*Pictured above: Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar. Photo by Zenith Richards.
As we approach Thanksgiving, I feel compelled to share my abundant gratitude for all the great new music that’s come out this past year, and especially this past six months since I began hosting Breaking Jazz (Sundays, 6:30 to 8 p.m. PT). In keeping with year-end traditions, this gratitude will take the form of a “best of” list. But this particular list is exciting because it will be starting a new tradition. Behold! The inaugural Breaking Jazz Best Albums of the Year!
But first, in keeping with the season’s spirit of generosity, I’m going to indulge my tendency to pontificate.
I look forward to programming Breaking Jazz every single week. For several reasons. But here are the two that are most important:
One, this younger generation of jazz musicians plays their asses off. The state of the art is strong. It must be heard to be believed. And it must be enthusiastically championed to stay strong and continue growing stronger. The technique, facility, and feel are humbling, and the artists themselves are... humble. The reverence for tradition; the curiosity about history, timelines, lineages…it’s all there. They’ve had great mentors, and jazz is about nothing if not that. L’dor v’dor. Generation to generation.
But that's not all; the original ideas are there, too. So now, we’re talking about knowledge and perspective acting in concert with aptitude and chops. That's the recipe for magic. Maybe the most exciting part (at least for Breaking Jazz purposes)? They’re not hemmed in by contrived boundaries. There are no aisles in the musical marketplace of ideas they actively avoid; they’ve got access to all the ingredients, and they make use of far more of them than ever before. Simply put, they are musical omnivores with superb jazz training. Even more simply put: They make music and leave the categorizing to the record labels and publicists.
Competition was stiff and choices were agonizing. History may very well prove the “Best of Breaking Jazz Class of 2024” to be exceptional. If it doesn’t, that will mean that the music has maintained, and perhaps even built upon, a very high standard. Either way, it will always be memorable for being the first.
Which brings me to the second reason I love producing Breaking Jazz each week. My feeling has always been that jazz is for everyone with an ear and a soul for music. If your musical homebase is bebop, hard bop, or post bop, Breaking Jazz is for you. If it’s classical, rock, funk, R&B, Broadway, hip-hop, jam bands, or any fusiony combination thereof, Breaking Jazz is for you, too — maybe even especially for you. Whatever your musical inclinations, there’s an easily accessible scenic detour that leads you to jazz. The shortcuts are more numerous than ever, and I’m eager to provide you directions. That’s what Breaking Jazz is all about. So, naturally, that’s the prism through which the hundreds of albums contending for inclusion on this list are filtered and evaluated.
With that said, here are Breaking Jazz’s Top 10 Albums of 2024 (with 10 more excellent recordings earning honorable mention listed beneath). There may be many other lists like this (and still many more not at all like this one), but this list is mine. And it's Breaking Jazz.
10. Stav Goldberg: Symphony of Water (Outside in Music)
"Symphony of Water" was a landmark release for Nick Finzer’s Outside in Music label; it’s the debut release on Outside In’s EU imprint, which will showcase European artists, like Israeli-German pianist and composer Stav Goldberg, pictured here. Photo by Ella Waldman.
Maybe the warmest album of the year, Symphony of Water provides the safest (and probably cheapest) instant attitude adjustment on the market. Deeply soulful and profoundly beautiful, this is as emotionally affecting as symphonic jazz gets; it’s the closest you can get to a transcendent spiritual experience with music as the lone stimulant. The compositions here exist at the intersection of the physical and spiritual realms, and, by some inconceivable sorcery, manage to embody the impossible interconnectedness of both. This record will speak to the part of your evolutionary biology that compels you to seek out the unknowable. This pursuit used to be a much bigger part of making art. Perhaps, with help from Goldberg and those of similar sensibilities and curiosities, the pendulum is swinging back toward that being the case again.
Breaking Jazz’s favorite cuts: “Comfort Song,” “Force of the River,” “Eulogy,” “Sahaf,” “Alone”
9. Jonathan Barber and Vision Ahead: In Motion (Vision Ahead Music)
”In Motion” is the fourth studio album from drummer Jonathan Barber (center) and his longtime band Vision Ahead, one of the most cohesive quintets touring and recording in contemporary jazz. Photo by Ike Abakah.
I almost left this album off. Released in August, I hit this one hard the first few weeks it was out, and then, like worthwhile friends sometimes do, we lost touch. Something told me to revisit; somehow I sensed I’d forgotten how good it is.
