My 40 Favorite Albums of 2024, part 1
The year-end rundown, randomly ordered
Frequency Festival 2025
Happy new year, folks. As usual, there isn’t too much in the world to be happy about, but we must carry on and try to create joy and beauty where can, and, I assume, for most readers, music is an important place for that to happen. Personally, music has been a steady balm, a renewable source of inspiration, and a mode of transcendence for me, and I expect it will play an even greater role on that front in 2025.
Today’s post is the first of the new year, and I want to thank all of my subscribers, especially those who’ve generously supported Nowhere Street with a paid subscription. It means a great deal to get such recognition. I do want to point out another related endeavor I’ve been pursuing since 2016, when I launched Frequency Festival in Chicago. This past Friday I announced the lineup for the 2025 edition, which runs between February 18-23, mostly at Constellation, but with a couple of events in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago, including the Chicago debuts of the extraordinary Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and the singular UK turntablist Mariam Rezaei, who will be performing with keyboardist Pat Thomas. As hard as it is to believe, their duo performance will mark Pat’s long overdue US debut, an event I couldn’t be more proud of. There are lots of other special performances, including many premieres: John McCowen’s Mundanas project with the incredible Madison Greenstone; the world premiere of a new work by Chicago composer Noah Jenkins performed by Varo String Quartet and ~Nois; Beyond This Point playing world premieres by David Bird and Julie Zhu; a solo recital by the wildly versatile pianist Mabel Kwan; a new work Joshua Abrams has written for Natural Information Society Community Ensemble with Ari Brown; the Chicago debut of the incredible Hardanger d’amour improviser Zosha Warpeha; Mivos Quartet playing commissioned works from Ambrose Akinmusire and Ingrid Laubrock, and a world premiere by Wet Ink mainstay Alex Mincek; Wet Ink percussionist Ian Antonio playing solo works by Jürg Frey; and Chicago vets Ensemble Dal Niente with a program including world premiers by Hilda Paredes and Aida Shirazi. You can find the full lineup here.
If you are around Chicago between February 18-23 I hope you can come out to some of the concerts, but if geography is trickier than financial support I hope you’ll consider chipping into the fundraiser I’ve organized to defray the mounting costs of making a festival.
List Season
Most music journalists are enlisted to create year-end lists for publications they write for, and those solicitations begin in the fall. I’m still trying to wend my way through as many recordings as possible at that time, so I’ve been hammering out my own lists until the new year. As always, the effort is a fool’s errand, a highly random one at that. As with last year, this year’s list of my 40 favorite albums is assembled randomly. There is no best. Today’s post includes the first ten selections, and I’ll add another 15 for each of the next two days, followed by some archival picks and honorable mentions. My hope is that these lists introduce readers to music they may have missed, which is why I enjoy reading the lists of others.
[Ahmed], Giant Beauty (fönstret)
Since forming in 2016 this remarkable European quartet has engaged in an eight-year (and counting) ascent that seems haltless. British pianist Pat Thomas and alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, Berlin-based Swedish bassist Joel Grip, and French drummer Antonin Gerbal launched the band to celebrate the legacy of bassist/oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who played with the likes of Thelonious Monk, Johnny Griffin, and Randy Weston, while also developing an early vision of Arabic jazz, but over the years that potent raison d’etre has been steadily supplanted by an internal power and rapport that’s eclipsed any theoretical underpinning. The group still essays Abdul-Malik music, although in the last year it’s begun to enfold the handful of Monk tunes that the bassist recorded with the pianist. This unreal 5-CD set was recorded at the 2022 iteration of John Chantler’s sadly defunct Edition Festival for Other Music, where the band tackled a different Abdul-Malik theme on each of five consecutive evenings. It captures a group achieving an exponential explosion, a perfect storm of conceptual brio, technical rigor, superhuman energy, and internal interplay. [Ahmed] also released Wood Blues (Astral Spirits), a different, equally searing take on the bassist’s “Oud Blues,” but Giant Beauty’s ambition and heft brings new meaning to the term “proof of concept.”
Olivia Block, The Mountain Pass (Black Truffle)
A large part of my admiration for Olivia Block stems from her steady reinvention over the years. While she has rarely abandoned specific ideas or techniques from her expanding oeuvre in a wholesale manner, she has also refused to get too comfortable or predictable with any of them. Her curiosity leads her down new paths regularly, sometimes blazing an entirely new direction, sometimes clearing overgrowth from an old trail that brings an utterly fresh perspective. The Mountain Pass felt as radical and as swift as any pivot in her fruitful career, moving in and out of song-like fragments, which included the unexpected presence of her elegant voice. That tender lyricism is countered by furious salvos unleashed by drummer Jon Mueller and almost martial trumpet from Thomas Madeja. As I wrote earlier this year, the suite “reflects upon the man-made degradation and damage of our natural world, particularly the impact upon wildlife in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, where Block spent time at a horse sanctuary.”
