My favorite albums of 2023, part 1

The year-end rundown, arranged alphabetically

I don’t really enjoy this exercise every year, and, of course, I would be able to carry on without spending so many hours each December taking stock on the music that moved me most over the preceding 12 months. As I write every year, it’s a rather arbitrary pursuit impacted by any number of factors on the day I sit down to compile these lists. In fact, I noticed that in the lists I produced for The Wire and 18th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll I mistakenly omitted Tyshawn Sorey’s masterful Continuing from my countdown, which did make the former list. It’s a crapshoot even when I’m thinking clearly! Anyway, this is the second year in a row where I’ve assembled this list alphabetically because pretending there’s some firm criteria is a joke. I find most music put out into the world each year to be awful, but there’s so much good stuff that I could never listen to it all. It’s way more fun to let my mood dictate what I want to spend time with. I do enjoy reading other lists as an act of discovery—each year I learn about records that had passed me by, and that’s the most valuable part of this process for me. Tomorrow I will publish twenty more albums that I loved, followed by a selection of reissues and archival titles on Thursday, with another non-annotated new recordings that didn’t make it into the top 40 when I created the list. It would be different on any given day. There’s also a brief selection of recommended shows in Berlin over the next week, but it’s a slow period so there ain’t too much.

Jason Adasiewicz

My 40 Favorite Albums of 2023, Part 1

Jason Adasiewicz, Roy’s World (Corbett vs. Dempsey)

Chicago vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz dropped two albums this past year, but the bigger news was that he released anything at all. After a hiatus spanning about six years—sporadically emerging here and there, although nothing that could be considered remotely regular—he’s returned to the scene with greater focus than ever. His solo album Roscoe Village, also on Corbett vs. Dempsey, presenting his inventive arrangements of compositions by Roscoe Mitchell, is incredible, but there’s something about the belatedly released music on Roy’s World—recorded in 2017 for the titular film by Rob Christopher—that has brought me such a steady sense of joy that I need to include it here. Working with cornetist Josh Berman, reedist Jon Doyle, bassist Joshua Abrams, and drummer Hamid Drake—the quintet delivers quintessential Chicago jazz. The music is rugged, bluesy, and generous, injecting post-bop forms with a contemporary aesthetic. The year’s most welcome return.

Ambrose Akinmusire, Owl Song (Nonesuch)

Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmsure broke several years of silence—at least discographically—but switching labels in 2023, moving from the jazz-branded Blue Note to the more ecumenical Nonesuch, but not before dropping a stunning solo album called Beauty is Enough. For his Nonesuch debut—the first of three new records coming in a one-year period—he’s joined by guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, and the material accentuates his rare gift for melody. The results are gorgeous in their conversational ease and effortless interplay. There are a pair of excellent duos between the trumpeter and his two bandmates—on “Mr. Riley” we get some gut-punching second line grooves beneath the leader’s tuneful blowing—but the trios are incredible models of three-way creativity. I can’t wait for what comes next.

Zoh Amba, Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, The Flower School (Palilalia)

The preternatural empathy between drummer Chris Corsano and guitarist Bill Orcutt has been firmly established and praised, and every record they make seems to heighten and deepen that connection. They dropped another strong duo recording with Play at Duke, but my favorite recording by the guitarist this year—not discounting his superb solo album Jump On It—was this first-time trio outing between the duo and saxophonist Zoh Amba, a regular collaborator of the drummer. There’s no doubt that Amba has the tools, but thanks to the stature of some of her early advocates and a giddy New York Times feature early in her career, she’s had to develop under intense scrutiny. To these ears this trio has provided the best context for her music thus far, a brooding, slowly opening atmosphere marked by haze and angularity. Her flinty, keening tenor deftly fills in the lurching grooves and fiery tones, locking into riffs or slashing against the dominant grain. She sounds more at ease than in any other context I’ve heard her in. That’s not to say she needs this rock-fueled energy to succeed, but thus far it’s proven to be the most effective setting for her vision.

Black Duck, Black Duck (Thrill Jockey)

Douglas McCombs, the stolid anchor of some of Chicago’s greatest bands—Eleventh Dream Day, Tortoise, and Brokeback—struck gold with this instrumental trio, refining his ardor for moody atmospheres, southwestern twang, and Tom Verlaine. Working with guitarist Bill MacKay and drummer Charles Rumback, who all contribute material, he pushes the results away from straight-up rock within a mold of collective improvisation for more explicitly ambient journeys. Moving between these liquid excursions, where sounds are shaped in abstract, painterly layers against the comparatively well-defined grooves and riffs of the composed material, Black Duck served up one of the year’s most pleasurable, heady experiences.

Antonio Borghini, Banquet of Consequences (We Insist!)

I wrote about this fantastic sextet led by bassist Antonio Borghini twice this year. The band hasn’t played often, but it is most definitely my favorite new ensemble in Berlin. The group—with alto saxophonist Pierre Borrel, tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius, drummer Steve Heather, cellist Anil Eraslan, and pianist Rieko Okuda—brings a durable alloy of blissful ebullience and sharp ensemble interplay to the leader’s infectious writing. The debut album delivered on the sextet’s riveting performances by simply transplanting sounds that flourish on stage into a studio, reclaiming the same fiery interplay, improvisation brio, and rhythmic spark. Borghini’s aesthetic compass explores the three-way intersection between jazz from the Netherlands, Italy, and South Africa, another by-product of the legacy left behind by cellist Tristan Honsinger, one of the year’s greatest losses. Banquet of Consequences is the sound of joy.

Vilhelm Bromander, In This Unfolding Moment (Thanatosis)

In a time when the phrase “spiritual jazz,” which never had much consequence during its foundational years, is bandied about so much that its innately ambiguous value has been stripped of any real meaning, Swedish bassist, composer, and bandleader Vilhelm Bromander served up a powerful album that could almost single-handedly reclaim its usage. Corralling many of the finest players from Stockholm’s remarkable scene, the bassist opens the work with a dhrupad grounding, deftly voiced by Marianne Svašek—a true student of the tradition—that reveals the composer’s depth and feeling for the tradition in the opening bars. The high-octane band channels Carla Bley’s full-bodied arrangements for the Liberation Music Orchestra while tapping into Charlie Haden’s revolutionary fervor. Bromander has explored more restricted confines elsewhere, whether providing a pulse in Christer Bothén’s slinky trio or digging into just intonation works with Fredrik Rasten or Maria W. Horn, but nothing conveys the scope, soul, or majesty of this instant classic.

Angharad Davies & Phil Julian, Neutral Red (Fataka)

When I wrote my review of this stunner for the Wire I didn’t have a physical copy of the CD, so I didn’t realize that its two pieces had been recorded in 2014 and 2018. It shocked me because this collaboration between violinist Angharad Davies and electronic musician Phil Julian feels like some kind of transmission from a murky future. Julian proves to be a master at providing frequently shifting landscapes—which shouldn’t imply placidity or emptiness—for Davies’ terse  frictive cycles, which mercurially adapt to the changes and form an astonishing kind of feedback loop. Every shift seems to move microscopically, but the interactions move at a deceptively rapid clip. This remains the most psychedelic record of the year for me, a sonic trip that genuinely takes me somewhere new each time.

Kris Davis’ Diatom Ribbons, Live at the Village Vanguard (Pyroclastic)

Live at the Village Vanguard is a release that proved how crucial the act of performance is for stratifying, refining, and sharpening ideas that come together either on paper or in a recording studio. I found the 2019 debut by Kris Davis’ Diatom Ribbons impressive but a bit shapeless. It was packed with ideas and possibilities, but Davis didn’t manage to tie it all together. That’s not the case with this knockout live recording, where her ideas congealed even within the project’s broad stylistic sweep. Pushed by the muscular rhythm section of drummer Terry Lynne Carrington and bassist Trevor Dunn, Davis, turntablist Val Jeanty, and guitarist Julian Lage map out thrilling pathways for the versatile material, both by the leader and artists as disparate as Ronald Shannon Jackson, Geri Allen, and Wayne Shorter. This stellar combo offers a tantalizing map of potential directions, but the quintet has already provided dividends.

Deerhoof, Miracle-Level (Joyful Noise)

The story behind the most recent album by Deerhoof is that it was the first recording by the band sung entirely in Japanese, the native land of singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki. It’s not much of a story, but I guess neither is the fact that few rock bands have been as consistently excellent over the last three decades. As usual there’s plenty of meticulously charted inner-tension—the over-the-top drumming of Greg Saunier, the contrapuntal braid of guitars both smooth and tangled, and instrumental fury supporting the most ravishing, catchy melodies Deefhoof has ever written. It’s not hard to imagine a tune like “The Poignant Melody” as a mainstream R&B ballad. Apart from the language shift I don’t hear any big surprises, but the music remains inspired and exciting. I know we’re always hearing that rock is dead, which isn’t true, of course—but it’s never felt less relevant to me. But then I hear this record and it feels more alive and enveloping than almost anything I heard this past year.

Lucia Dlugoszewski, Abyss and Caress (Col Legno)

A major addition and momentum builder for the ongoing rediscovery of Lucia Dlugoszewski’s singular, visceral music, this essential double album features the first recordings of two heavy duty pieces from the early 1970s. The music is articulated with red-hot intensity and razor-sharp precision by Klangforum Wien, with the technically monstrous trumpeter Peter Evans ably filling the chair in the composer’s music once occupied by Gerard Schwartz. The survey spans more than four decades during which Dlugoszewski stuck firmly to her aesthetic guns, splitting with one-time friend John Cage on his inescapable conceptualism in favor of music free of emotional and intellectual overtones. Whether writing for brass ensembles, string quartets, chamber group, or orchestral marvel, including the title composition featuring Evans, with conductor Ilan Volkov, Dlugoszewski imparted a bruising ferocity that sounds more invigorating and original as the years pass. The upcoming edition of MaerzMusik in March promises a significant event built around her work, and I hope by this time next year we’ll be hearing a lot more of her music.

George Dumitriu, Monk on Viola (Evil Rabbit)

George Dumitriu—a Romanian violist based in Amsterdam whom I first heard as a member of Kaja Draksler’s sublime octet—turned my head around with this solo recording, a collection of eight Monk tunes pushed and pulled in captivating new directions. Dumitriu will sometimes stick with a theme, digging in deep and finding fresh nuances through his own angular phrasing, or he withholds them, as with a mind-blowing account of “Round Midnight” that spends six minutes running up to the crushing theme with a barrage of skittery bow strikes and coloristic smears. His elliptical reimagining says as much about his own broad aesthetic as it does about the elasticity of Monk’s compositions. The music straddles so-called jazz and contemporary music with more imagination and brio than almost anything commanding attention in European concert halls these days.

Die Enttäuschung, Music Minus One (Two Nineteen)

This unexpected recording from what’s arguably been one of the top two or three post-bop bands over the last couple of decades served as a reminder to take stock in what’s around and often taken for granted. Die Enttäuschung—the quartet of trumpeter Axel Dörner, bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, bassist Jan Roder, and drummer Michael Griener—hasn’t really changed its general approach ever, but it has continued to inject sustainability, style, and inspiration within a loosey-goosey, fiercely swinging sound in a way that’s proven endlessly renewable. A new batch of 17 pithy originals that hit all of the right pleasure spots, tackled with a mixture of rhythmic buoyancy, melodic generosity, and elastic interplay, Music Minus One is also one of those records I need once in a while to remind me of the most basic joys of jazz and improvised music, an ethos that first pulled me in four decades ago and hasn’t let go.

Jürg Frey, Continuité, fragilité, résonance (Elsewhere)

While just about all of the music by Swiss composer Jürg Frey is worth hearing, this recording documents his second stone cold classic in as many years, following the 2022 marvel I Listened to the Wind Again. And as someone who has already heard a recording of his fourth string quartet by Quatuor Bozzini—due out soon—he’s got a third cued up. Continuité, fragilité, resonance enlists two ensembles he clearly trusts, melding the strings of Bozzini with the reeds of Konus Quartet. Their collective timbres seem almost iridescent, shape-shifting like the sonic equivalent of the murmuration of a starling flock. Frey’s delicate palette gets more beautiful over time, and the shimmering tones, melodic fragments, and harmonic sweep of this work have provided some of my most ineffable listening experiences of the year.

Ricardo Dias Gomes, Muito Sol (Hive Mind)

It’s been gratifying to witness the world starting to wake up to the music of Ricardo Dias Gomes, a songwriter, producer, and bassist from Rio de Janeiro who’s been living in Lisbon, Portugal for about half-a-decade. This year he contributed invaluable production to the latest album from Domenico Lancelotti, and he played some gigs as part of Joshua Abrams and Muñoz’s ongoing homage to Pharoah Sanders. Muito Sol is the strongest album yet from the one-time bassist for Caetano Veloso, blending his tender writing, inventive production, and restrained delivery, which still feels hushed even when the music occasionally screams. He doesn’t recognize much of a divide between experimental textures and MPB craftsmanship—his songs achieve a tender, irresistible elegance, using the leanest of materials. He follows a pair of ravishing pop gems with “Flux,” a needling pointillistic jam that gets lost within the acrid murk of rude, groaning overtones, before circling back to lyric beauty.

Madison Greenstone, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch)

Apart from their work in TAK Ensemble and The [Switch Ensemble] I had only heard clarinetist Madison Greenstone in their excellent duo with contrabass clarinetist John McCowen—on the extremely worthwhile Mundanas I-V (Edition Wandelweiser)—before encountering this mind-blowing solo record. I got to hear them play it a few weeks later here in Berlin and the experience was even more shatteringly intense than this devastating recording. Greenstone pushes deep into the clarinet’s extreme reaches, transforming sounds and utterances from their instrument that are usually scrupulously avoided into a bracing focal point. These visceral studies of leaked air and screaming overtones are powerful sonic explorations in which Greenstone is literally struggling with the clarinet, wresting conventionally discarded sounds to the surface and trying to maintain balance. It’s not easygoing and it requires us to adjust our ears to this aesthetic, but each time I’ve done exactly that I’ve been incredibly grateful and energized by the experience. What’s even more thrilling is that Greenstone seems to be just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Gunn Truscinski Nace, Glass Band (Three Lobed)