Saved by the subconscious yet again!
The burners here burn deep and the slow jams smolder, charging the subatomic particles in the air around you in a way you can only perceive in the place where your gut and soul meet. Barber, the group’s leader and drummer, has been playing with all his sidemen here since college and with bassist Matt Dwonszyk since high school. What we have here is a “smoother” jazz that’s by no means “smooth jazz.” Barber’s compositions here speak softly, with a self-assured economy and authority. This is the product of total trust between musicians sharing a bandstand.
If you listen to only one track, let it be the title track, which eschews traditional jazz song structure to give you nearly five minutes of soloists precisely trading, at first, many, then, gradually, fewer and fewer measures, while (at least) three different melodic strands weave together into a tightly woven tapestry beneath them. This requires several things: superior stamina and discipline, the innate feel to toggle rapidly in and then quickly out of stretches of improvisation, an incredible sense of time, really sharp ears, and a lot of trust. It’s an epic musical product fully formed in under five minutes.
Others not to be missed include the soulful, muscly, and anthemic opener, “Radar,” the wistful but resolute second track “Giving,” “When Love Calls,” which I’d characterize as the quintessential sweaty house party slow jam, and “Can’t Call It,” which, if there’s a department store anywhere on Earth that doesn’t feel like purgatory, it’s probably because this is playing there.
8. Marshall Gilkes and the WDR Big Band: Life Songs (Alternate Side Records)
Marshall Gilkes is right at home leading Cologne, Germany’s WDR Big Band. The trombonist, composer, and arranger spent years in WDR’s trombone section, returning this time to record his third album with the celebrated ensemble.
One of the first truly great albums released in 2024. A resolute, defiant pulse permeates every track, as does a One Band, One Sound credo, which only serves to underscore the individual dynamism of the featured soloists. Galvanizing and emboldening are the two descriptors that feel most right, though clean and tight aren’t too far behind. And how about strutting? Yes, this album struts.
Contemporary yet unabashedly melodic with hip, noirish hooks, there is a propulsive, poppy coolness here that those inclined toward meandering avant-garde introspection will likely sneer at. Gilkes and company couldn’t care less. Like Copeland’s was for his time, this is virtuoso and populist music for this time.
Breaking Jazz’s favorite cuts: “Back in the Groove,” “Fresh Start,” “Cora’s Tune,” “Taconic Turns,” “Sugar Rush”
7. Charles Goold: Triptych Lespri (La Reserve Records)
A graduate of Juilliard and a favorite of Jazz at Lincoln Center, drummer Charles Goold is both on his way to do great things and already doing them.
Released in June 2024 on the La Reserve label, Triptych Lespri demonstrates that Goold, a young drummer with Juilliard and Jazz at Lincoln Center bona fides, joined here by bandmates Mark Lewandowsk (bass) and Davis Whitfield (piano), is a force, playing joyful, driving compositions that doff a cap to myriad global and regional musical influences and break new ground at the same time. The son of American jazz saxophonist Ned Goold (Harry Connick, Jr.’s band) and a Haitian American mother, this is Goold’s second album-length fusion of hard bop’s relentlessly driving swing with rhythmic seasonings native to the Haitian diaspora — and the Americas’ African diaspora, more broadly.
Goold is a powerhouse; he’s got arrows of every conceivable variety and purpose in his quiver. But, for me, Triptych Lespri is just as much a coming out party for pianist Davis Whitfield, the son of guitar great Mark Whitfield, who, in the early 90s, was considered to be a rising star himself, one of the “Young Lions” making a splash at the 1991 Newport jazz festival as part of the supergroup Jazz Futures, where bandmates included Christian McBride, Tim Warfield, Antonio Hart, Benny Green, Joey DeFrancesco and Roy Hargrove. The elder Whitfield guests here on “Luna!,” a straight-ahead showcase for Whitfield Sr.’s guitar, Lewandoswki’s bass, and guest Juan Diego Villalobos’s vibes. And the younger Whitfield sparkles on the feverish “Traffic in Cairo.” Triptych Lespri’s high-water mark, though, is the three-song suite in the album’s middle, where the bookending tunes, “Charles’s Vibe” and “Davis’s Blues,” provide the purest distillations of the multicultural aesthetic Goold’s envisioned.
