut to vote for, 42 (23.7%) came up with three qualifying albums.
As for the point scheme: We’ve always allowed unranked lists, in the old scheme according an average of the total number of points each voter had, which worked out to 5.5 points per album. Davis never liked the idea of unranked lists, and sought to minimize them by not mentioning the option in the invitation, so few people thought to insist on them. I agreed, but took a different tack: I mentioned the option — for one thing, I wanted to remove obstacles from voting, and for many people ranking is both extra and unpleasant work. But I thought that weighting ranked lists a bit higher would encourage voters to do a bit of extra work, and submit lists with more valuable information. I counted unranked lists at 1 point for each vote (as if all 10 albums were equal to the 10th best — which has some logic to it, in that the voters weren’t telling me differently), but used a sliding scale for ranked albums, from 1 point for 10th up to 3 points for 1st (2.4 for 2nd, 2.0 for 3rd, 1.8 for 4th, etc., so I didn’t get rid of the damn fractions).
In devising this points scheme, I wanted to do two things: to offer an incentive for ranked lists — but not kill off unranked lists because they are still much preferable to not voting at all; and to reduce the points spread between 1st and 10th best albums from its previous 10-to-1 to something more realistic, like 3-to-1. Here I was partly drawing on my own Pazz & Jop ballots, where voters divvy up 100 points with a maximum of 30 and a minimum of 5. My ballots only exceeded 3-to-1 because I started running out of points down around 7-8, not because I thought the lower third of the list slacked off that much, but because rebalancing the votes would have taken more work while accomplishing little.
What I didn’t consider is whether treating ranking and unranked voters differently might introduce an anomaly that favors one style over another. It turns out that if you divide points by votes, the main thing you wind up measuring isn’t intensity of support — which seemed like the obvious point; indeed, it’s one that Davis has pointed out repeatedly over the years — but the ratio of ranking vs. unranked voters. I haven’t run many numbers, but I can give you a couple of examples:
- Kahil El’Zabar’s 11 votes got more points than Tarbaby’s 17 votes, the p/v ratios being 2.209 to 1.335. El’Zabar was on 1 unranked list, vs. 6 for Tarbaby. But Tarbaby still edged out Jeff Parker (14 votes) and Allen Lowe (13 votes), which only appeared on 2 unranked lists each.
- Similarly, Ahmed’s 18 votes (2.150 p/v, 2 unranked) beat out Tyshawn Sorey’s 24 (1.541 p/v, 9 unranked) and Immanuel Wilkins’ 22 (1.618 p/v, 3 unranked).
Or is this really an anomaly? While my examples seem to show some correlation between unranking voters and more mainstream tastes, it is also possible that what we’re measuring is the broader promotion and distribution that those more mainstream records get. Tarbaby is on a small label, but they’re using the same independent publicist who helped tiny Pyroclastic snag 1st and 6th this year. Sorey is on Pi Recordings, a small label that pays close enough attention to the poll to regularly get half of their releases onto our leaderboard (this year, that’s Sorey at 11, Steve Coleman at 16, Luke Stewart at 22, and Kim Cass at 31). And Wilkins is on Blue Note, the biggest label of them all: they bounced back from a relatively weak showing last year to place records at 3, 12, 25, 26, 32, 34, 39, 41, 42, and 52, as well as win in Rara Avis, where they also ranked 9, 15, and 29.
Saxophonist/composer Allen Lowe. Photo: Helen Ward
On the other hand, I know nothing about the PR for El’Zabar (on Spiritmuse, a UK label I know for little else) or Ahmed (on Fönstret, a Swedish label I had never even heard of before the box bum-rushed our mid-year poll — it finished 10th, as it ultimately did in our poll, where it got just enough extra votes to hold its spot). I didn’t get a single piece of email, let alone a promo CD, from either. I doubt many others did. But that a sufficient number of critics can overcome such obstacles, and find a few records that don’t have the advantages of the usual rich and famous, and lift them from obscurity to compete — not on an equal playing field, but on any one at all — suggests to me that we aren’t doing such a bad job.
I’ve been observing polls and perusing end-of-year lists since the mid-’70s, when I was a fledgling rock critic and first voted in Pazz & Jop. Even before that, I was one of those critical theory types that politicians like Ron DeSantis decry for trying to corrupt the youth by encouraging them to doubt authority. We learned to dismantle assumptions, to doubt motives, to notice subtle signs of manipulation, and to insert human values into every equation. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve never seen a poll or list that didn’t raise more questions than it answered. That’s just part of the process of understanding, from which a better, more thoughtful, and more caring world might emerge.
The first question I’ve always wondered about regarding album polls is — who gets to hear what? I keep fairly careful records on everything I listen to, so I can look at a our totals lists and figure out how much I have and have not heard. Thanks to the information I’ve gathered in running this poll, to cheap streaming, and to having enough of a reputation I can occasionally shake a precious album loose, I’ve managed to hear 99 of the top 100 new albums this year. The one exception at present is number 46: Joëlle Léandre’s 5-CD Lifetime Rebel, on the French RogueArt label (who sometimes send me promo CDs, but labels get extra-finicky when the disc count goes up). The next one after that is at 102:One Another Orchestra, on another French label (it’s on Bandcamp, but only 4 of 14 tracks, not enough to review; I often review full albums from Bandcamp, but it’s often a rush job). Beyond that, but the number surely goes up, and possibly rather steeply. At that level, the problem is not just access, but time.
I’ve had more problems with Rara Avis, where the list of albums I haven’t heard starts at 18 (King Oliver), 19 (Cecil Taylor), 20 (Bobby Hutcherson), 22 (Don Byas), and picks up again from 37 (Charles Mingus) on. Three of those are priced well over $100, and while I don’t doubt that they are gorgeous products, I already have most of the music (even the Taylor) in some other form. Mosaic, by the way, did very well in the early polls, when we had fewer voters and they were more generous in servicing them. The percentage of voters who heard these five albums and voted for them may well exceed the voter share of the leaders but, as my own example shows, the number of voters who did hear them is probably quite small.
Every critic struggles with the same two constraints: access and time, in various combinations. The only way we can gain any perspective and leverage on the world is by comparing notes. The internet and airwaves convey more information than anyone can possibly digest. The poll is a tool that helps us understand and make use of those notes. The various rules we have laid out force voters to standardize, so we gather data that can be sorted and aggregated, and fed back as information. No one critic can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but many critics working together can expand our grasp.
The purpose of the rules is to force voters to offer us their views in a format that can be added, sorted, and compared. Left to their own whims, voters do all sorts of things. Some may stop at five albums, while others trudge on past 100. Some try to combine albums they regard as related, while others separate them out. Some are fastidious about ranking, others refuse to rank, and in between you get all kinds of muddles. Old and new mean different things. Some don’t even keep track of years — and while it’s inevitable that there will be albums that voters cannot get to until after our deadlines, some wind up voting for the previous year’s winners, or even earlier albums. And those problems still occur with all the rules we have in place. Who knows what we’d get if we just turned this into a freeform essay question?
So, the rules are one dimension of the poll. The other dimension is the voters. I wasn’t privy to the vetting that Francis Davis did in deciding who to invite to the polls, even well after I started helping him correspond. I made a few suggestions, probably no more than five in any year. My impression is that in addition to his own personal contacts, he drew heavily on whoever impressed him writing for major publications likeDownBeat,JazzTimes, andNew York City Jazz Record. He also invited a fair number of jazz radio people. I don’t have much sense of their work, and have no way of vetting them. But I think the key has always been to look for people who manage to listen to a large quantity and wide range of jazz. Until recently, that meant people on publicists’ lists, so they’ve been the hidden coordinators of the process.
Since I’ve taken over, I’ve been looking more at blogs and specialized online publications. I’ve invited a few writers who aren’t really jazz specialists but were known to me to have serious interest and fairly wide range — notably rock critics who minor in jazz and thereby help introduce non-jazz fans to occasional jazz albums, and other journalists who dabble conspicuously (Chuck Eddy and Robert Christgau are examples of the former; Jeffrey St. Clair is one of the latter).
