Jazz 2025: The Mid-Year Report, by George Grella

People frequently (that is, once every few years) stop me on the street and ask me, “George” (no one really knows who I am), “should I be listening to jazz?” My first response is always, “absolutely!” Then, when they ask me why, this is what I tell them (again almost never happens, but it’s good to have a handy quasi-script tucked away in the mind):

Because you’re American: Jazz is one of the few genuinely native cultural products of America, one of the best, and one of the most important, powerful and far-reaching. Baseball, Coca-Cola, jazz, and blue jeans, that’s America in the minds of millions of people.

Because you’re modern: America is a modern country and the people who choose to be Americans are modern people. Jazz is a modern music, not just because it was created in the 20th century, but because it works by taking older ideas and remaking them into something new.

Because you’re hip: You have your eyes open and your ear to the ground, you know what’s going on around you and your place amidst it, you are in the world and you value being aware of the facts, the trends, and the vibes. Jazz is the soundtrack to this hipness, communicating immediately and directly from contemporary experience.

Because you’re intelligent: Maybe Art Blakey did not indeed say this thing, but jazz-heads choose to believe he did, so that makes it true enough: “It takes an intelligent ear to listen to jazz.” Enjoy how it stimulates your brain.

Because you love music: You love music as it is, something to listen to for pleasure in your mind, body, and soul, something to bring you together with others, something to surprise and enlighten and fulfill you. You’re not a consumer accumulating commodified culture in order to define and represent your public aspect, you’re a fully realized human being.

All these things come together in the pure joy of listening to jazz, what it does to you and what it communicates to you—I’ve got a record you’ll find below playing right now, and I had to pull my hands away from the keyboard while typing this sentence because the tastiness of the melody and harmony made me lift my head, smiling, and then the delightful funkiness of the rhythm and the spirit of the playing had me dancing in little circles for awhile. That’s jazz, baby.

This mid-year report of the best new jazz albums I’ve heard (with release dates through the end of this month) is here to give you those pleasures and to satisfy the explanations for why you should be listening to jazz. It’s not much of a step to see how each of those qualities above are defenses against the anti-Americanness of both the current national regime. Things like American culture, modernity, intelligence, social expression and communication, valuing anything non-material, these are all things that Trump and his henchmen and sycophants are against.

We also have too many people in this country who enjoy modern material comforts but who are against some of the modern ideas that are this nation’s core. Modernism is a struggle against atavism. Atavism is easy to see in racism and misogyny, but it’s also in the creation and defense of a de facto aristocratic class through things like legacy admissions, indifference toward most white collar crime, the way mediocrities (mostly white males) get to shuffle from one sinecure to another while the wrong sort of people (without the right connections) are ignored no matter their ability.

Jazz is the enemy of that because it’s modern, and it takes merit to play. You cannot fake the music, you sure as hell can’t fake the skill, and if making music for you is about showing off a certain lifestyle or social stance, than you’re in the wrong line of work, my friend. Maybe try politics? There, I’m certain no one in the White House listens to jazz, and I doubt Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and John Fetterman and Elise Slotkin and Rahm Emanuel and Andrew Cuomo and other lazy, cowardly Democrats do either. You know they’re clapping on the one and three.

I also get no hint of jazz fandom from anything on the New York Times opinion page. The Atlantic magazine, despite having the recently departed and great jazz critic Francis Davis on its staff for years (the only reason I ever subscribed), is as un-jazzy as it gets. And The New Yorker has had barely a handful of anything serious about jazz since Whitney Ballet retired, twenty-five fucking years ago.

Well, to paraphrase Ian Faith in This is Spinal Tap, it’s not like New York City is a big jazz town …

The lack of attention to jazz can be frustrating and discouraging (and thank you for reading this far), but one saving grace to that in 2025 is that I can’t see the regime censoring jazz. Even though Fox News loudmouths can hear Scott Pelley tell Wake Forest University graduating seniors that journalism is under attack and say, as former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did, that he should have been arrested (she doesn’t listen to jazz because she doesn’t have the intelligence to as you can see by her inability to understand plain English words that go into her ears and come out her mouth) they can’t go after something that’s invisible to them.

They can harm jazz in other ways, though. Because it’s improvised out of the everyday experience of the musicians, jazz tells you what’s happening faster than any other kind of music. Making albums is of course a little slower process, and all the ones below were recorded before January.

The Trump challenges
The documentation of what’s happening right now is being made right now, but since the Trump regime wants to make life more expensive and harder and more unhealthy and shorter for all except the elite, it’s going to be plain economically and physically harder to make jazz, until things change.

The music that gets made is still going to be great, but the situation is bad for the music—expect less of it next year. Nothing against Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, but a rich culture like this one needs a hell of a broader range of music than those two can produce.

So, while you can, listen to the records on this list, and don’t just stream them but buy them so the musicians can make a little money. Via Bandcamp if possible, Amazon only as a last resort.

Some of these I’ve mentioned in previous columns, and they remain on the list because they will vie for best-of-the-year status for the next six months. And I seriously doubt there will be a better record of any kind this year than Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone, but they doesn’t mean I won’t try and listen for one. Enjoy, early and often:

• Ambrose Akinmusire, honey from a winter stone (Nonesuch)
• Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, Live in Philadelphia (Otherly Love)
• Glenn Dickson and Bob Familiar, All the Light of Our Sphere (Sounds Familiar)
• James Brandon Lewis, Apple Cores (Anti-)
• The Ancients, The Ancients (Eremite)
• Sasha Berliner, Fantome (Outside In Music)
• The Hemphill Stringtet, The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill (Out of Your Head)
• Hearts and Minds, Illuminescence (Astral Spirits)
• Sullivan Fortner, Southern Nights (Artwork Records)
• Pitch, Rhythm & Consciousness, Sextet (Reva Records)

George Grella

George Grella wrote the book on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. He write other stuff too. killyridols.substack.com/