6. Mike Stern: Echoes and Other Songs (Mack Avenue)
Mike Stern’s “Echoes and Other Songs” is tailor-made for “Breaking Jazz.” Gospel, blues, rock, funk, post-bop — there is something for every kind of jazz and jazz-adjacent fan to like here.
Stern, a pioneering fusionist known most broadly for his work with Miles Davis in the 1980s, is right there in that category defined by Metheny, Coryell, and Scofield (who actually replaced him in Miles’ band). And he’s still going. This latest entry to Stern’s discography is, from start to finish, eminently satisfying. Released in Sept. on Mack Ave., Stern’s band is anchored by Christian McBride, who is to that label what Michael Jordan is to Nike. This session features more than one Michael Jordan-caliber figure, though. Late pianist/keyboardist Jim Beard (Steely Dan, Metheny, Scofield, et. al.), featured in one of his last recording sessions, is here; as is drummer Antonio Sanchez (Metheny, Danilo Perez, Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra, original score for Birdman); as is Chris Potter, whose every solo is a force of nature, its own self-contained, multi-layered weather system. Just listen to him on the album’s closer, “Could Be,” a Monk-inspired contrafact of Burke and Van Heusen’s “It Could Happen to You.” Stern and Beard were such a well-matched composing/arranging team; this album, perhaps more than anything else, is the quintessential testament to the inexhaustible musicality that defined that partnership.
One of the most satisfying albums, top-to-bottom, Stern has released in some time, Echoes and Other Songs has it all. It rocks (“Echoes”); it swings its ass off (see Potter’s solo accompanied by McBride’s electric bass on “Connections”); it’s got blues hall smoke and sticky snarl (“Stuff Happens”), infectiously funky wiggle (“Space Bar”), and a contemplative, globally oriented soul (“I Hope So”). In an age where most people listen to individual songs on-demand as part of a randomly shuffled playlist, it’s nice to see that the art of coherently constructing an album from start to finish, where each track communicates something to those which come before or after, isn’t completely lost.
5. Mathis Picard Trio: The Royal Room: Live in Seattle (La Reserve Records)
Recorded live at the Seattle venue of the same name in Novemeber 2023, Mathis Picard's "The Royal Room" was released in May 2024 on La Reserve Records.
Best live album of the year, and I’m not sure it’s particularly close — not because the competition isn’t strong; this performance is just that explosive. Joined by drummer Jonathan Pinson and bassist Parker McCallister, Picard — born in France, educated in London and then at Juilliard — displays a mastery of the piano that's comprehensive. He’s capable of expressing his virtuosity in so many different musical tongues that one begins to wonder: is this what music classified as “contemporary jazz” should be capable of? If so, it will be a mighty high bar to clear.
On “A Dopo” (“until then” or “see you later” in Italian), Picard filters a melodic theme reminiscent of Fiddler on the Roof’s “Sunrise Sunset” through an Afro-Caribbean rhythmic prism, dovetailing seamlessly into an extended quotation of Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu that is simply not done justice by the term “inspired.” It’s a moment of elevated consciousness, more the stuff of gods than men. Not even 30, Picard is capable of accessing more routes to the sublime on piano than anyone else at this moment. Nearly every aspect of his musicality is addressed — not just in every album but within nearly every individual selection he plays. Imagine offspring with genetic components of Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Chopin, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. Now imagine the musical styles that most resonated with this offspring during his teenage years in London were house and dubstep. As a composer and arranger, Picard's an erudite populist. His music isn't quite made for the club or dance hall, but there's no doubting its primordial impulses are rooted in tension and release. This is music for thrill-seekers, catharsis junkies, and anyone curious about the possibilities of exorcism through music.
Breaking Jazz’s favorite cuts: “A Dopo,” “The Space Between Breath,” “Look at All Those Trees,” “Prana”
4. Michael Mayo: Fly (Mack Avenue)
Michael Mayo’s “Fly” is the most exciting release by a male jazz vocalist in several years. If we don’t use the words "brilliant talent" to describe Mayo, I’m not sure what or whom we’re saving them for. Photo by Lauren Desberg.