I’ve also long wanted to cast a wider international net. Europe became a major refuge for American jazz musicians in the ’70s, when many prominent American labels dried up. American musicians are well known there, but at this point there are probably as many Europeans playing jazz as Americans, not that the American public knows much about them. Davis invited a few European critics, but as late as 2022 our electorate was a good 90% American. I made a serious move toward Europe this year — we also added a couple critics from Latin America and Japan — so for the first time ever the American contingent is down to . . . about 80%. (I’ve made no effort to track demographics, maybe in reaction to the way pollsters focus on such things, or perhaps as a well-aged, ill-educated, working class redneck who was born male and straight, I realize as well as anyone that such labels are neither fate nor very helpful. I would, however, love to know how many critics also listen to hip-hop or metal, or how many can’t stand Beethoven. And I wouldn’t mind a straw poll on Trump vs. Harris vs. anyone else who isn’t guilty of war and/or fiduciary crimes, although I promise not to judge any such compromised position too harshly.)
At this point, I have no idea how this year’s expansion has affected the standings — other than that the total number of albums receiving one or just a few votes seems to have kept pace with the number of voters. That might be something to follow up on and study. One hypothesis might be that having more voters dilutes the cozy relationship between voters and top publicists and labels (although diminished budgets can have the same effect). It appears that there is a slight increase in the number of albums in the standings without an obvious PR agent, but even if that’s a trend, the revolution has yet to arrive: 4 of 5 category winners were repped by two top independent publicists, and the other was on Blue Note.
Another possibility is that the electorate is shaded slightly more toward free jazz critics, possibly because it’s been easier to identify and contact writers for Free Jazz Collective and El Intruso than has been the case with bigger but more mainstream publications. (For the latter, we were aided by a couple of European publicists, but they entered the frame too late to have much impact.)
Whatever extra focus we had on free jazz — which as far as I’m concerned has been a good thing, both because I find the music interesting and because hardly anyone else notices it — is unlikely to have had much effect on the standings, as there’s even less consensus among free jazz critics than anywhere else. For example, Ivo Perelman got 12 votes, but they were divided among 8 different albums, so his highest rated album came in at 112. You might compare the lists at Free Jazz Collective. Ten (of 20) of their writers voted in our poll, which probably contributed to two albums making both their and our top ten (Darius Jones, Ahmed). It is also possible that they may have tipped Vocal, where they rarely vote for anyone, from Samara Joy to Fay Victor. In close elections, as we know all too painfully, any small factor could be decisive (or at least easily blamed).
I’m of the belief that there is no right answer as to who should win what. Each category has many valid choices, and a well-designed poll will help identify and juxtapose as many of them as possible. So what I look for in vetting voters is someone who demonstrates a passion to explore, evaluate, and explain: traits I associate with the word “critic,” whether one can make a living at it or not. Indeed, I suspect that most of the people who do it — and I am one of them — do not make their living this way. But the costs of access, both to listen and to publish, have dropped remarkably over our 19 years. By the way, those same cost factors have also dropped for musicians, so we now have many more releasing many more albums than ever before, and therefore need more critics.
I went to bed last night thinking I’d quickly wrap this piece up the next day, perhaps with a short bit about my own ballot — something Davis did regularly, but me not so much. Then I woke up this morning with dozens of thoughts that could lead to hundreds or possibly thousands of additional words. But at last, one of them was: why not hold off and write more later? My dithering is holding up publication, and thereby delaying your opportunity to delve into and figure out your own takes. I hope voters and other readers will write their own pieces about the poll, and publish them in whatever outlets they have. Or you could just send them to me. I’ve set up a section on the archive websiteand I already have one such piece: Larry Blumenfeld’s Top 10 Reasons to Hate Top 10 Lists. He makes cogent points about the pitfalls and pettiness that go into such lists, but I would counter that the discipline they demand helps clarify one’s thoughts, as well as providing a service to others.
Let me illustrate this with my own ballot. For New Albums, my choices were:
- Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra,Louis Armstrong’s America(ESP-Disk)
- Fay Victor,Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way(TAO Forms)
- Luke Stewart Silt Trio,Unknown Rivers(Pi)
- Emmeluth’s Amoeba,Nonsense(Moserobie)
- Darius Jones,Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)(AUM Fidelity)
- Steve Coleman and Five Elements,PolyTropos/Of Many Turns(Pi)
- Dave Douglas,Gifts(Greenleaf Music)
- The Core,Roots(Moserobie)
- Ballister,Smash and Grab(Aerophonic)
- أحمد [Ahmed],Giant Beauty(Fönstret)
I could explain this two ways: the usual one would be to write a line or two explaining why each album is so good, but for that you might as well consult myThe Best Jazz Albums of 2024, which doesn’t stop at 10 because I’m one of those lists run on and on — the A/A- part exceeding 100 for the first time ever, and for context I mention every other jazz album I listened to last year. I could try to explain the thought that went into this assembling particular list. I’ll do a bit of the latter, but going deep would take way too long:
- The Lowe and Victor albums were the only ones I gave my maximum A grade to — I reserve that grade for records I not only love but have played a lot, but I rarely put enough time into new records these days — so those two had to lead my list. Everything else I graded A-, which I try to rank, but often it’s just whim. The rest of the list was arranged from records that somewhat accidentally got inserted higher up the list.
- One thing all ten records have in common is strong saxophone. Among the non-sax leaders, Victor has Michaël Attias, Stewart has Brian Settles, Douglas has James Brandon Lewis, and Ahmed has Seymour Wright. Some years the number may drop as low as eight, but that’s what I like best. I end every day with a treasured saxophone record. Usually Coleman Hawkins.
- I have CDs of my top nine records. That wasn’t a deliberate choice, but my stereo system sounds a bit better than my computer, and I have a bit more flexibility in playing it. CDs are more likely to get an extra play, which only helps if the records are good enough.
- The exception was the Ahmed box, which I’ve only streamed, and probably haven’t played enough to justify such a high vote. I rarely place a strategic vote, but when I filed my vote this year — about midway in the voting period, when I had 20-25% of votes counted — Giant Beautyonly had 2 votes. It had come in a very surprising 10th place in the mid-year poll, and I didn’t want to see it drop way off. Besides, I was very impressed, and had little doubt that if I had the CDs and time it would rise into that vote range.
- My top three albums finished 20, 23, and 22, and three more albums from my ballot finished 8, 10, and 16. I doubt my ballot has ever correlated that closely with the totals. There is a statistic called centricity, which measures such things. It would be interesting to run it on our data. When they did at Pazz & Jop, I was usually in the next to lowest decile, meaning I occasionally liked a fairly popular record, but no more than a couple. Six 8-23 albums would have put me near the median. I can imagine several hypotheses for this, including that I’m skewing the electorate. But even if so, I’m not doing it by much. Four or five of those six got pretty good PR support — Lowe had in-house label support, shared by Matthew Shipp, who came in 7th; I don’t know what Ahmed had, butThe Wire(pretty much alone) pickedGiant Beautyas its album of the year, so maybe it had some laser focus. Three of the others are from small labels that have singled me out. That leaves Douglas, who had some PR but only came in 49 (while Lewis’s own records finished 15 and 21; Ahmed bumpedTransfigurationoff my list, which I felt less bad about because I still had Douglas on my list).
For Rara Avis, I led off with two sets I had CDs of (Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy, and Sonny Rollins), then skipped to three streamed albums I just wanted to make sure got some mention (NRG Ensemble, Phil Haynes,WEBO). I had a lot more like that I could have chosen from. I didn’t get to it in time, but Michael Griener & Jan Roder,Be My Guest(Trouble in the East) would have been a worthy choice. I also skipped over some major label items I only streamed but thought were very good — Alice Coltrane’sThe Carnegie Hall Concert, Louis Armstrong’sLouis in London, and Wayne Shorter’sCelebration— and more good ones that I got CDs for, includingMiles in France. More on these in my afore-linked “Best Jazz” file.
Aside from Victor, I had little trouble bagging my limit in the categories just by scanning down my A-list:
- Vocal: Queen Esther, Catherine Russell, and Betty Bryant, after moving Julia Vari to Latin.
- Latin: Julia Vari, Dafnis Prieto, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, skipping over higher-rated (but less Latin Jazzish?) records by Miguel Zenón and Patricia Brennan.
- Debut: Ivanna Cuesta, Alfredo Colón, and Mathias Højgaard Jensen.
As I’ve said already, the statistic that I feel most exemplifies the poll is the total number of albums that received top-ten list votes: 613. Even at this point, after poring over these ballots since mid-November, I still haven’t heard nearly a third (190).
