My 40 Favorite Albums of 2024, part 3

The third installment of the list, randomly ordered

Here’s the final fifteen of my favorite new albums from 2024. Tomorrow I will share some archival picks and honorable mentions. You can find part one here and part two here.

Wendy Eisenberg (photo: Odelia Toder)

Wendy Eisenberg, Viewfinder (American Dreams)

Last year I wrote about the multifarious music of guitarist and composer Wendy Eisenberg, noting how their work routinely took different forms. It’s a quality I admire deeply and one I think reflects the core of an artist, even if most of them avoid expressing their full diapason for whatever reason—confusing the marketplace, diluting creative purity. I don’t know. Eisenberg is the opposite, so much so that just when I felt as if I had my head wrapped around their music along comes Viewfinder to shatter any such assumptions. Jazz has been a big part of Eisenberg’s work, but it’s usually come in more intimate settings, such as Accept When (Astral Spirits), their wonderful duo album with saxophonist Caroline Davis, which braids rigorous improvisation with fleeting glimpses of pop songcraft, or the hard-hitting fury of The Machinic Unconscious (Tzadik), an early trio session with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. Viewfinder is a kind of suite inspired by and documenting Lasik surgery Eisenberg underwent which literally opened up the visual world for them. There are some lovely songs documenting the experience with characteristic wit, openness, and imagination, but most of the album is a kind post-bop recording with an agile band—trumpeter Christopher Williams, trombonist Zekereyya el-Magharbel, drummer Booker Stardrum, bassist Tryone Allen (Carmen Q. Rothwell deftly subs on the extended “After Image”), and keyboardist Andrew Links. Well, it’s sorta post-bop. The music moves easily between different stylistic modes in which the leader’s guitar playing alternates between conductor, soloist, and anchor, injecting a quality that evades any clear stylistic definition—par for the course with Eisenberg. So while it’s the most straight-ahead jazz record Eisenberg has made, every piece pushes against convention. I’m back to trying to wrap my brain around this stuff, again—an endlessly fortifying pursuit. You can hear the opening track below, but Viewfinder needs to be heard as a whole.

Abdou-Gouband-Warelis, Hammer, Roll and Leaf (Relative Pitch)

I first heard the French saxophonist Sakina Abdou through a superb, highly original 2022 solo album called Goodbye Ground, and in the time since I’ve gotten to hear her excellent playing a couple of times in Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra. She’s a wonderfully agile musician who’s abstraction comes in an almost gauzy bebop veneer that feels much closer to Lee Konitz than Evan Parker. She’s joined by two equally distinctive figures on this sublime follow-up—Berlin-based Polish pianist Marta Warelis, who deploys heady preparations, and French percussionist Toma Gouband, who uses stones and tree branches more than sticks and brushes on his drum. With remarkable ease each bespoke approach fitts together with almost preternatural elegance. The musicians often function as sonic alchemists, forging a collective sound that conjures imaginary instruments, as on the opening piece “Roll,” where the blend of repetitive figures on saxophone and piano evoke the sound of an accordion. The players triangulate brilliantly, shifting tone and attack from piece to piece to open up fresh sonic vistas every time. There’s incredible interactive precision at work, a quality that owes as much to heightened listening skills as to instrumental virtuosity.

Leo Chadburn, The Primordial Pieces (Library of Nothing)

When a composer looks through their drawers to sort through old pieces it could indicate a paucity of new ideas, but sometimes those old or unfinished works contain potent seeds. British composer Leo Chadburn, who seems to be overflowing with ideas, waded through 25 years of old sketches to locate the core ideas for the five magnificent works on this new album, suggesting that time and experience can provide the missing ingredients for something that failed to coalesce in the past. Between three solo piano works and a pair of string quartets not a ton happens, but within those constricted designs I’ve been constantly transported, whether its floating within the rolling arpeggios—a gradually descending cadence that suggests an endlessly repeating introductory phrase—and haloed overtones in “The Reflecting Pool,” or the shimmering strings of “Map of the World” where a fragile chord is periodically riven by the accelerated motion of a single violin while the others articulate an ethereal din. If only more music where nothing really happens could be so engrossing, beautiful, and restorative.

