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Brilliance accommodates any form — and, as these albums show, sometimes lightning lands in a bottle.
No big jazz-pop crossover star broke out in 2019, and nobody hijacked the conversation with an incendiary comment requiring some “O.K. Boomer” clapback. Jazz stuck to its own steadfast devices this year, though that hardly meant sitting still: Improvising musicians are increasingly dissolving the membranes separating storytelling, composition, live performance and visual art; the music’s death-defying, ever-diversifying present is a place of vast possibility.
Kris Davis, 39, has spent years as her generation’s powerhouse pianist in waiting. No longer. On “Diatom Ribbons,” her skills as a composer, band assembler, system builder and improviser — a musical auteur, basically — come fully into focus. Ms. Davis builds her compositions on crooked patterns and splintered loops that somehow become a kind of magnetic touchstone, bringing together wildly diverse musicians in tangled unity.
Since the mid-1990s, this 11-piece band has been the testing ground for Guillermo Klein’s tumbling, tango-influenced composition style — basically unbeholden to broader trends in pop, classical or jazz — and “Cristal” is among Los Guachos’ best efforts. Mr. Klein rarely spends time on music that wasn’t written by himself or a bandmate, but here he devotes three tracks to the repertoire of Carlos Gardel, an early-20th-century tango star, demonstrating how to pay homage without disappearing into the material.
In a New York City crowded with hyperliterate young jazz talent, the 24-year-old vibraphonist Joel Ross has been putting forward something refreshing and direct. But was anybody ready for his debut album — self-recorded three years ago with his quintet, Good Vibes, and released by Blue Note in May — to be so fully formed? Like Roy Hargrove in the 1990s, he is the rare young talent able to inhabit the clichés of contemporary jazz while also challenging them.
Steve Lehman is an alto saxophonist who’s often in overdrive: hammering at his odd time signatures, scraping and squeezing his tone, refusing to land. Craig Taborn is a pianist of abundant gifts who underplays; he sculpts negative space through suggestion as much as through sound. With Mr. Lehman’s smartly balanced, rhythmically rampant compositions at their fingertips, and his longtime rhythm section at their backs, these two play as if always in each other’s orbit, allowing the air around them to be felt, never embracing but always connected.
Just 30 minutes long, “Love Tape” is the latest in a series of Marquis Hill releases caught between album and mixtape, between casual one-off and conceptual ambition, between jazz and hip-hop and beat music. Mr. Hill, a trumpeter, is focused on communing with his inspirations (spoken words of wisdom are interspersed throughout the album, mostly taken from interviews with black women) more than on simply signaling his musical influences (Hargrove, D’Angelo, Madlib).
Ms. Sánchez writes for her quintet with a melody-first approach — and melody-second, and melody-third. She weaves the alto saxophone of Roman Filiu together with the tenor of Chris Cheek and her own line-driven piano style. The music of this international group (the members all hail from different countries) is driven by intersections and rhythmic friction, but it remains fluid and acrobatic.
The third and finest album from m_unit, Miho Hazama’s 13-piece ensemble, which mixes strategies from jazz and Western classical music, “Dancer in Nowhere” affirms this young composer’s place in the emerging pantheon of 21st-century big band leaders. The small string section drapes a canopy; swirling horns run through it like a waterway; and the vibraphone, piano, bass and drums unite to create a firm footing beneath it all.
Purists are bound to lament that the newly refurbished Art Ensemble has so little in common with the classic five-piece outfit of the 1970s and ’80s. (Most of that group’s members are dead). But under the guidance of Roscoe Mitchell and Famoudou Don Moye, the new overflow lineup becomes something else: a habitat where woodwinds and strings can converse with the radical poetry of Moor Mother, and where, moments later, a corps of percussionists can open up into a 10-minute, pseudo-Caribbean vamp.
Gerald Cleaver, a drummer, recorded these five lengthy tracks at a jazz bar in Connecticut in 2006. He finally decided to release them as an album this fall, and it’s a good thing: We need more straight-ahead jazz like this to recirculate in the ecosystem. It’s masterly and unpretentious, full of original compositions driven by powerful rhythm rather than by structural complexity, and always propelled along by the springy locomotion of this expert drummer.
A saxophonist, clarinetist and sound designer, Lea Bertucci has made the study of sonics and resonance into nearly her entire practice — one that abounds with implications about our relationship to the ecology around us, the safety of our bodies in space and the healing potential of sound. She recorded this solo album not in a field but a decommissioned grain silo in Buffalo — a hollowed-out monument to economic decay — where a 12-second-long echo allowed her to harmonize with her own horn in slow, overlapping strokes, savoring a bit of the past as it slipped away.