Saxophonist Roby Glod. Photo: Bandcamp
On the other hand, I want to leave you with a list of albums that I have heard, and thought highly enough to grade A-, but which didn’t get a single vote (even in a category, although * is a record that got a vote in the mid-year poll, but not in this one):
- Roby Glod-Christian Ramond-Klaus Kugel,No ToXiC(Nemu) *
- Ivo Perelman:Water Music(RogueArt) *
- Advancing on a Wild Pitch:Disasters Vol. 2(Hot Cup) *
- Dave Rempis-Pandelis Karayorgis-Jakob Heinemann-Bill Harris,Truss(Aerophonic/Drift) *
- Live in Holland: Houston Person Meets Peter Beets Trio(Maxanter)
- Four + Six(Jazz Hang)
- Claudio Scolari Project,Intermission(Principal)
- Ivo Perelman-Barry Guy-Ramon Lopez,Interaction(Ibeji Music) *
- Roberto Ottaviano-Danilo Gallo-Fernando Faroò,Lacy in the Sky With Diamonds(Clean Feed)
- Martina Verhoeven Quintet,Indicator Light (Live at Paradox 2023)(A New Wave of Jazz Axis)
- Radam Schwartz,Saxophone Quartet Music(Arabesque)
- اسم ISM [Pat Thomas-Joel Grip-Antonin Gerbal],Maua(577) *
- Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp,Magical Incantation(Soul City Sounds) *
- Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet,Saarbrücken(Clean Feed)
- Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band,Live at the Texas Theatre(Astral Spirits)
- Samo Salamon-Vasil Hadzimanov-Ra-Kalam Bob Moses,Dances of Freedom(Samo)
- Owen Broder,Hodges: Front and Center, Vol. Two(Outside In Music)
- Beholder Quartet,Suspension of Disbelief(Sachimay) *
- Camila Nebbia & Angelica Sanchez,In Another Land, Another Dream(Relative Pitch)
- Maria Faust Jazz Catastrophe,3rd Mutation: Moth(Bush Flash)
- Gilbert Holmström,Peak(Moserobie)
- Eva Novoa-Daniel Carter-Francisco Mela Trio, Vol. 1(577)
- Steve Hirsh-Steve Swell-Jim Clouse-William Parker,Out on a Limb(Soul City Sounds)
- William Parker-Hugo Costa-Philipp Ernsting,Pulsar(NoBusiness)
- Ernesto Rodrigues-Bruno Parinha-João Madeira,Into the Wood(Creative Sources)
- Sound the Alarm: A Large Ensemble Instigation for Palestine(Relative Pitch)
- I Am Three,In Other Words(Leo)
Same thing for Rara Avis:
- Mars Williams & Hamid Drake,I Know You Are but What Am I(1996, Corbett vs. Dempsey) *
- Mal Waldron & Terumasa Hino,Reminiscent Suite(1973, BBE)
- Grupo Irakere(1976, Mr Bongo)
- Austin Peralta,Endless Planets [Deluxe Edition](2011, Brainfeeder)
- Atrás del Cosmos,Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams(1980, Blank Forms Editions) *
- Iancu Duitrescu,Ansamblul Hyperion(1980, Corbett vs. Dempsey)
- Roberto Magris,Live Is Passing Thru: Solo/Duo/Trio/Quartet(2005, JMood)
Those lists come to about a quarter of the A-lists lists I drew them from (27 of 108 New Albums, 7 of 29 Rara Avis). The lesson I draw from these exercises is that there is a lot of extraordinary jazz out there that few of us are noticing, myself included.
I’d like to end this with thanks tothose who voted, and also to the many more who contribute in their own way. But especially right now, to those who not only voted but volunteered to help out, and proved invaluable at many critical junctures: John Chacona, Lee Rice Epstein, Andrey Henkin, Rob Hoff, Brad Luen, Paul Medrano, Greg Morton, and Rob Shepherd. Also, of course, to Francis Davis, for trusting me with his baby. And to the publicists who generously shared their understanding of who’s who, what they do, and how to get in touch with them. It’s if not impossible at least treacherous to predict the future, but thus far at least, the poll continues because there is a community that wants it to.
Tom Hull studied sociology and worked in engineering, but also wrote rock criticism in the 1970s, and the Village Voice’s Jazz Consumer Guide from 2005 to 2011. He continues to blog, and has over 20,000 short reviews on his website