Musicians both established and up-and-coming stretched themselves in fresh ways over the last year, creating poignant moments of collaboration and challenge. By Hank Shteamer In 2024, jazz continued ...

Even if you aren’t actively seeking out jazz, it’s inescapable. It directly informs so much hip hop and electronic music, and we frequently hear it popping up in punk, metal, and indie rock too. It ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... After much consternation, I’ve managed to pare down a long list of fine jazz-improv recordings from 2025 to a top 10. So, apologies to Marshall Allen, The ...

Rising young talents and revered veterans helped take jazz to a multitude of exciting new destinations in 2025. But the most notable debut album of the year, the aptly titled “New Dawn,” came from a ...

Back in the late sixties, when rock musicians started to explore more complex things, the music became at the same time more interesting and, well, complicated at the same time. It was the advent of ...

Assessing the best jazz albums of any current year could be a tricky affair. The tricky part lies in the term current, as during any given year there is a slew of reissued jazz albums that can ...

If you think about it a certain way, one of the defining qualities of jazz is earnestness. This is one of the reasons why jazz and metal have so much in common, and so often appeal to the same ...

It’s been a good year for jazz, diverse in every way—styles, influences, tastes, and demographics too. I didn’t aim the list to turn out this way, but four of the albums’ leaders are women, and five ...