Stereogum's 10 Best Jazz Albums Of 2020

Following up the dreamy mélange of string quartet, hip-hop, and abstract jazz that was 2018’s *Origami Harvest*, Oakland trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire returns with *on the tender spot of every calloused moment*, revisiting the hard-hitting acoustic sound of his working quartet with pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown (the same lineup that recorded 2017’s *A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard*). In the confines of the studio, they’re not a bit less energized and audacious. There’s a certain loose and limber authority and turn-on-a-dime polish in such pieces as “Blues (We measure the heart with a fist),” “Tide of Hyacinth” (featuring percussionist/vocalist Jesus Diaz), and “An Interlude (that get’ more intense).” Akinmusire’s recent work with veteran Chicago avant-gardist Roscoe Mitchell inspired the busy and insistent “Mr. Roscoe (consider the simultaneous).” (It’s worth noting that Archie Shepp wrote the liner notes for this album, remarking of Akinmusire, “This is the cat!”) The guest vocal by Genevieve Artadi of KNOWER on “Cynical sideliners” finds Akinmusire playing gentle accompaniment on Rhodes, revealing new facets of his musicianship. “Roy” is a soulful ballad homage to the tragically departed Roy Hargrove, a dear friend and role model, while the closing “Hooded procession (read the names outloud),” with Akinmusire on solo Rhodes this time, alludes to the ongoing injustices that have catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a continuation of what has become a series, starting with “My Name Is Oscar,” “Rollcall for Those Absent,” and “Free, White and 21” from previous Akinmusire albums. The fact that he articulates no names, only a sequence of resonant sustaining Rhodes chords, lends a certain inscrutable mystery and gestural power to the track.

Stay on it! This is the future! This is the spectral dreaming, the reshaped soundwaves of post-Katrina, post-Osage Avenue, post-Obamacare that we borrow from to do this work, so stay on it. Who Sent You? they said from their liquid cryo-chamber, from a low-light induction field cobbled together with lithium rods, with melted down Romare Bearden and Howardena Pindell paintings, stitched with chaos fibers and placed in the center of the carrion husk of a burnt out shanty town. They took time to scrape ashen samples of what was, their souls the residue thick and caked on, that still climbs those new high-rise condominiums like moss—the only evidence that they were once there, that they were baked into the fabric of this planet—they were there fixing elevators and tossing wrenches into quantum fields until they were stopped! frisked! and turned into weird, 100-foot martyr murals on the backside, the north side, of supermarket walls—Who Sent You? is how the matrix modulation works. Dig it: Who Sent You? is the punk-rocking of jazz and the mystification of the avant-garde, a sci-fi sound from that out-soul-fire jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements. Who Sent You? they asked and tried to lock us in their distress chambers, and yet here it is: an album that functions as a heat-sealed care package for the modern Afrofuturist’s pre-flight machinations. This record weaves kinetic soul fusion, dreamy yet harrowing spectral poetry, and intricate force-field-tight rhythms into wild, warmth-giving tapestries that comfort and conceal, confront and coerce all at once, with the dark matter of the deep, black all-consuming universe as its thread. Where the band’s self-titled debut was all explosive noisy anthems and glorious cosmic bluster, Who Sent You? is a focused and patient ritual. Irreversible Entanglements take their time in between these grooves, stalking the war-torn streets of the Deep South and post-Columbian apocalypses—taking their time to add our DNA to the centrifuge, to dream up an alchemical amalgamation that sounds truly euphoric, drenched in the epic star-flung fallout of a nova only they can conjure. More than the sum of its parts—Luke Stewart’s war-like basslines, Keir Neuringer’s haunting saxophone, Aquiles Navarro’s cyberpunk brass, the unwieldy storm of Tcheser Holmes’ drums, and the oracular phyletic incantations of Camae Ayewa—Who Sent You? is an entire holistic jam of “infinite possibilities coming back around,” a sprawling meditation for afro-cosmonauts, a reminder of the forms and traumas of the past, and the shape and vision of Afrotopian sounds to come.

Though it’s far from the only trio that pianist Matthew Shipp has led over the years, the lineup with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker is a special one, as the albums *The Conduct of Jazz*, *Piano Song*, and *Signature* have made clear. *The Unidentifiable*, the trio’s second for ESP-Disk’, has a certain stark and transparent beauty, with episodes morphing from abstract groove and swing (“The Dimension,” “The Unidentifiable”) to the elusive Afro-Latin vibe of “Regeneration” to the closing chamber epic, “New Heaven and New Earth.” Baker’s attention to texture and tone color, most clearly on “Dark Sea Negative Charge” and the short solo prelude “Virgin Psych Space 1,” is consistently striking—indeed, there’s an inner clarity to his interaction with Bisio even when Shipp is going at maximum tilt. Soon after this album’s release, Shipp published an essay on what he calls the Black Mystery School Pianists: players such as Monk, Mal Waldron, Andrew Hill, and a select other few—exponents of “an underground language,” one with “a certain geometry and architecture,” a mode of “generating sound…grounded in a technique they invented…that cannot be taught in school.” While Shipp does not consciously emulate any one Mystery School figure, he draws on their historical examples, here and throughout his catalog, in pursuit of *The Unidentifiable*.

Starting in the bebop era, the piano-bass-drums lineup has been the most classic jazz format in which the piano is featured, accumulating the weight of history and critical expectations. In this setting, a non-mainstream player such as Shipp can infiltrate Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and other Establishment bastions in a familiar format and then unleash his ideas on audiences that might not normally be exposed to his style. Thanks to hearing it in the communal language of the piano trio, they can better understand the message the Matthew Shipp Trio has to deliver – “Mr. Shipp’s predilection for finding fertile ground between accessibility and abstraction,” as Larry Blumenfeld wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Shipp says, "The piano trio is such a basic configuration in jazz, and it is an honor to take a well-explored area and apply my imagination to it to see where we can go—it helps that my trio mates are great." Shipp, Bisio, and Baker convened at Shipp's favorite recording venue last year looking to pursue a new direction. The result is both distinctively Shippian yet a further evolution of the group’s sound.

Pianist Nduduzo Makhathini has gained a following from releases on his own Gundu label as well as sideman work with Shabaka and the Ancestors. But with *Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds* on Blue Note, he makes a wider international breakthrough. A native of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, he draws from the church and spiritual traditions of his homeland, South African jazz forebears, and also John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and other pillars of jazz modernism to create a whirlwind of sound in a small-group context. His wife, Omagugu Makhathini, contributes a commanding vocal on the leadoff track, “Yehlisan’uMoya,” framing intense solo flights by Linda Sikhakhane and Logan Richardson on tenor and alto saxes, respectively, over a slowly churning groove. Driven by bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere and drummer Ayanda Sikade, the band is equally authoritative on poetic, out-of-tempo episodes (“Isithunywa,” “Emaphusheni”) and frenetic workouts (“Unyazi,” “Umyalez’oPhuthumayo”). If one track sums up the fiery chemistry at work here, it is “Umlotha,” with its gripping, three-way solo exchanges between Sikhakhane, Richardson, and trumpeter Ndabo Zulu and steady-stream percussion from Gontse Makhene.

On his third Mack Avenue release, pianist Aaron Diehl gathers with bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Gregory Hutchinson for a set of mostly original music. But if you attend to the four non-original works, grouped at the end of the album, they reveal a lot about Diehl’s artistic interests and range. His classical side surfaces with a fast-moving adaptation of Prokofiev and a closing étude by Philip Glass, while his love for the legacy of such underappreciated jazz piano forebears as John Lewis and Sir Roland Hanna comes into focus on “Milano” and “A Story Often Told, Seldom Heard,” respectively. Just as Diehl leaves his own creative imprint on these pieces, their aesthetic and technical sensibilities inform his writing as well. The airy, evocative swing of “Polaris,” the brighter and more involved “Magnanimous Disguise,” the beautifully paced balladry of “Treasure’s Past,” the minor-key yearning of the title track: These examples find Diehl wringing pure, expansive sound from the piano, growing considerably in stature as a composer and bandleader.

Alongside Londoners such as saxophonist Nubya Garcia, tuba player Theon Cross, and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, Shabaka Hutchings is at the forefront of club jazz’s resurgence in the UK. The British-Barbadian artist’s various projects all work in Afro-political idioms, with each occupying a different philosophical realm: Sons of Kemet focuses on black displacement in royal Britain, The Comet Is Coming is influenced by Afrofuturism and progressive rock, and Shabaka and the Ancestors explores the African diaspora from the standpoint of Western culture’s erasure of black identity and communities. On *We Are Sent Here By History*, Hutchings and his South Africa-based band use history as a reflection point, but one that deeply informs the future. Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and Yusef Lateef are just a few of the musical-political touchstones that also influence the record, and you hear these icons in the powerful chants and spoken words of Siyabonga Mthembu, the phrasing of the woodwinds—chaotic, playful, spiritual—and the general status-quo-challenging vibe of the arrangement. Like his predecessors, Hutchings makes protest songs that make you feel alive, even when they are indictments of colonialism and toxic masculinity. But he also uses music as a corrective: Like its title suggests, “We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”—all looping chanted vocals around a multitude of percussive instruments—looks beyond a dark past towards brighter days.

*Bandcamp Exclusive* 2 Bonus tracks will be included when you purchase the full album, only on Bandcamp. From March 10th to March 15th, as the world was becoming aware of the full implications of a global pandemic, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah and his dedicated band were doing what they do - human conversation in the form of music - at the famed Blue Note in New York. They pressed on, understanding that there was risk but determined to bring positive energy to the people. Little did they (or we) know that this would be the last show for some time. Capturing this moment was already precious, and now it is even more so - humans in direct proximity walking the delicate line between listening and being heard, expressing themselves without casting a shadow on others. While this will not be the last show, for now it is a wonderful reminder of the vibrant energy we all can share.