The Beautiful Now – The Best of Jazz Spectrum 2024

The Beautiful Now – The Best of 2024

By Fritz Byers

I just finished James Kaplan’s recent book, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Lost Empire of Cool.  The book traverses ground that we’re deeply familiar with – not merely from listening to those three artists, before during and after their coalescence on Kind of Blue, but also from Ashley Kahn’s book on the making of Kind of Blue, the published and word-of-mouth biographies of each of the three musicians that abound, and the atmospherics around them, including countless disciples, imitators, and critics.

But in reading the book I was repeatedly struck by the new anecdotal nuggets, the fresh perspectives on the origins and evolution of each artist, and their journeys from Kind of Blue toward their separate saddening demises.  You’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll learn stuff that matters.

Among the many things that stuck with me from the book is this quote from Bill Evans, ruing “this preoccupation with ‘who’s the most modern’ instead of who’s making the most beautiful, human music.’  {The most beautiful} may very well be the most modern thing as well, but to make just avant-garde the criteria has gotten to be almost a sickness, especially in jazz.”

As I sorted and re-sorted the selections for this year’s Best of list, I routinely took a dose of this point, using it as a corrective to the hard-to-dodge impulse to lavish attention on the new, the innovative, the challenging, the rebellious.  Who among us isn’t swayed, at least in part and at least occasionally, by those modernist imperatives and the sensibilities they suggest?  Not for nothing did Peter Gay title his book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.

Ezra Pound meant it when he said “Make It New.”  (One can wonder, given Pound’s attachment to ancient literature, whether the “it” he’s referring to is “the Old.”).  But if, like me, you’ve struggled to find the poetry in Ezra’s poetry, you might wish, as I do, that he’d added “and Make It Sound Pretty.”  In this regard, the inveterate modernist Charlie Parker got it very nearly exactly right when he said music is “playing clean and looking for the pretty notes.”

As I made the final selections from this year’s cascade of new releases, I listened several times to all of the contenders.  I was listening for both the new and for the pretty notes.  Here are the 24 releases I came up with.  

We’ll listen to 12 of them on Jazz Spectrum Friday and the other twelve on JS Saturday.

(* denotes a special favorite)

Melissa Aldana - Echoes of the Inner Prophet
*Ben Allison - Tell the Birds I Said Hello
Kenny Barron - Beyond this Place
*Patricia Brennan - Breaking Stretch
Kris Davis - Run the Gauntlet
Mike Holober - This Rock We're On: Imaginary Letters
Vijay Iyer - Compassion
*Jihye Lee Orchestra - Infinite Connections
*Charles Lloyd  - The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
*James Brandon Lewis - Transfiguration
*Ron Miles - Old Main Chapel
David Murray - Francesca
Charles McPherson - Reverence
Jeff Parker - ETA IVtet
*Chris Potter - Eagle's Point
Joel Ross - nublues
Marta Sanchez - Perpetual Void
Wayne Shorter - Celebration Vol. 1
*Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers - Centrals Park's Mosaics of Reservoirs, Like, Paths and Gardens
*Walter Smith III - three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not
Tyshawn Sorey - The Susceptible Now
*Luke Stewart Silt Trio - Unknown Rivers
Micah Thomas - Mountains
Rebecca Trescher Tentet - Character Pieces