Released in early October, Fly, Mayo’s second on the Mack Avenue label, is not only the best, the most exciting, most dynamic release from a male jazz vocalist this year; by my estimation, it’s the best in that particular category in several years. He’s the son of two musicians — saxophonist Scott Mayo (dad) and vocalist Valerie Pinkston (mom) both guest on the album — and you can tell…in the same way you can tell with Veronica Swift. The fluency is complete, yes…but, more than that, it’s almost native. You encounter it with people who are so immersed in the music from such a young age it becomes what water is to fish.
Unsurprisingly, Mayo is musically omnivorous, transcends classification, and is clearly comfortable in working in virtually any genre, sub-genre or idiom. The album’s first single, “Bag of Bones,” has the sort of pop-Broadway feel you’d get by crossing the cerebral power-pop of Ben Folds with the smoothed-out, contemporary emo of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman). It may not be jazz per se, but it is Breaking Jazz, and it is a hit.
Fear not, there’s no scarcity of jazz takes. And they’re all brilliant. His takes on Miles Davis’s “Four” and Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” are masterclasses in jazz vocalese, and his R&B-inflected arrangement of “Just Friends” combines strutting cool with believable spirituality. His a cappella treatment of Rogers and Hart’s “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was” has to be heard to be believed. Mayo becomes a vocal band unto himself — something on the order of Boys II Men. But it may be his arrangement of Van Heusen and Burke’s “It Could Happen to You,” with its funky chord substitutions and challenging key changes that’s most impressive. It’s like a musical Picasso but not nearly as discordant as that would suggest. What it’s not is that navel-gazey, show-offy, "musicians’ musician" stuff; it’s all charmingly melodic. It’s one of the rare things destined to be both popular and worthy of being called art. This is the most exciting and talented male vocalist in jazz right now; do not miss him.
3. Vanisha Gould: She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth (Cellar Music Group)
Vanisha Gould with band. From left: Drummer JK Kim, Gould, pianist Chris McCarthy, and bassist John Sims. Photo by Diane Smithers.
Without Veronica Swift (who's been off indulging glam/goth-rock passion projects) to serve as an edgy counterweight to the unimpeachable goodness of Samara Joy — who’s excellent but sometimes cloyingly perfect — there's been a void in the female jazz vocalist universe. This album has filled that void; Gould is a most welcome shot of vinegar. What she may lack in raw vocal range, she more than makes up for with a feel and an attitude that falls squarely into a beloved tradition of female vocal vulnerability and defiance.
Gould, a Simi Valley native, is the sister of Grammy-nominated pianist Victor Gould. She's been a fixture on the NY scene for nearly a decade now since relocating from SoCal, and should be no stranger to Breaking Jazz listeners; we played a lot of music earlier in the year from Life’s a Gig, the great album of standards she released this past January with pianist Chris McCarthy. McCarthy, again, joins her here. His accompaniment, as you’d expect after hearing Life’s a Gig, is once again masterful. Combined with J.K. Kim, maybe the most sought after young drummer in jazz today, and bassist John Sims, Gould’s working with the best NYC has to offer here.
This time, however, it’s Gould’s name shining most brightly atop the marquee; it’s her first album with top billing as a leader and one consisting entirely of Vanisha’s original compositions.
Released earlier this month, a few months too late to be considered for February’s Grammy’s, this album is what sports bettors call a stone-cold mortal lock for a Grammy nom a year from now. The tracks I’m most excited about: “Cute Boy,” “New Dance,” “Donavan,” and the title track. Jazz singing is a feel; it’s an attitude. Gould’s got IT.
2. Taylor Eigsti: Plot Armor (GroundUp Music)
Alright, Taylor, we get it: We promise to refer to you as a pianist AND a composer. Photo by Eli von Stubendorff.
Nominations for this February’s Grammy Awards were announced earlier this month. One album I was not at all surprised to see recognized was Taylor Eigsti’s Plot Armor, another album that epitomizes the house aesthetic here at “Breaking Jazz.” Virtuoso playing, fluency across a variety of musical idioms. Spice from every aisle. Released in March of this year, I’ve been telling anyone who’s been willing to listen since Breaking Jazz first came on the air in mid-June that this will end up being considered one of the year’s best albums. This has, indeed, come to pass, and Eigsti’s Plot Armor has been deservedly honored with a nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.
The considerable star power of the sidemen on this session is a testament to the health of the longstanding, usually unspoken understanding between musicians. Eigsti’s spent much of his career guesting on albums led by friends like guitarists Julian Lage and Charles Altura, vocalists Lisa Fischer and Gretchen Parlato, drummer Kendrick Scott, and, most prominently, trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. All those friends — and other A-listers like saxophonists Ben Wendel and Dayna Stephens — are here, returning the favor.