Borderlands Trio, Rewilder (Intakt)

Working ensembles built around free improvisation continue to increasingly attract my attention, and Borderlands Trio remains nonpareil in that regard. While some groups build pieces around a kind of structural modus operandi—whether the Necks or Ghosted (Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin), who both released strong albums in 2024—Borderlands Trio seems to trace a new path every single time. But the connections they’ve forged are palpable, giving the performances a communal sensibility that can only be built over time. The “non-idiomatic” strain of free improv has felt exhausted—with certain exceptions, of course—for years. Few musicians could endure the kind of limitations Derek Bailey applied to his own playing, but I’m just as happy to hear a group fall into spontaneous grooves, draw from a particular style, or embrace traditional hierarchies as I am to hear one committed to eschewing all of them. It’s what you do with that shit. Bassist Stephan Crump, drummer Eric McPherson, and pianist Kris Davis are all ridiculous instrumentalists, but the ineffable bond that pulses through them as Borderlands Trio remains singular. I had the honor of writing liner notes for the group’s brilliant 2021 album Wandersphere, and either because the trio sound suddenly congealed on that recording or because I was completely spellbound by the extended duration of most of the pieces it remains an untouchable album for me. In its own fashion Rewilder is just as powerful, pursuing different paths. In general it feels a bit more active and less meditative, but the interplay and heightened perceptions are just as astonishing as on its predecessor.

J. Pavone Ensemble, Reverse Bloom (Astral Spirits)

Jessica Pavone had steadily evolved her practice into three distinct strands, all of them consistently blossoming or changing. She continues to be a gripping solo performer, finessing a harmonically lush, stripped down sound, but recently she’s been changing things up with the use of electronics. And a couple of years ago she composed for a larger ensemble with improvising soloist Katherine Young with Clamor. But for me nothing has proven more effective and rewarding than the J. Pavone String Ensemble with Aimée Niemann and Abby Swidler. There’s a tonal connection between the players—a keen ability to tune into one another, adjusting micro pitches rapidly and on the fly—that has grown and deepened since the current line-up solidified in 2021. That bond not only elevates their performances, but it seems to have brought renewed inspiration to Pavone as a composer, with minimalist gems shaded by early music elegance. The four works on Reverse Bloom are extravagant in their tonal viscosity, a striated slithering that’s as seductive as it is sorrowful.

Patricia Brennan (photo: Frank Heath)

Patricia Brennan, Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic)

In recent years there’s been no doubt that Patricia Brennan is a major new voice on the vibraphone, both through her work in projects led by Mary Halvorson, Tomas Fujiwara, and Sylvie Courvoisier and through her own recordings. She’s complemented her virtuosity through an effects array seemingly influenced by Halvorson, but Breaking Stretch captures a sudden escalation of her talents as a composer and arranger. The core rhythm section—bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and percussionist Mauricio Herrera—played behind her on the 2022 album More Touch, but here, vividly enhanced by the horns of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Mark Shim, her music has added exciting new timbres, extended rhythmic ideas, and multi-partite themes that bring a density, heft, and energy I hadn’t previously experienced in her work. This killer band deserves plenty of credit, as they deftly navigate thorny polyrhythmic marvels and hall-of-mirror harmonic refractions, but Brennan’s grip on these nine new compositions is so authoritative and ineffable I almost can’t believe it’s the same person. I don’t know if another 2024 album stood out so boldly.

Pat Thomas, The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir (Otoroku)

2024 may have been the year of [Ahmed], the fiercely bruising and original quartet that snuck high octane improvisation into the ears of los of people who never cross paths with jazz, but outside of the quartet context Pat Thomas had an equally amazing stretch, releasing a slew of electronic recordings on Scatter Archive and 577 to say nothing of his second album with Dominic Lash and Tony Orrell as Bleyschool. But this bracing solo piano album captures his essence as a keyboardist like nothing else, a collection of original meditations that connect barrelhouse heavy Albert Ammons and stride great Wiillie “the Lion” Smith with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and Horace Silver through a modernist lens of Ligeti or Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. But Thomas doesn’t create some pomo hodge-podge of influences. Instead he’s forged a granite-hard amalgam that’s turned 20^th century piano playing inside out. Thomas can deal with harmony, but rhythm is his business, and his inexorable sense of propulsion and movement is shot through a wonderfully jagged, abraded sense of timbre.

Adam O’Farrill, Hueso (Food)

I’ve been a huge admirer of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill since I first heard him as a sideman on Rudresh Mahanthappa’s excellent Bird Calls (ACT). The following year he dropped the debut album from his quartet Stranger Days, and it’s been amazing to witness his ascent as an in-demand sideman in killer bands led by Mary Halvorson, Anna Webber, and Patricia Brennan, but the most gratifying growth has occurred within his own outfit. With the exception of saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, the group hasn’t changed its line-up in nearly a decade of existence, with the trumpeter’s brother Zack O’Farrill on drums and Walter Stinson on bass. But within the group O’Farrill has become a composer of exquisite taste, elegant proportion, and insistent but subtle experimentation. Within an elastic post-bop framework his strengths as an arranger have become clear. As I wrote last year, “There’s a touch of cool jazz in the way the frontline is in constant dialogue. Sometimes the pair improvise simultaneously, forging stunning strands of contrapuntal melody, but the real attraction is how they navigate the written material. There’s a lot of hocketing throughout the album, as the horns divvy up the melodies in infectiously terse, fast-paced sonic daubs that might seem abstract in isolation, but which provide serious thrills in tandem.” Beyond the horn interactions there are also judiciously deployed electronics, smearing and stretching sound rather than glossing it. The band is firing on all cylinders even when it’s inhabiting a measured chill.

Michelle Lou, Near Distant (Kairos)

This triple CD is a pretty daunting introduction to the music of Michelle Lou, considering its scope and the heft of its contents, but much of it is remarkable, particularly the more recent compositions. Lou’s more experimental electronic work has gained more of a foothold online than her more composed output, but this overview, which spans 2014-2021, corrals most of her written efforts from that period in a single palce. The title piece is the most recent, from 2021, and it’s tackled with crackling energy and sonic precision by Ensemble Inverspace. Lou frequently conjures an oddly alluring collision of machine-like grind, and stark orchestrations which limn industrial wreckage in shifting ways, whether as erratic interventions or, as they do here, raising a gauzy curtain against the jagged din. There’s not much ameliorating the electro-acoustic sizzles, swells, and spasms Line Upon Line Percussion grapple with in “molt” or the lowercase hums, friction, and tightrope delicacy of “opal,” a 2018 piece played by Scapegoat. Some of the older pieces are no less absorbing, but there is a clear elevation evidenced by the most recent works. Lou has rapidly gained a much stronger hold on these materials and how to arrange them. Coupled with her 2024 work “teeth,” which I heard last March at MaerzMusik played by Ensemble Kollektiv Berlin, Lou has forged a sound that truly deals with noise and electronics, fully integrated within larger instrumental forms. Too often such tactics seem like readymades tossed into the orchestra like a hand grenade, but Lou demonstrates an uncanny ability to interweave those disparate materials so rigorously they become something else entirely.

Ernst Karel/Bhob Rainey, 47 Gates (Erstwhile)

Two very different types of equally rigorous and inventive sound explorers spent nine years forging this rich hybrid of musique concrete, electronics, static-stained samples, and austere chamber music. A kaleidoscopic assortment of source materials were sculpted, re-shaped, and poured into a single chord occupied by a 96-tone octave, but that harmonic wonder is subservient to the dynamic, deeply cinematic composition, where divergent elements and timescales are deployed in mind-boggling arrangements. There’s an increasing amount of work being produced today that engages vaguely similar notions, but the sophisticated palettes and formal boldness of Ernst Karel and Bhob Rainey provides an object lesson on what electro-acoustic music can be in 2024.

Signe Emmeluth, Banshee (Motvind)

Alto saxophonist and composer Signe Emmeluth was a wrecking ball in 2024, opening the new year with Nonsense (Moserobie), the best recording yet from her long-running Amoeba, and then turning around with the mind-melting Banshee months later. She’s been tearing it up wherever I see her, and her vision is growing in close step. This commissioned piece is a case in point, a conceptually audacious suite played by a knockout cast—drummer Jennifer Torrence, bassist Guro Skumsnes Moe, keyboardist Guoste Tamulynaite, tubaist Heiða Karine Jóhannesdóttir, trumpeter Anne “Efternøler” Andersson, and vocalist-noise artist Maja S.K. Ratkje—that offers one of the more rigorous and exciting long-form works to fully grapple with and understand improvised and composed material. As I wrote of the work last year, “she channeled the titular Irish myth, embracing the archetype to express questions about this life and what we want from it. It’s hard not to see how the idea of a screaming, wailing woman who’s voice heralds the death of a family member can be broadly applied; to the fucked world we inhabit or to the ongoing sexism that continues to be a hurdle for female musicians—the ensemble is all female, which might’ve been consciously political choice, but Emmeluth doesn’t draw any attention to that fact.”

Léo Dupleix (photo: Margot Becka)

Léo Dupleix, Resonant Trees (Black Truffle)

French composer and keyboardist Léo Dupleix carved out his own world on this remarkable album, eliding any divide between baroque and minimalist impulses. Both of the album’s two works are grounded by his cycling justly intoned harpsichord patterns, which seem to unspool in colorbursts of rich harmony—suggesting a fusion of Arnold Dreyblatt and C.C. Hennix if they were dabbled in early music. Around those figures are pastel daubs of sound articulated on viola, bass clarinet, acoustic guitar, and (one the first piece) traverso flutes, patient clusters that seem to emanate directly from the harpsichord overtones. Various voices step up, offering counterpoint to the action for extended stretches, which not only give the music a sort of motivic flow, but which also cast the harmony in regularly evolving, new light. Chamber music for a new consciousness.

Space, Embrace the Space (Relative Pitch)

It’s always exciting to witness the accelerated growth of a new ensemble, tracing the development of a creative kernel into a fully formed organism. The Swedish trio Space has exploded since dropping its fully improvised debut in 2022. Granted, pianist Lisa Ullén, double bassist Elsa Bergman, and drummer Anna Lund had already logged plenty of hours working together as the backbone of Anna Högberg Attack! when they first recorded together, but as someone lucky enough to have caught the group multiple times since then, there’s no missing how they gelled. Bergman and Lund have an easy rapport that has injected highly elastic grooves into the equation, with rhythms that expand and contract, wobble, and teeter without ever interrupting an innate pulse. Their rhythms are infectious in their unpredictability, which makes them a simpatico match for Ullén’s shape-shifting improvisations, which generally offer contrasting abstraction to the concrete propulsion. The music is weirdly funky at times, always slithering and sliding with a seriously organic sense of time. And every performance has seen them get better and deeper. I’d be remiss not to mention the remarkably powerful and touchingly personal solo album Heirloom (fönstret) that Ullén also released in 2024.

Twin Talk, Twin Talk Live (Shifting Paradigm)

Regular readers of this newsletter might know that Chicago is near and dear to my heart, as I spent 35 years living in the city. It possesses one of the most vibrant, diverse musical communities anywhere. Most people think of the AACM or more contemporary free jazz figures like Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, Dave Rempis, Tomeka Reid, or Mike Reed, but there’s a lot more going on than what typically comes across the transom. The members of Twin Talk come out of a more straight-ahead bag, but over the years saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, bassist-singer Katie Ernst, and drummer Andrew Green have absorbed outside influences and it’s opened up their music, which reached a new apex on Twin Talk Live. It’s consistently tuneful and chill, but dig beneath that cool veneer and there’s a lot going on. I wrote about the record last fall: “The real pleasure is listening to how the group’s almost telepathic rapport and years of experience together allow it to inhabit the material with such preternatural authority. Each member of the trio stretches and smears the arrangements in fascinating ways, and it’s those fine-tuned gestures that make Twin Talk such a good band, the kind of a group that’s going to perpetually be refashioning its material without dispensing with its essence.” My ardor for the trio has only grown since then, with my appreciation rooted in the most subtle of its internal machinations rather than hollow virtuosity. To be sure, these folks are excellent players who can dazzle with their chops, but they’ve found a much higher calling in working together to construct music of boundless nuance, soul, and beauty.