My 40 Favorite Albums of 2025, part 1

The year-end rundown, randomly ordered

Frequency Festival’s 10th Anniversary

On Tuesday I announced the lineup for the 10th edition of Frequency Festival, which runs from Tuesday February 24 through Sunday, March 1, 2026 in Chicago. I’m very excited about the program, which begins at Constellation with the great Oslo-based drummer Jennifer Torrence performing music by Chicago-based composers Kelley Sheehan and Kari Watson. Her set will be followed by the US premiere of Tristan Perich’s Open Symmetry, a 50-minute work for 3 vibraphones and 20-channel 1-bit electronics—performed by the all-star percussion trio of Douglas Perkins, Ian Antonio, and Xin Yi Chong. On Wednesday Rage Thormbones return to the festival after jaw-dropping performances on their own and with Kevin Drumm in 2019. Headlining the second evening is the mighty أحمد [Ahmed], making their Chicago debut. On Thursday the singular composer Olivia Block plays new work, predeced by the sublime Chicago saxophone ensemble ~Nois Quartet, giving the world premiere of the Alex Mincek work The Perpetual, Poly-Iterative, Multivalent, Transmodal, Vibe Maximizer. On Friday Chicago’s beloved Ensemble Dal Niente make their annual fest appearance with a program including the premiere of a new piece by Lei Liang along with pieces from Ayanna Woods, Chaya Czernowin, José Julio Diaz Infante, and Helmut Lachenmann. On Saturday the action moves to the University of Chicago in Hyde Park for the US debut of Norwegian guitarist Fredrik Rasten, followed by the US debut of his incredible duo with the great Scottish folksinger Alasdair Roberts, performing in the US for the first time since 2013. The fest concludes on Sunday back at Constellation with the world premiere of Zachary Good’s stunning new clarinet compostion Lake Heritage, followed by New York’s TAK Ensemble performing Weston Olencki’s when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean. For full details check out the festival website.

Although 2026 is off to a horrific start—including the brazen murder of an innocent observor at the hands of I.C.E. in Minneapolis yesterday—I’m more than ready to put 2025 beyond me. I’m putting it to rest with several posts recounting my favorite recordings of last year, as music was one of the things that got me through all of the rot that seems to be corroding much of the planet. As with my recent rundowns, the selections are all randomly ordered—20 albums today, another 20 tomorrow, with some reissues and other tidbits next week. Naturally, this exercise is not definitive, as I couldn’t possibly hear everything, and depending on the day, certain records hit differently. But I have experience great pleasure, contemplation, and expansion thanks to albums that follow.

40 Reasons to be Grateful, Part 1

Eliana Glass, E (Shelter Press)

As I wrote earlier this year, “Eliana Glass doesn’t really sing songs as much as she inhabits them, her voice functioning like sonar as it sizes up a tune almost as if it was a room.” The glacial pace of most of the performances on her stunning debut album remind me of the richly patient vibe singer Jeanne Lee and pianist Ran Blake carved out on their classic 1962 album The Newest Sound Around (RCA), but as much as Glass employs jazz methodology in her work, the music reaches beyond that, tapping into folk and pop sensibilities as she constructs a sonic world that offers a much-needed antidote to the deluge of artists confusing shallow, ethereal twaddle as something meaningful and probing. Within the singer-pianist’s restraint is a surfeit of detail, nuance, and emotional heft. It’s mind-boggling to encounter such a fully-formed debut.

Anna Högberg Attack, Ensamseglaren (fönstret)

Recentered by a three-year hiatus from bandleading along with the death of her father, Swedish also alto saxophonist and composer Anna Högberg returned to the fold with this emotionally fraught gem, that rare instance of a suite without heavy programmatic direction than nonetheless packs a narrative punch that’s otherworldly. Doubling the size of the old sextet version of Attack, Högberg and this remarkable group move through wildly divergent terrain, all meticulously following an arc-like structure packed with careful yet visceral detail. The rise-and-fall path is littered with brilliant improvisations, whether the coruscating tenor sax solo unleashed by Elin Forkelid or an unexpectedly haunting, theremin-like saw duet played by brothers Finn and Gus Loxbo.

​Exaudi, Jürg Frey: Voices (Neu)

Within his precise world of sound—patient, austere, and marked by elegant melodies that unfold like geologic shifts—Swiss composer Jürg Frey keeps expanding his reach, and in recent years that’s included a relatively new practice of writing for voice. It’s hard to think of an ensemble as well-suited to his lean aesthetic as the British choral ensemble Exaudi, who straddle the divide between early and contemporary music as if they’re separated by mere footsteps. The earliest work dates back to 1998—the only piece on this magnificent collection written prior to Frey’s partnership with the ensemble—use poetry mostly as sonic material, while the meaning of text has taken on greater importance in the newer material, whether creating settings for the poetry of Emily Dickinson or writing his own words for “Landscape of Echoes,” where the addition and subtraction of voices within a cycling seven-bar phrase plays with density and harmonic complexity in hypnotizing fashion.