Plot Armor intoxicates instantly. The opener, “Let You Bee” is triumphant, unabashedly maximalist orchestral jazz at its peacocking, chutzpah-fueled best. Altura’s soaring electric guitar is a ready-made religious experience. Throughout the recording, the musical ideas are incredibly refined, but the energy is visceral. Upstairs brain is stimulated; downstairs brain is stimulated. The animal within is satiated; the intellectual thirst is quenched…not at different moments, but at the same time, nearly all the time.
The second cut, “Bucket of F’s,” does not let up on the gas. Eigsti’s compositional brilliance will blow your mind here. Starting at about 1:15 drummer Oscar Seaton, Jr., Eigsti, flutist Rebecca Kleinman, and violist Benni Von Gutzeit engage in a machine gun-like call and response before settling into a thrilling unison backed by a string quartet arranged by Andrew Balogh. It shouldn’t be legal; it’s too much fun, too stimulating. Your neural pleasure receptors will light up like a pinball machine. And then comes the assertive earthiness of Ben Wendel’s tenor saxophone, which perfectly counters the feeling of sublime exaltation with inspiring earthbound resolve. This is your brain on Eigsti. Mood elevators and stabilizers. The evolved intellect. The animal. It’s all here. A dozen tunes. Ten originals. Zero duds. Zero plays taken off. Exceptional.
1. Riley Mulherkar: Riley (Westerlies Records)
I’m no more in the business of making kings than anyone else, but this guy’s already starting to feel like jazz royalty-in-training to me. Photo by Zenith Richards.
In March, Downbeat declared Riley, “one of the best debut records to come out in a long, long time.”
That almost nails it, except what’s all this "one of" talk?
The rhetorical hedge is unwarranted. Riley flat out IS the best jazz debut in a very long time. And it’s the most important — because it proves, once and for all, that modern jazz is not an oxymoron. Stylishly produced by contemporary tastemaker Rafiq Bhatia and musically omnivorous pianist Chris Pattishall, Riley pairs a very old musical soul with futurist instincts that bend toward the surreal and the hyper-real. There is an intoxicating, though understated, grandiosity to originals like “Chicken Coop Blues” and, especially, “Ride or Die.” The latter is tailor made for a prestige TV opening credits sequence, something manic and smoldering and intellectual, set in contemporary New York City and filmed in black and white. Ambient interludes — “Looking Up” and “Looking Out” — serve as cinematic intermezzi, momentarily steadying the listener to be unmoored all over again by whichever of the album’s half-dozen showstoppers comes next.
Of those half-dozen, it’s the three oldest tunes here that — maybe ironically, definitely most satisfyingly — possess the greatest potential staying power. Simple, sleek, deep, and humbly assertive, Riley’s takes on “King Porter Stomp,” “Stardust,” and “Honey Man” are modern masterworks. Mulherkar’s “Honey Man,” in foregrounding the darker subtext of the original from Porgy and Bess, is the most emotionally powerful treatment of that particular tune of the Gershwins’ since Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, and the Gil Evans Orchestra (featuring Kenny Garrett and Wallace Roney) teamed up to pay tribute to the late Evans at Montreaux in 1991. Very few new albums introduce a new aesthetic, let alone one that you just know will be relentlessly imitated over the next year or two. When those inevitably lesser imitations feel trite and empty, remember that Riley came first and truly did have something new to say.
The Next Ten: For those wondering about the alternate universe where the ten selections above either never existed or were never released.
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Zach Adleman: We Make: Stories for a New Day (Cellar Music)
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Walter Smith III: three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not (Blue Note)
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Vanisha Gould and Chris McCarthy: Life’s a Gig (Fresh Sound New Talent)
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Pritesh Walia: Hopetown (PSA Records)
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Julian Lage: Speak to Me (Blue Note)
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Nikara Presents Black Wall Street: The Queen of Kings County (Switch Hit Records)
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Jake Leckie: Planter of Seeds (self-released)
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Jeremy Ledbetter Trio: Gravity (CaneFire Records)
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Jun Iida: Evergreen (Origin)
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Aaron Parks: Little Big III (Blue Note)