Tyshawn Sorey, The Susceptible Now (Pi)
On the latest transmission from his trio—with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Harish Raghavan—drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey retains the deep digging with the conventional trappings of the format unleashed on his remarkable album Continuing, from 2023. The collection features four extended readings of tunes by Brad Mehldau, Joni Mitchell, McCoy Tyner, and Vividry, an R&B artist I know nothing about. There’s a clear ardor for the material on display, which means the listener also has to dig a bit to fully appreciate the subtle, highly musical injections each participant makes inside of the forms. Naturally, piano is the most prominent voice, and Diehl’s technical clarity only heightens the power of his imagination, as if we were getting to observe his creative process in slow motion. Although this album isn’t as funereal, pace-wise, as Continuing, it still takes its time. But look under the hood and you get just as much elaboration, quicksilver interaction, and redirection as the keyboard delivers. It almost feels like Sorey is daring you to really listen, as I could easily imagine someone using this as background music. Because one you can change your own personal tempo and gather some patience, this thing opens the fuck up.
ØKSE, ØKSE (Backwoodzstudioz)
Swedish bassist Petter Eldh’s sure-handed grip on expansive J Dilla-style boom bap, free jazz, and deep groove is well established, but with ØKSE he joined a quartet that balances these components with a sui generis effectiveness that ought to silence most fakers. Drummer Savannah Harris exercises restraint and purpose with the sort of post-gospel jazz complexity that in other hands often decimates everything around it. Her sense of economy and oomph stands alone. Val Jeanty scratches vinyl and scrapes atmospheres with lean precision, while Eldh’s mix of snapping bass lines and MPC beat science all deliver a simpatico platform for Mette Rasmussen’s slashing alto—which seems to become more agile, versatile, and confident with every performance—and the nimble rhymes from a number of fierce MCs, including ELUCID and billy woods of Armand Hammer.
Sarah Hennies, Motor Tapes (New World)
In 2024 Sarah Hennies answered a relative paucity of recorded activity in recent years with a veritable avalanche of new music, both as composer and performer (see Transits: Vol. 1, the first in an ongoing series of albums devoted to the work of Michael Ranta). All of it has been rewarding, but Hennies achieved a new apotheosis as a composer with this heavy hitter. “Zeitgebers,” the opening piece deftly blends extraordinary nature recordings into the impossible percussive schemes she’s often deployed, but the other two works unleash exciting new sides of Hennies’ practice. The cloppity, strained rhythms are now couched in far more cinematic, full-bodied contexts. She refers to “Clock Dies,” commissioned by New York’s Talea Ensemble, as a step into the breach of “normal music,” but like all three works on this double CD, it deals with incremental shifts embedded within repeating phrases. There’s an exquisite tension at work, fortified by the group’s pinpoint precision. The second disc is occupied solely by the seductively unstable title work played by France’s Ensemble Dedalus in which Didier Aschour’s electric guitar represents the sort of memories that play out across our lives in shifting contexts, like a circling tape loop where context dictates meaning.
Rhodri Davies, Telyn Wrachïod (Amgen)
After pushing an amplified improvised harp practice to the precipice, Rhodri Davies has found a retrenchment worthy of his previous efforts. Inspired by early iterations of his instrument he learned of in a medieval manuscript written by Robert ap Huw, he has turned to primitive models of his instrument. He’s even commissioned their construction, such as the long vanished telyn rawn, or horsehair harp, he used on his 2020 album of the same name. This album’s title is taken after the Welsh name for the bray harp, a device fitted with wooden pegs named brays which bring admixtures of buzz, sitar-like twang, and enhanced volume. Further complicating his process with different tunings, Davies has crafted an exquisite collection of works that bring an experimental ethos to knotty folk-like themes spiked with rhythmic jags, rough timbres, and a feast of circular polyphony by turns hypnotic, spiritual, and triumphant.
Splinter Reeds, Dark Currents (Cantaloupe)
If I ever had the notion that the all-reed ensemble might be played out, Dark Currents would quickly disabuse me of such a misjudgement. The quintet led by Dana Jessen has long been impressive, but the two new works featured here facilitate a new highwater mark. Once again composer Michael Gordon—a co-founder of a Bang on a Can—surprises me with another of his left turns, which should no longer be surprising at this point, as “Tall Grass” vividly weaves between magnificent descending chords, with each note pulled beautifully apart, and striated long tones, creating a fluid spectrum between post-minimal pulsations and spectral drone. Paula Matthusen’s “Antenna Studies” draws upon the sort of extended reed techniques I usually expect from new music practice, but the way she arranges those various tongue slaps, unpitched breaths, and takes them on a wide-ranging journey, overlaid at times with electronics and field recordings, moving from lean abstraction to melancholy lyricism, is astonishing. It doesn’t take much time before I stop hearing specific instruments, simply hearing music. That’s high praise, friend.
The Handover, The Handover (Sublime Frequencies)
Violinist Ayman Asfour, oudist Aly Eissa, and keyboardist Jonas Cambien are true metamusicians using deep improvisational impulses to traverse geography and styles and generate something sui generis. Cambien, a Belgian living in Oslo, has worked primarily in jazz contexts, but he met his Egyptian counterparts during regular jaunts to Cairo stretching back a decade. All three musicians have already demonstrated a thoughtful cosmopolitanism, but as the Handover they’ve created something rooted in Arabic tradition while simultaneously existing beyond its fuzzy borders. The trio’s namesake composition is a two-part marvel by Eissa, the first half flirting with the chamber sophistication of classical Arabic forms before turning to a percussion-free evocation of shaabi, a euphoric street pop. I’ve seen audience members consistently succumb to that infectious rhythm, their collective imaginations fleshing out the groove. The recording features a revolving string of spirited, sensitive improvisations perpetually elevated by shape-shifting vamps, sly ad libs, and subtle accents. I had the privilege of hearing this trio four different times, each performance bringing out endless new details and nuances from the same piece.
Nick Dunston, Colla Voce (Out of Your Head)
I was well aware of Nick Dunston’s jazz bona fides before he moved to Berlin a few years ago, but I’ve been fascinated—if not deliciously perplexed, at times—by the full scope of his evolving practice since he landed here. No album I heard in 2024 was more ambitious and bold than his Colla Voce, which he has called an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera.” The music contains three elements—a string quartet, a vocal quartet, and a jazz quartet, more or less. The strings were played by JACK Quartet, arguably the most adventurous and technically fearsome quartet in the US if not the world. Dunston, however, was not cowed by their participation, and working with producer Weston Olencki, he chopped up JACK’s reading of his composition with radical insouciance, treating it as raw material. Vocalists Cansu Tanrıkulu, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Sofia Jernberg, and Friede Merz push and pull against standard techniques in spoken, sung, and onomatopoetic utterances, while a quartet featuring the leader, drummer Moritz Baumgärtner, cellist Anil Eraslan, and guitarist Tal Yahalom all triangulate, blend, and collide in jarring yet thrilling combinations to meet the demands of Dunston’s outsized imagination, which goes way beyond even the most daring hybrids.
Ingrid Schmoliner, MNEEN (Ventil)
Although I’d previously listened to recordings she played on, 2024 is the year I really heard Austrian pianist Ingrid Schmoliner. This mistake was on me. She’s been quite active for quite a few years and she regularly visits Berlin. MNEEN was actually recorded in 2019, and five years later it sounds as fresh, bracing, and tough as anything created in 2024. There are quite a few improvisers who’ve developed sophisticated prepared piano practices—Magda Mayas, Marta Warelis, Elisabeth Harnik, Hermione Johnson—but I’ve never heard anyone manage what Schmoliner does here. Deploying meticulous microphone placement and expert sound engineering, she gets deep inside the piano, capturing every overtone and harmonic collision imaginable while churning out a relentless thrum of minimalist development that’s simultaneously hypnotic and energizing. Her hands craft an unending flow of terse rhythmic patterns that constantly morph with subtle variations—in a way it reminds of the way Philip Glass’s earliest work feels kind of static until we realize that it’s altering constantly, each bar introducing a shift that ends up taking the music somewhere new. No less exciting are the elusive timbres she uses to achieve this mind-warping experience. Schmoliner creates it all herself, shaping a breathtaking sonic fabric without electronic effects or overdubbing. The album functions like a vortex, inexorably pulling you deeper and deeper into its peculiar reality.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
January 7: Daniel Erdmann, tenor saxophone, Aki Takase, piano, and Isabel Rößler, double bass, 7:30 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
January 7: Organza Ray (Hilary Jeffery, alphorn, and Eleni Poulou, synthesizer) play Philip Corner, O Tannenbaum, Hermannstraße 232, 12049 Berlin
January 8: Bastian Stein Trio with Chris Speed (Chris Speed, tenor saxophone, Bastian Stein, trumpet, Phil Donkin, double bass, Moritz Baumgärtner, drums); Gawlik/Stein Quintet (Bastian Stein, trumpet, Julius Gawlik, tenor saxophone, Evi Filippou, vibraphone, Thorbjørn Stefanssonn, double bass, Moritz Baumgärtner, drums), 9 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin
January 9: Aki Takase, piano, Fabiana Striffler, violin, and Daniel Erdmann, tenor saxophone, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
January 9: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, Antonio Borghini, double bass, and Tony Buck, drums; Grgur Savić, alto & soprano saxophone, Franzi Aller, double bass
Kazuhisa Uchihashi, electric guitar 7:30 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
January 11: Don Malfon, saxophone, Emilio Gordoa, vibraphone, and Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin