Pitchfork's Best Jazz and Experimental Music of 2021

The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.

In Claire Rousay’s music, a field recording is never just a record of a place—it also represents a trace of a personal memory, perhaps even a portal to another world. The Texas experimental musician is constantly recording, translating the murmurs and footfalls of the world around her into dreamy abstractions. Unlike some of her records, where she has run personal correspondence through text-to-speech generators—rendering the most intimate details in surreal, robotic tones—language does not play a central role on *A Softer Focus*. Yet this short, enveloping album is among her most lyrical, emotionally direct works to date. It begins with clatter—fingers tapping on an iPhone, perhaps the rustle of dishes being cleared—but with “Discrete (The Market),” uncharacteristically harmonic sounds rise in the mix, suffusing everything with a warm glow. The reassuringly consonant piano, cello, and synthesizer constitute the record’s nostalgic through line, recalling post-classical composers like Sarah Davachi. But no matter how lulling Rousay’s melodies become, the line between music and sound remains provocatively fuzzy. In “Diluted Dreams,” sparkling drones are shot through with the sounds of passing traffic and kids playing on the street; “Stoned Gesture” flickers in the light of fireworks exploding overhead. Only Rousay knows the precise meaning of these sounds, but for the rest of us, they are suggestive triggers, as evocative as the scent of a freshly cut lawn or hot pavement after a summer rain.

Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”

Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”

In the lexicon of jazz band configurations, the trio is perhaps most challenging. Triangulating compositions through just three instruments, there is ample space for each member to either sink or fly. For New York-based composer, professor and pianist Vijay Iyer, it\'s the perfect setting in which to showcase his intuitive, emotive approach to improvisation, one that feeds off collaboration as much as it is propelled by uncompromising individual thought. Despite having spent the past decade playing informally with bassist Linda May Han Oh and two decades recording and performing with drummer Tyshawn Sorey, *Uneasy* is his first in this trio configuration. “The impetus behind this album wasn’t necessarily a theme—it was just about the three of us playing together,” Iyer tells Apple Music. “As soon as we sat down together in 2019, I realised our playing had its own energy and drive, it demanded its own space for a project.” The result is eight reimagined compositions from the past 20 years of Iyer’s work, as well as a tribute to his long-time mentor and friend Geri Allen and a reinterpretation of the jazz standard “Night and Day”. *Uneasy* takes its title from a 2011 collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, and its reference to the emotions of anxiety and discontent come to epitomise the ensuing narrative of the record as a whole. “We want you to inhabit this slightly turbulent space of the album, since life is not stable, as is increasingly revealed to us every day,” Iyer says as he guides us through each of *Uneasy*\'s tracks. **“Children of Flint”** \"I had been invited in 2019 to write a piece for a classical music context, and the theme was \'the year of water\'. Immediately, I thought, ‘The year of water for whom? What about people who don\'t have it?’ In the US context, it becomes a political question, and with the Flint crisis, this was a moment where a political disaster caused an environmental disaster that disproportionately affected communities of colour. So I wrote a piece for solo viola called \'Song for Flint\', which had a mournful and harrowing quality to it. There was a fragment of it that kept haunting me, and I wanted to keep that sense of rage and to direct energy and money to that community. When it came to the trio, I included this piece called \'Children of Flint\' on the record, as it is both a child of the \'Song for Flint\' and I imagined it playing for children or giving it to children.\" **“Combat Breathing”** \"This was originally created for the occasion of a Black Lives Matter protest that we did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, which was the year of the birth of the movement. That year, things came to a boil and we all wanted to divert energy in the direction of the people on the ground who were doing the work. With the trio’s interpretation, it has a sense of urgency to it, but then it also has a space where it imagines a different reality and it stretches out. Something that this group does best is to stretch out without too much provocation, to allow the music to blossom into a river of energy.\" **“Night and Day”** \"Joe Henderson made a version of this Cole Porter composition in 1966, which remakes the song. Musicians in the jazz lineage have always repurposed and reinvented pre-existing material on their own terms. It’s a transformative tradition of creating something else using a found text as a vehicle. With the trio, we wanted to capture the very colourful, bright energy of Henderson and McCoy Tyner’s version. I\'ve been listening to that recording for 30 years and I\'ve studied McCoy Tyner, trying to understand how he sets things in motion, how he anchors the sound and how he creates this spectrum of colours. Since he passed away last year, this is a tribute to him.\" **“Touba”** \"The poet Michael Ladd and I collaborated on an album called *In What Language?* in 2003, and there is a piece on there called \'Plastic Bag\', which is based around a poem about a Senegalese street vendor in New York. He was part of this community that practised a version of Islam called Mouride; their mythic homeland is called Touba, and wherever they settle and build community, like in Harlem, you\'ll find these businesses called Touba. They carry this sense of home with them throughout the diaspora. That piece was called \'Plastic Bag\' because this guy carried all his earthly belongings in this gigantic plastic sack, and this version is a travelling blues.\" **“Drummer’s Song”** \"I\'ve been a fan of Geri Allen’s music and her playing since the late ’80s. I first heard her when I was 16, and later, in the early 2000s, I got to know her better, and she\'s been a hero to me ever since. She became a very nurturing and endlessly generous member of our community. Very few of us knew that she was suffering when she died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2017. I wanted to continue to study her music and to perform it and uphold her legacy as best as I can. Playing this composition of hers for the record was a nice challenge. It\'s really hard to pull off in the trio context because there\'s a lot of polyphony going on and everyone has to cover a lot of bases. She always made it look effortless.\" **“Augury”** \"For this track, we were all done with the recording sessions. Tyshawn and Linda went home and I just asked the engineer to hit record. In those moments, especially after a long day of recording, you\'re depleted and in a vulnerable state, which attunes you intuitively to certain things. I went in with no real agenda; I didn\'t know if I would make anything worth salvaging, I just decided to play something. This was what came out in that moment, and I call it ‘Augury\' because it feels like a certain kind of divination. In that moment at the end of 2019, at the cusp of a disastrous year, what am I hearing?\" **“Configurations”** \"It had been almost 20 years since I\'d last performed this piece with Tyshawn and I dared him to play it to see if he remembered, and of course he did—he has a genius memory. We had fun pulling it together, particularly trying to do it as a trio because it has a challenging structure, but Linda and Tyshawn always rise above any challenge and make it into something better. It ended up becoming a set piece for us where there\'s all this energy being passed around rapidly and then there is a wild ending referencing different rhythmic techniques from South Indian music.\" **“Uneasy”** \"This piece was written for a collaboration with a dance company in 2011, and we were thinking about what it was to be an American 10 years after 9/11. It was the thick and thin of the Obama years—optimism and surveillance, truth and deception. \'Uneasy’ was the word for how none of that felt quite right. We were asking with the piece, what does it mean to come together with a certain kind of exuberance and yet to also know that there\'s something sinister beneath the surface that we are not talking about yet? Now, 10 years on, it still fits well with the current moment—perhaps even better. In American life, we\'re living in the echo of that time.\" **“Retrofit”** \"I wrote this originally for my sextet, since I wanted to make something that was dealing with new ideas rhythmically and harmonically. Reducing it to the trio format meant that it could be split open differently to become an interactive vehicle for us. Especially in the last few minutes, it becomes molten—it keeps changing shape, and that\'s something that we can do with the trio because we’re a rhythm section. A lot of what is happening in our work is rhythm being expressed and then shifting.\" **“Entrustment”** \"So often with the trio, we\'re creating an intimate version of something more grand, which is the case with ‘Entrustment’, a composition I wrote as part of a larger suite for a string orchestra. The suite was called ‘City of Sand’ and it was inspired by me visiting the site of an incredible network of several hundred Buddhist cave temples in the Gobi Desert. It was this crossroads of all these different cultures, and ‘Entrustment’ was the closing meditation, a processional embrace of that kind of openness, expansiveness and emptiness. It\'s only two chords—it’s made of almost nothing, it\'s just those qualities coming together.\"