These three musicians have worked together in different contexts over the years, producing wildly different music depending on the situation. Steve Gunn has evolved into a singer-songwriter, gradually pouring more effort into his singing—with great success—than his stellar guitar playing, but he’s kept the door open to more experimental settings in his duo with drummer John Truscinksi, one of his most trusted and exploratory collaborators. Nace has played with them both, but he tends to embrace a more visceral, abstract, and noisy aesthetic. As a trio they bend all of those tendencies into one hypnotic, richly varied trip. The music definitely leans toward a more accessible stripe of experimentation, with Gunn and Truscinksi generally shaping ambling grooves and sun-parched meditations, which prove a simpatico match for Nace, who has a remarkable ability to recontextualize his uncompromising language without surrendering his essence. Instead, settings like this help us realize his elastic imagination, affording us to hear how his spontaneity can interact with other voices in a gentler setting.

PJ Harvey, I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan)

I distinctly remember when Polly Jean Harvey basically put down her guitar after releasing Rid of Me in 1993 how many people lamented that choice. I understood the disappointment because her playing was so gripping and integral to the airtight music she made with her first trio, but To Bring You My Love was so spectacular, opening up new directions, that I didn’t care much. She has changed and developed throughout her entire career, and I had to remind myself when I first heard the fragile, upper register singing voice she deploys throughout most of I Inside the Old Year Dying. Instead of taking it on its own, I was comparing it to previous work, which is a mistake with PJ Harvey. Low impact and measured on the surface, this album contains typical multitudes and captures another retrenchment from an artist we should be eternally grateful for, one who never confuses the music business with art making.

Per “Texas” Johansson, Den Sämsta Lösingen av Alla (Moserobie)

After a lengthy hiatus from music to work in medicine, Per “Texas” Johansson has fully made his comeback, not only becoming a regular and crucial presence in several bands with drummer Gard Nilssen, but dropping a series of new recordings as a leader. I also love is orchestra album Orkester Omnitonal, but this unique septet album is so strong that his giant reed arsenal—he plays oboe, English horn, and bassoon in addition to three different clarinet types and tenor saxophone—is a minor part of the appeal. Joined by a knockout band, he’s the featured soloist on a variety of beautifully melancholic originals, where he reveals a profundity and fluidity on every horn. He’s a deeply respected figure across Scandinavia, and now it’s time for the rest of the world to wake up.

Russ Johnson Quartet, Reveal (Calligram)

Trumpeter Russ Johnson is one of those improvising musicians whose innate curiosity and versatility has worked against him, at least in terms of establishing a firm identity for his stunning talents. It’s not that people don’t recognize how good Johnson is, but by working primarily as a sideman under many different leaders no single aesthetic has emerged, even if his playing is distinctive. This newsletter will catch up on some of those sideman recordings in the coming months, but nothing stands out like this excellent quartet date with violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Ethan Philion, and drummer Tim Daisy, arguably my favorite post-bop album of the year. Johnson injects his writing with clever patterns, infectious melodies, and effortless range, and hearing this combo essay the tunes is a potent reminder of what a top-flight working band can achieve.

Darius Jones,  fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred) (Northern Spy/We Jazz)

There’s never been any doubt about the remarkable artistry of saxophonist Darius Jones. He has routinely taken difficult, unexpected routes with his music, eschewing the usual choices most jazz saxophonists make in favor of pushing himself and testing listeners. This commission from the Western Front in Vancouver finds him moving into new terrain, deploying graphic notation—particularly designed for the string players who join him, cellist Peggy Lee and violinists Jesse and Josh Zubot—and adapting ideas from Fluxus artists, while paying homage to the venue’s commitment in forging long-term partnerships with artists like George Lewis and Ornette Coleman. With drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist James Meger pushing and pulling the whole enterprise, Jones creates elastic alloys with the strings and unleashes some of the most passionate, thrilling alto improvisations he’s ever recorded.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

January 4: Lucía Martínez & the Fearless (Lucía Martínez, drums; Benjamin Weidekamp, bass clarinet; Ronny Graupe, guitar; Morris Kliphuis, French horn; Marcel Kroemker, bass), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

January 6: Ignaz Schick (saxophones), Jan Roder (bass), Taiko Saito (vibraphone) & Martial Frenzel, drums, 8 PM, Kuhlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

January 7: Thomas Borgmann’s Keys & Screws (Thomas Borgmann, tenor saxophone, flute; Johannes Schleiermacher, tenor saxophone; Vinicius Cajado, bass; Will Kellers, drums), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin