Stereogum's 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2022

Long before he made his name at jazz’s vanguard, editing together off-the-cuff live sessions like a hip-hop beatmaker, drummer, and producer, Makaya McCraven set out to create a comprehensive record of his collaborative process—a testament to the intuition of improvisation. Its sessions recorded over the course of seven years, between multiple projects and releases, *In These Times* is McCraven’s sixth album as a bandleader, and it showcases the virtuosic instrumentalists he has spent his career building an almost telepathic bond with—bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker among them. It’s also the warmest and most enveloping album he’s produced to date. Frenetic beat-splicing might underpin the polyrhythms of tracks such as “Seventh String” and “This Place That Place,” but the soft melodies played by Parker and harpist Brandee Younger always permeate—a reminder of the clarity of the moment of creation, rather than its post-production manipulation. Indeed, *In These Times* is a reflection of the past decade of McCraven’s instrumental expertise, but it’s also a powerful reminder of the freedom inherent in this time, in the here and now of making music together, when the artist lets go and surrounds us with the ineffable beauty of collective creation.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, composer, producer, and pillar of our label family, Makaya McCraven. Although this album is “new," the truth it’s something that's been in process for a very long time, since shortly after he released his International Anthem debut In The Moment in 2015. Dedicated followers may note he’s had 6 other releases in the meantime (including 2018’s widely-popular Universal Beings and 2020’s We’re New Again, his rework of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album for XL Recordings); but none of which have been as definitive an expression of his artistic ethos as In These Times. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records. And his patience, ambition, and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. As epic and expansive as it is impressively potent and concise, the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work from home. The pure fact that he was able to so eloquently condense and articulate the immense human scale of the work into 41 fleeting minutes of emotive and engaging sound is a monumental achievement. It’s an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer; but moreover it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer. In These Times is an almost unfathomable new peak for an already-soaring innovator who has been called "one of the best arguments for jazz's vitality" by The New York Times, as well as recently, and perhaps more aptly, a "cultural synthesizer." While challenging and pushing himself into uncharted territories, McCraven quintessentially expresses his unique gifts for collapsing space and transcending borders – blending past, present, and future into elegant, poly-textural arrangements of jazz-rooted, post-genre 21st century folk music.

One of a pair of strong 2022 releases, Mary Halvorson’s *Amaryllis* finds her in a sextet lineup with Patricia Brennan’s vibraphone as the primary harmonic instrument and tone color. As a brass section and as individual soloists, trombonist Jacob Garchik and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill are superb in every respect. Bassist Nick Dunston and drummer Tomas Fujiwara achieve an ideal balance of driving, funky rhythm and sensitive support. On the latter half of the album, Halvorson adds the adventurous strings of the Mivos Quartet, offering a glimpse of the sounds she’s able to summon with Mivos on the full-length companion release, *Belladonna*. The breadth, detail, and sheer character of her writing on these releases is a marvel, attesting to her prodigious growth as an artist in this period.

On his milestone 10th album, pianist, composer, improviser, and healer Nduduzo Makhathini distills a decade’s worth of creative output into an offering that reflects upon both his and his forebearer’s footsteps. “This whole journey started in 2012, when I went to studio to record my debut album,” he tells Apple Music. “This is me summarizing my journey. This is the moment for a bird’s-eye view of the recurring themes and dialoguing that’s been taking place.” *In the Spirit of Ntu* muses on various ideas—from a range of disciplines—that collectively shape us. “An underpinning concept of *ubuntu* is that everything that lives carries vital force, and this vital force is what counts as ‘Ntu,’” Makhatini explains. “I’ve found that the hinge that connects all African art, music, religions, worldviews, and histories is this notion of Ntu. This is the part the colonial system was not able to erase. This album is an intervention to hold on to the things that refused to be removed.” Crafted by a talented young lineup, these 10 tracks situate Makhathini’s ideas in the realm of sound. “I was grappling with what it means to locate the sonic inside of these conversations,” he says. “You exist in the context of the whole, and that became the underpinning conceptual view towards the bandstand—all the musicians are younger than me, to build continuity within that shared ‘insideness’ of this cultural sphere.” Here, Makhathini breaks down key tracks from the album. **“Unonkanyamba”** “When I was growing up, there was this myth that if there were heavy quakes, Inkanyamba \[the serpent\] was emerging from beneath the earth. When it emerges, there’s no way you can survive, and we were told we couldn’t see it cause we’d die immediately. As a kid, I’d internalized this as a masculine energy. Here, I use the idea of ‘Uno’ as pointing towards a different polarity. What if these energies were feminine? Anything that has to do with water, we consult Nomkhubulwane—that’s a deity or divinity for rain. There’s a sense in which the arising of Unonkanymaba could be seen as a metaphor for all the things that could possibly emerge from beneath the earth.” **“Mama” (feat. Omagugu)** “This whole album is underpinned by Ntu configured as essence, and essence as a space of origin. There’s always this feminine energy surrounding the womb and water. ‘Mama’ is a human manifestation of what Unonkanyamba would mean at a cosmic level. My wife, Omagugu, composed \[this song\] for my mother-in-law, who got sick and passed away. It’s paying tribute to a mother in a spiritual form—as part of the lineage of ancestors that can make interventions on our behalf. The sonic arrangement starts with a gentleness, then builds, almost like a fetus growing in the womb. The break is the idea of giving birth as something that is high frequency. Though it tries to give a sonic feeling of what it means to be a mother, it asks what it means to lose one.” **”Amathongo”** “In English, we say you’re in ‘deep sleep,’ which has nothing to do with being elsewhere—in a world that functions. In isiZulu, we say ‘usebuthongweni,’ which means he or she is one with the ‘star gods’ or *amathongo*. That says something about sleep as this moment where we’re actually alive in another reality. Ntu speaks about how we collapse these two realities. So, when I say, ‘Vumani vumani vumani weZangoma,’ it’s because you have to surrender. Through this invocation of ‘ukuvuma’ \[‘to agree or concur’\], a collective agreement enables a ritual state where time and space are suspended. When I grew up, jazz musicians had no sense of cultural situatedness. There was no relationship between *amathongo* and the things that we see around us, until Busi Mhlongo and Zim Ngqawana arrived. They brought these connections in a more deliberate way, so this is part of that codification.” **“Emlilweni” (feat. Jaleel Shaw)** “In various creation stories on the \[African\] continent, the earth was once filled with fire. When water emerged, all the fires escaped to the underworlds as a sign of obedience. As we speak about the underworlds, we also speak about the location of our ancestors, so it’s interesting to me how South Africans use fire as one of our codes for expressing our tiredness. We\'re so tired, we’re telling our ancestors that we need bigger interventions. This was the language post-coloniality and still is. Throughout these time periods, we’ve viewed musicians as operating from the edges of these burning fires—to propel the fire burning in the middle. Given the urgency of things to change in a very fragile system, there’s an even deeper urgency for musicians to enunciate from within these burning fires instead of from around them.” **“Omnyama”** “When I first heard Mfaz’Omnyama, his voice would just cut through. He always projected something that was distant from here—something untouchable by the systems. Bab’ Mfaz’Omnyama, Mam’ Busi Mhlongo, and Bab’ Phuzekhemisi were unlocking codes, and if you heard that, that was your access. They were like, ‘I’m giving this to you, and the only way to enter is for you to hear, to sense.’ I think of Maskanda musicians as a radical movement. To pick up a Western classical instrument and do a full-on colonization of it is radical—the guitar was speaking English, and they made it speak isiZulu! Through this unconventional tuning, they were telling us something deeper about how to make these tools obey your own story.” **“Senze’ Nina”** “We’ve seen how men are targeted in a deep way, even during apartheid. We grew up without our fathers, and these were the creations of dysfunctionality in the Black family. There are problematic constructs we’ve created ourselves, too, and men really need to add gentleness to their vocabulary of masculinity. ‘Senze’ Nina’ is about the truth that at the very core of every man lives a gentleness that is inherent just by the mere fact that they were born of a mother. I propose the idea of the making of a new man when that gentleness needs to be reawakened. Some of the most powerful things are projected with a gentleness!” **“Ntu”** “*In the Spirit of Ntu* starts with all these things that are clashing and conflicting, and it ends with this gentle solo piano—this very utopian place. All the things that happen on this album are things that you can see, but this last song leads into a dream and happens elsewhere. This music is one of those ritual technologies that takes us to different locations, where you enter a space and come out of it different. Ntu is that reconfiguration of self.”

With her third studio album, pianist, composer and vocalist Thandi Ntuli begins a journey of self-discovery that picks up where 2018’s *Exiled* left off. “\[In 2020\] I was two years into the release of the last album,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was outgrowing the place I was at when I made *Exiled*; it held space for difficult conversations and difficult feelings—but I didn\'t want to get stuck in that. I became very intentional about bringing joy back to my life, to my outlook. This album is a continuation and a response to *Exiled*, and it\'s sharing little anchors and glimpses of certain things that I felt were responsible for bringing me out of that haze.” Over eight tracks, *Blk Elijah and the Children of Meroë* journeys through what Ntuli frames as remembering and re-membering. “I like to think of life as cyclical, but I also think that what moves us along is looking back,” she explains. “Re-membering is putting your self together again. I think a lot of people have noticed that about the life that we had accepted as normal, pre-lockdown; there’s a reckoning that you go through when you look back.” That journey towards forming a new identity and embracing a higher sense of self is encapsulated in the album’s dual titular concepts. “‘Blk Elijah’ is a character I playfully created some years ago, in having a conversation with a friend of mine,” Ntuli explains. “We were talking about \[South African group\] The Soul Brothers. The organ player\'s name is Black Moses \[Ngwenya\]. And I said, \"One day I\'m going to start playing synths and call myself Black Elijah.\" For this project, I used the idea of ‘Blk Elijah’ as a character. If you think of your higher self, your better self, or just a guardian energy, it comes into your awareness as something that tears things apart in your life with the purpose of building a better reality. I came across the word ‘Meroë’ from a book that was talking about the African origins of different spiritual traditions in the world, and comparing certain names \[with names from\] Christianity. They know the Mother Mary, and the different manifestations of that name in different African cultures. ‘Mary’ pointed me to Sudan, and I learned about the area, Meroë, which is an ancient city of Kush, and the name stuck with me. In the context of this album, Meroë is a fictitious place, where I imagine people who have gone past their difficulties by doing the personal inner work and getting to know themselves, live.” Along with solely featuring her own vocals across the entirety of the project (rather than her usual slate of guest stars) the album sees Ntuli play piano and synth—and record with the same band she performs with live, for the first time: Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums), Keenan Ahrends (guitar), Ndabo Zulu (trumpet), Mthunzi Mvubu (alto saxophone and flute), Shane Cooper (bass guitar), and Nomphumelelo Nhlapo (percussion). Here, Ntuli breaks down the album, track by track. **“Izibongo”** “This is the song that probably highlights the idea of re-membering the most. It’s me singing parts of family praise \[chants\] that were written by my great-grandfather many years ago. Digging into my ancestral memory has been a huge part of my process of re-membering, even in terms of coming back together—as much as we\'ve known each other \[before\], we were not the same \[now\]. Everyone\'s gone through some type of change because of this disruption or disturbance that we\'ve all experienced collectively, and individual disruptions and disturbances, as well.” **“Cold Winds”** “I wrote this at the end of 2019. Sometimes I just have pictures in my mind, and with ‘Cold Winds’, I had just finished reading a book called *Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype* \[by Dr Clarissa Estés\], and that book really tuned me into the psychological power of stories and storytelling, and creating visuals and ideas. ‘Cold Wind’ was this image in my mind of snow—of someone who\'s walking in a snowstorm, and it\'s cold, but that journey can lead you to a place where you find yourself at home. So it was using the elements as a way of telling the story that the bad times don\'t last. Sometimes, you can get to a better place because of the difficulties that you experience.” **“Amazing Grace”** “‘Amazing Grace’, was a retake on the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, but I also wanted to tell my own version of what grace feels like to me, as well. In lockdown, I was thinking, \'How does joy feel? What does happiness feel like? How does it sound or feel?\' And the music, for me, that always circled back to that feeling was Brazilian music—samba, more so than bossa nova. So many times I\'ll be listening to a beautiful song from Brazil—and the lyrics are morbid. It\'s such a sad song, but it sounds so joyful. And I think that is a huge characteristic of African music, and music from different parts of the world. It just feels so good, even if it\'s so sad. I think I drew more from the Latin influence and a little bit from Central African rumba. But the main thing that I was doing musically was just acknowledging that sometimes music just makes you feel that feeling of joy and grace.” **“Portal Into a New World”** “‘Portal Into a New World’ is just a different version of a song that I performed and recorded before; this one I wrote some time ago. It\'s the band\'s favourite song. It\'s really about this experience of going inwards, representing, being in a different environment, a new world—literally, a new experience. But I also think that\'s also reflective of what is external. We have a new reality. And it\'s weird because it\'s almost like partly people are going back into it, and it feels like nothing happened. But, at the same time, everyone knows and senses on a very deep level that something has happened. Something is very different about the way life is now, even if we can\'t always put our finger on it.” **“Go Gently As the Sower Reaps”** “I wrote this in 2020. I was part of a digital cohort of musicians who were commissioned to write pieces for an exhibition called *Inflorescence*, exhibited at The Showroom in London, and it had various composers from around the world writing around the central theme of inflorescence, of budding flowers that are growing. I wrote ‘Go Gently’ with a sense of when the wind is cold, and you\'re just spinning and you don\'t know what\'s what, and where to start and where to end, sometimes it\'s best to just surrender.\' And it usually gets you to the other side when you step out of the panic.” **“Secret Keeper”** “Going back to finding out information about my lineage, where I come from, my personal family history, and in that way learning a lot about history from my family—what I \[realised\] is that that there\'s a lot about Africans, our heritage, that is kept from us. And I deliberately say, \'Kept from us,\' because we never get this information at school. There is so much wealth in our history, and there\'s such a sense of connectedness I feel when I know my history a lot deeper—and I think it would sort out so many issues in society, if we felt that connectedness to each other. I kept having the sound of the vocals that are in Thomas Chauke\'s music \[in my head\]. It was just the thing that was just constantly coming back at me—that melodic sound. Or songs like Chico Twala—those sounds that we grew up with. And I ended up settling on an XiTsonga proverb, which basically translates to, \'Whatever is hidden in the dark will eventually come out.\' I chose Tsonga, not just because of the vocals that I was feeling were referencing that sound, but also because it\'s a cultural language that\'s been marginalised in this country, and there\'s all sorts of \[judgmental things\] people say about Tsonga people or Shangaan people. I just thought it would be cool for me to step into that world and step into that language. I was experimenting with that, as well—writing in a language that I\'ve never really written in, and also just capturing that message in the song.” **“No Wrong Turn”** “I think in many ways the songs are also characters. ‘No Wrong Turn’ came from this realisation that even when you start, and you\'re in the cold wind and it seems it\'s rough, at the end of it all you\'ll actually realise that everything that was happening, was happening *for* you, and it\'s a very soothing experience to \[realise that\] you\'ve been guided the whole time, even when you felt like you were alone, or you were in the pits and nobody knew what was going on. For me, it was almost a realisation that, \'Oh, my gosh, of course everything is fine.\' And just to show, again, the cyclical nature of things where we go up, then we go down, we go round and round.” **“Inkululeko”** ‘Inkululeko’ \[‘freedom’\] is what lies on the other side of having the courage to dig in and reconstruct yourself and your views and your life and heal yourself. The other side of it is a sense of freedom. Inner freedom, because I\'m also very cognisant of the fact that freedom is not something that\'s been fully realised in society. And I can\'t yet say that, \'Society, I\'m free,\' but I do think that the starting point of freedom is internal. It comes from realising, first and foremost, that you\'re not free, having some vision of what freedom looks and feels like, that you can now work towards actually building or manifesting externally. So it was a conclusion, but not a conclusive thing. It\'s not that I\'m free and we\'re all free, but I think that what I\'ve just gone through, the process I\'ve just gone through, has unlocked the journey to freedom. I feel free, at least, from a certain portion of life. I feel free from certain things.”

Creating at a fast pace, trumpeter Theo Croker continues in the ethereal, groove-oriented vein of his 2021 album, *BLK2LIFE // A FUTURE PAST*, with the even more guest-heavy *LOVE QUANTUM*. Around the release of that previous LP, Croker frankly acknowledged his “psilocybin meditations,” and that energy certainly seems in play here as he reaches for a sonic world well beyond his specific instrument. Alto sax legend and Miles Davis alum Gary Bartz, appearing alongside cutting-edge MC and drummer Kassa Overall, bluesily sings a message he’s spoken about for years—“JAZZ IS DEAD”—which, to be properly understood, must be coupled with the next line, “long live music.” The goal, which Croker has embodied from the start, is to break free of any idiom’s expectations, to define tradition on one’s own terms. Croker’s horn pervades in a dreamy legato, playing hooks and melodic fragments as the guests do their thing. The rhythmic complexity and precision of “LOVE THYSELF,” with in-the-pocket vocals by Teedra Moses, provides a particular charge late in the program.

It was an event when this star-studded group reconvened after more than 25 years to release *RoundAgain*, the (very) belated follow-up to Joshua Redman’s *MoodSwing* from 1994. Rather than scatter to the winds, the quartet stayed intact to document a set of five Redman originals on *LongGone*. “Rejoice,” originally from *MoodSwing*, is heard at the end in an exploratory live take from the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Redman shows depth and range as a writer with the moody and chamberlike “Statuesque,” the lilting, lyrical swing of “Long Gone” and “Ship to Shore,” and the jaunty modernism of “Disco Ears” and “Kite Song.” Mehldau and Redman have a fiery, richly complementary blend as the prominent soloists, a quality they also documented on the 2016 duo release *Nearness*.