Cosmic Ear, Traces (We Jazz)

Cosmic Ear (photo: Johan Bergmark)

A stellar evocation of Don Cherry’s prescient genius featuring the great Christer Bothén—a key collaborator during the trumpeter’s time in Sweden—on clarinets and donso n’goni. But while the entire quintet manages to evoke several phases of Cherry’s sonic history, Cosmic Ear feels like a real band, carving out its own space, even while borrowing an indelible line from the mid-70s classic “Brown Rice.” In addition to the rheumy bass clarinet of Bothén, the frontline features reedist Mats Gustafsson and trumpeter Goran Kajfeš, with the elastic, soulful grooves sculpted by double bassist Kansan Zetterberg and percussionist Juan Romero. This strain of total music doesn’t feel remotely retro, surely due to the fact that Cherry was so far ahead of his time and that his pan-cultural ethos is more important than ever now.

Chiyoko Szlavnics, Memory Spaces (Neu)

Working closely with Ensemble Contrechamps, the versatile Swiss new music group, and guest conductor Max Murray, Berlin-based Canadian composer Chiyoko Slavnics conjures alien worlds from rather ordinary materials using just intonation. Of course, the execution requires serious precision for the full expanse of her sound world to be fully activated. That attention to detail makes all the difference in the world. The title piece is a rapturously churning drone that undergoes endless transformation, with shifting instrument combinations arcing, bending, and turning themselves inside out, while the brass-heavy “Oracles” offers a model for the collision of harmonic phenomenon and artless compositional motifs. In between comes “For Eva Hesse,” an older piece for sine tones that proffers an ideal illustration of the composer’s deep investment in tuning, a persistently changing dance of extended electronic tones.

Mark Fell & Pat Thomas, Reality is Not a Theory (Black Truffle)

This remarkable first-time meeting between electronic musician Mark Fell and pianist Pat Thomas struck me as an unusual pairing on first blush, but it didn’t take much time to realize that they’re sonic kin. Without compromise they forge ahead, Fell constantly rejiggering the tonal qualities of synthetic lines between percussive and coloristic, weaving unstable patterns with the overtone-heavy machinations of Thomas. They don’t follow one another, but they routinely land upon powerful, spontaneous collisions that erase any gap between practices and sound world. In a review I wrote for the Wire I said we are lucky to have this document, which allows the listener to parse and marvel at a real-time performance on our own timescales, revisiting the process over and over again.

Mary Halvorson Amaryllis, About Ghosts (Nonesuch)

Mary Halvorson (photo: Amy Touchette)

I’ve written previously about how Mary Halvorson’s talent as a composer and arranger have steadily grown to match her preternatural abilities as a guitarist and improviser. Amaryllis is as good or better than any band she’s led, a sextet of nonchalant versatility and virtuosity that’s more than up to the task of filling in the dynamic forms she puts down on paper. She takes her fair share of excellent, masterfully constructed solos here, but I’m more absorbed by how she writes for the entire band and how they live up to her ideals. In the past she kept enlarging her trio until it reached the size of an octet, which Amaryllis became with the presence of saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles on several tracks, providing further muscle and richness. Halvorson, who’s already playing out with a new quartet called Canis Major—with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, bassist Henry Fraser, and trumpeter Dave Adewumi—never stops growing and developing, but even at the top of her game with Amaryllis I still imagine there’s room for further growth.

The Necks, Disquiet (Northern Spy)

39 years into an improbable journey the Necks continue to mine seemingly inexhaustible magic through the same basic improvisationally-rooted process. Although they use the studio—mostly for overdubs—regularly, the core of its work revolves around extended, slowly morphing improvisations launched by one of its members. This staggering 3-CD set contains four transformative pieces that cast spells through various admixtures of repetition, motivic exploration, finely-tuned chaos, space, 3-D sound sculpture, and limber grooves—often superimposed by the trio’s members, keyboardist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton, and drummer Tony Buck, who all double on other instruments. A lot of albums that hit me hardest this year were slow, an invaluable salve for the breakneck pace of turbulence, cruelty, and greed surrounding contemporary life, and the Necks have the ability to freeze time, which feels like an essential act of resistance.

Laura Steenberge, Piriforms (Sacred Realism)

A stunner from composer-musician Laura Steenberge, Piriforms taps into ancient chant traditions through a modern lens, as otherworldly vocal harmonies conjure an alien world marked by almost psychedelic textures. Reflecting on a tradition of singing together in monasteries, she writes, “Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken away, or some other change is made that renders the language unintelligible.” A stellar cast of musicians including Catherine Lamb, Julia Holter, Rebecca Lane (who doubles on bass flute), Evelyn Saylor, and Yannick Guédon bring these spectral meditations to life, conjuring a repeatedly transportive, eternal sound that feels thoroughly contemporary.

Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner, The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi)

This high-energy blast celebrates the sense of joy and fun located within Anthony Braxton’s music, a quality that’s usually overlooked. Alto saxophonist Steve Lehman has long forged a protean alliance with bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid—sonic acrobats who thrive on complexity, making it all seem like a walk in the park. Well, sort of. Joined by tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, who dispatches his usual cool for something far more fiery, the band rips into five early Braxton tunes, including the utterly breathless “23b + 23g,” with infectious ebullience. The rep is rounded out by a couple of thorny Lehman themes that embrace the same sort of high-velocity tempos and zig-zagging lines of the album’s honoree, and the set, which was recorded live at the late, great ETA in Los Angeles, concludes with an abstracted take on Monk’s “Trinkle, Tinkle,” that doesn’t feel so far in spirit from the Braxton tunes.

Tangent Mek, Immutable Traveler (Montaigne Noire)

French violinist Anouck Genthon, Greek flutist Marina Tantanozi, and Finnish viola de gamba player Anna-Kaisa Meklin are all based in Switzerland where they came together to form Tangent Mek, a trio of stunning versatility and lyric beauty. They toggle between folk material and contemporary music on Immutable Traveler, rejecting any notion of stylistic purity. Sometimes it reminds me of the folk explorations taken by Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker in their Canti di Guerra project, when they all sing lovely melodies, while elsewhere they conjure sonic worlds that the listener can inhabit, such “Say it Clear, Say it Loud,” where the layers of sustained tones generate a lush physical sensation, as one line or another seems to move across the foundation, suggesting a beguiling three-dimensionality.

Nate Wooley, Henry House (Ideologic Organ)

Trumpeter Nate Wooley puts his horn down for this arresting work, a composite literary portrait of a troubled American everyman drawn from texts written by John Berryman, Reiner Stach, Joseph Mitchell, and Wendell Berry. Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert articulate the words, reinforcing the unreliable narrator’s perspectives, while shimmering, beating sine tones support and interact with subtly virtuosic swells and sustained tones shaped by a stellar support cast including brass players Peter Evans, Weston Olencki, Mattie Barbier, and Dan Peck, percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and pianists Laura Barger and Cory Smythe. I’ve never heard anything quite like it, and the piece further reinforces the rigor Wooley imparts in his maverick explorations and focused writing.

Santiago Diez Fischer, Songs (Another Timbre)

I love when albums confuse and confound me, pulling me back in for repeated listens to try to figure out what the fuck is going on. Songs fits the bill perfectly, a series of electro-acoustic trips constructed over the last decade with the members of the Swiss Gyre Ensemble. Despite the album title there aren’t really any songs here, although the human voice sneaks its way into three of the five pieces. There are three pieces that feature fraught, mysterious interplay between the one of ensemble’s three instrumentalists—baritone saxophonist Alejandro Oliván López, accordionist Stefanie Mirwald-Keiser, and percussionist Christian Streit Smith—and the electronics of Argentine composer Santiago Diez Fischer, but the music never sounds that reduced, and in fact, it’s hard to distinguish the two trio works from the more stripped down ones. The music focuses on timbre, interplay, and gesture, but the end result doesn’t fit within any niche, beyond a devotion to sound.

Amir ElSaffar, New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal (Maqam)

In the last year or two I’ve occasionally written about the encouraging embrace of microtonality and different tuning systems within jazz, an endeavor explored in numerous ways by folks like Anna Weber, Will Mason, and Kristian Enkerud’s Krise. Regrettably, I’ve overlooked the innovations of trumpeter Amir ElSaffar in those discussions, an artist who’s been rigorously melding Iraqi maqam with extended improvisation in all kinds of shifting contexts for two decades. In many ways that collision has been the heart of his music. This stunning new quartet album with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, tenor saxophonist Ole Mathisen, and microtonal pianist Tania Giannouli captures musicians fully immersed in more expansive harmonic possibility, and rigorously tuned in to one another. Giannouli’s microtonal piano accentuates that harmonic world, cradling the remarkable interactions of the frontline, and giving them more to work with. The bulk of the album is rooted in elastic, ornately composed post-bop, but for me it’s the connective, ruminative spells of sustained sound that hit hardest.

James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Abstraction is Deliverance (Intakt)

The James Brandon Lewis Quartet with drummer Chad Taylor, bassist Brad Jones, and pianist Aruán Ortiz gave one of the most galvanizing and intense performances I caught all year when they brought Jazzfest Berlin to a staggering conclusion in November. Rarely have I seen a jazz combo so in sync, ripping into the material on Abstraction is Deliverance with a focus and unity that felt to me like a modern iteration of John Coltrane’s quartet. They didn’t really sound like Coltrane’s band, but the intensity, breadth, and passion on display evoked the old master. Naturally, a studio album can’t ignite the same fire, but this is a gorgeous recording, capturing a quartet at the peak of its powers rip apart the leader’s classic-sounding, indelible originals, along with a superb account of Mal Waldron’s “Left Alone.”

Petr Bakla, Cello & Piano (Octopus Press)

Pianist Miroslav Beinhauer and cellist Matthias Lorenz occupy these three works by Czech composer Petr Bakla with an almost casual intimacy, whether it’s the restrained, conversational exchanges that make up “Two Instances,” where they seem to be finishing one another’s sentences, or the fraught “For Eduard Herzog,” where the cellist interleaves the changing nature of the piano lines with needling arco patterns and brittle, tightly coiled pizz. But the highlight is the longest and newest piece, “Eight Notes,” a minimalist gem in which Lorenz dances in and around stark, granite-hard piano tones, with ominous see-sawing lines, building a tense atmosphere marked by shifting dynamics but ultimately left unresolved by its abrupt conclusion.

[Ahmed], Sama’a – Audition (Otoroku)

We’ve become accustomed to the [Ahmed] modus operandi, taking set-long excursions through the overlooked compositions of the great bassist and Arabic jazz pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Mailk. Sama’a – Audition marks the quartet’s first studio recordings and it also finds them reducing the length of each performance to between 14-19 minutes. It’s fantastic to get to experience a fuller, more detailed and sonically nuanced portrait of the group’s sonic attack—whether the sharp tang of Antonin Gerbal’s cymbal wizardry or an even more forceful reproduction of Pat Tomas’ slamming clusters. While I wouldn’t say the shorter takes concentrate greater power in each piece, the group has no problem recalibrating its onslaught without losing its devastating sense of proportion.

Zanussi 3, A Keen Beast (Sauajazz)

Bassist Per Zanussi has been a key but too often overlooked figure of Norwegian jazz in the 21^st century: a musician devoted to the full complement of improvised music. But as strong as the support and rapport he brings as a sideman is, I still prefer to hear him as a leader. He’s led ensembles of various sizes, but in this leaner setting the clarity and snap of his writing has never sounded stronger. Drummer Per Oddvar Johansen has been with Zanussi from the beginning, yet the standout is tenor saxophonist Kristoffer Berre Alberts. He sounds great on Did We Really? (Sauajazz), the terrific new Cortex album with guitarist Hedvig Mollestad, but given the space to let it rip within such handsome melodies has been one this winter’s greatest pleasures. The album was actually recorded back in 2019, but I sure hope its emergence augurs the same for the trio as a performing unit.

Sophie Agnel, Learning (Otoroku)

2025 was a terrible year for the French pianist Sophie Agnel, who was diagnosed and treated for brain cancer.Thankfully she’s on the road to recovery, slowly. Several recordings made before her illness was detected were released this year: Song (Relative Pitch), a collection of shorter solo works, and Antlia (Shrike), a bracing duo with drummer Mark Sanders. But she saved the best for last with Learning, two side-long works in which her prodigious prepared piano practice is deployed for maximum tactility and force, an endless stream of inventively connected sequences that swing from thunderous heft to almost spectral textural investigation. The catalog of sounds is extraordinary, sometimes drifting into psychoacoustic turf, and so is the way they’re woven together.

Ambrose Akinmusire, honey from a winter stone (Nonesuch)

Trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire has never been modest nor hasty in his creative ambitions, making him an exemplar of contemplative, patient growth. His ascent has been steady and his ability to reside so easily within an artistically mobile environment makes it easy to overlook how seamlessly and inventively he melds ideas. He’s not a genre juggler. He’s a musician. Akinmusire extends the blend of jazz improvisation, contemporary music, and hip-hop introduced on his 2018 album Origami Harvest, with Kokayi now bringing greater humanity to his rhymes than Kool A.D. did on the earlier record