The New York Times' Best Jazz Albums of 2021

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.

The Sound Will Tell You, Moran's 3rd Solo piano recording, was made on January 4-6, 2021. Half of the works use an effect dubbed "DRIP", a filter to allow the sound cast a shadow. The Drip gives the note another gravity. These pieces are marked by "tear", "honey" and "shadow. Moran, from Houston, also recalls DJ Screw's ability to give a song a new sluggish gait. Drawing out the drawl and sinking the beat into the mud. The music moves in slower motion. Many of the titles refer to Toni Morrison, the author Moran read most frequently during quarantine. She evokes sound often and speaks of the pitch black night as "it may as well be a rainbow." - Song of Solomon. The Sound Will Tell You is being concurrently released with an exhibition of new works on paper at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Tribeca, New York. Moran's practice of recording his hand motions on the piano manual creates a variation on the "recording". The attack of the finger on the key leaves a mark and accumulates residue. A believer in "melody", much like his idols Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols, Moran writes pieces that retrace themselves. The songs step into their own footsteps, a choreography of repetition, occasionally disrupting their own dance. Body and Soul remains a piece Moran circles around, this time with a nod to Eddie Kendricks' Intimate Friends. For Love was recently heard in the film version of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which Moran scored. His dedication to the melody is what pulls this record into another territory, aiming to eliminate the differences between melody and solo. The narrative drives these works. How much more terrible was the Night highlights America's current state of pandemonium.

For this suite inspired by the life and legacy of polymath agriculturalist George Washington Carver, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis assembles a quintet with cornetist Kirk Knuffke, cellist Chris Hoffman, bassist William Parker, and drummer Chad Taylor. The texture is raw and sinewy, with earthy grooves and big, declamatory melodic themes that find Lewis sounding like his forebear David S. Ware (a close colleague of Parker’s for decades). But the writing can be intimate and chamber-like, with tenor, cello, and cornet interweaving sensitively on pieces like “Fallen Flowers” and “Experiment Station.” Parker plays guembri, the bass-like West African instrument, on “Lowlands of Sorrow” and “Chemurgy,” introducing a low, sandpapery timbre in the mix. Taylor’s mbira on the shortest piece, “Seer,” further varies the palette. The cover art is Carver’s actual drawing of his ultimately impractical prototype Jesup Wagon (funded by a Morris Jesup), intended as a rolling laboratory that would spread word of new innovations to farmers on-site. As Robin D. G. Kelley puts it in a booklet essay, Carver “made art out of botanical science, listening to voices while collating data.” He was also a capable musician. In finding deep connection with the subject, Lewis emerges with something beautiful and prescient of his own.

"Visions Of Your Other" is the third album by Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days, one that takes the band back to its roots in original compositions after their Mexican folk music-inspired release, El Maquech. Adam and two of his bandmates, Walter Stinson on bass and Zack O'Farrill on drums, return along with the arrival of Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone. The album takes its title from a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's post-WWII psychological portrait, "The Master", in which the main character, a veteran suffering PTSD, is interrogated about supposed visions he had of his mother. In the vein of this theme of dueling realities, the album functions a study of conflict and contrast. The opening track, "stakra", takes Ryuichi Sakamoto's chromatic fantasy of the same name and extracts just a fragment of it, allowing the band to enter a deeper sonic meditation. Walter Stinson's "Kurosawa at Berghain" finds the meeting place between the rigidity of electronic house music and the spontaneity of acoustic, chord-less quartet. Adam wrote both "Inner War" and "Ducks" while staying and working at Morning Glory Farm in Bethel, ME in the summer of 2017, the former of which is a reflection of inner turmoil he felt when bringing chickens to be slaughtered. "Hopeful Heart" is a pseudo-lullaby inspired by the story of two lovers torn apart by circumstance, yet their uncertainty is lightly tinged with optimism. And the closing track, "Blackening Skies", was written from a climate change-induced anxiety, having experienced a scorching heatwave in NY within days of a summer monsoon in LA. Visual artist: Janelle Jones Liner notes: Kevin Sun

[CENTERING 1020–1029] 10 Albums – 91 total tracks – 594 minutes (10 hours) of all new music created expressly for this collection. MUSICIANS William Parker: compositions, bass & addt’l instruments Featuring: an international, inter-generational array of singers & musicians, drawn from both long-standing colleagues and a new generation of devoted artists. That William Parker is a bassist, composer and bandleader of extraordinary spirit and imaginative drive is common knowledge among any with an interest in the progressive jazz scene of the past 25 years or more. What’s become increasingly apparent, though, is Parker’s stature as a visionary of sound and song – an artist of melody and poetry who works beyond category, to use the Ellingtonian phrase. The latest multi-disc boxed set from Centering Records/AUM Fidelity devoted to Parker’s expansive creativity underscores his virtually peerless achievement in recent years. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World (Volumes 1–10) is a 10-album collection of vocal and instrumental suites all recorded expressly for this set between late 2018 and early 2020, with women’s voices at its core. This is music as empathetic as it is intrepid, as philosophical as it is visceral, as resolutely modernist as it is attuned to tradition. Parker’s art not only draws from the deepest well of African-American culture; it breathes in inspiration from across the globe, with sounds drawn from Africa, Asia and Indonesia as well as Europe and the Americas; there is free improvisation and re-imagined sonic collage; there are album-length explorations of solo piano and solo voice, along with string ensembles and ancient wind instruments. There are dedications to jazz heroes, Native Americans and Mexican migrants, plus tributes to the great African-American culture of Harlem and the mix of passion and compassion Parker found in vintage Italian cinema. Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World conjures a vast world of music and feeling, and its creation is a feat that ranks with that of the most ambitious talents in any genre.

A collaboration between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, drawing inspiration from Iduma’s latest book, A Stranger’s Pose, a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry. In a combination of music, text, image and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels, Intimate Strangers explores such themes as of movement, home, grief, absence and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world”. Intimate Strangers is made possible with the support from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Equal parts vocalist, bassist, and “songwright” (her preferred term), Esperanza Spalding continually raises the bar with wildly imaginative, process-oriented albums like *SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB*. The successor to *12 Little Spells* (and the hard-to-find *Exposure*), *S.A.L.* reflects Spalding’s deep interest in music therapy with 12 songs, or “formwelas,” conceived to address specific types of emotional disquiet. (Each is explained on the album’s dedicated website, which also includes detailed accounts of the songs’ “ingredients” or musical building blocks.) The formwelas come in three distinct batches: the first three completed in Wasco County, Oregon, with various collaborators including multi-instrumentalist Phoelix and coproducer Raphael Saadiq; the next three disarmingly intimate tracks in her hometown of Portland, with vocalist and cowriter Corey King; and the remaining six in downtown Manhattan with band members Leo Genovese (piano/keyboards), Matthew Stevens (guitar), Aaron Burnett (tenor sax), and Francisco Mela (drums), plus special guests. (“Formwela 12” is a vinyl-only bonus track.) Spalding’s expressive range is vast, from the most lyrical and infectious melodies to the rawest dissonance and rhythmic fragmentation—at times in the same piece, such as “Formwela 9,” cowritten (“formwelated”) with Genovese. Stevens and Genovese share credit for “Formwela 11,” its twisting acoustic guitar and high-register vocal unisons calling to mind Hermeto Pascoal. The great Wayne Shorter sends “Formwela 3” into the heavens with his inimitable saxophone work (*S.A.L.* came out less than two months before the premiere of *Iphigenia*, the opera cowritten by Shorter and Spalding).