Bandcamp now has @jonahpwll 's list up, too: (I'm hoping he'll still have his Bird Is The Worm countdown this year, too, which is not constrained to Bandcamp releases (though Bandcamp has plenty of good jazz!)
I encourage everyone to give Where Future Unfolds a spin, if you haven't yet. Protest music yes, but also powerfully inspirational and even optimistic. Part of an incredible year of releases by International Anthem Records.
Love that NPR classical list... thanks for posting. Speaking of classical lists... This one tends a bit more towards traditional in most years, but does have pretty wide breadth of labels and performers covered.
Music Web International's Recordings of the Year for 2019
Go to albumoftheyear.org for an excellent list of lists - more than 100 lists of the best of 2019 and over 30 lists of the best of the decade all in alphabetical order.
Bandcamp now has @jonahpwll 's list up, too: (I'm hoping he'll still have his Bird Is The Worm countdown this year, too, which is not constrained to Bandcamp releases (though Bandcamp has plenty of good jazz!)
Looking at maybe starting the BitW Best of 2019 on January 1st. Might kick things off on the following Sunday, instead, though.
I was really hoping to have a new site name and site design in place before getting the Best Of festivities underway, but I'm nowhere close to being where I need to be, so 2019 will be the final year-end list as Bird is the Worm, and sometime in early 2020, it'll be all new everything.
Bandcamp now has @jonahpwll 's list up, too: (I'm hoping he'll still have his Bird Is The Worm countdown this year, too, which is not constrained to Bandcamp releases (though Bandcamp has plenty of good jazz!)
Looking at maybe starting the BitW Best of 2019 on January 1st. Might kick things off on the following Sunday, instead, though.
I was really hoping to have a new site name and site design in place before getting the Best Of festivities underway, but I'm nowhere close to being where I need to be, so 2019 will be the final year-end list as Bird is the Worm, and sometime in early 2020, it'll be all new everything.
Cheers.
Sounds good from over here! Let's here it for an all new all better 20-20!
Well, I have been sick for a week, but finally found the
energy to compile my own best of 2019 list for the edification of anyone here who has the patience and
a few Facebook friends who check in on it each year. All the usual caveats – it’s not the
top 20, I only listen to a tiny sliver of what’s there, and it’s just what I
liked best out of a fair bit of listening. The point of the list is just to help beautiful things be noticed.
My method was to make a playlist of everything I spent time with this year that
was a 2019 release (whole albums only), spend December with it (adding things I found in December!), and gradually remove albums that did
not feel like close companions until I did not feel like removing any more. The 23 that were left felt as if they fit roughly into three tiers, and because
they are the ones left, all three tiers are recommendations. Where possible the links go to where the album can be streamed for free; a few go to samples at Amazon.
First, these are the albums that right now feel like
long-term additions to my life, things I will return to again and again. These albums
had that extra something special that drew me in close, kept me there, and still has me wanting to hear them more. Two of them (Cockburn
and Morse) I was privileged to see live and bought the CD at the show. In alphabetical
order:
This next bunch are great too – perhaps just a little less
immediate on my instinctive “I have to listen to that again soon” horizon, but really
rewarding. Note Porya Hatami, Darren McClure, and Neal Morse all getting a
second mention already; some of my favorite artists had good years. (And this
Morse album has an extra niche in my memory because much to my surprise, I
found the CD at the back of a little market stall in Kyiv, Ukraine during a visit). Again, in alphabetical
order:
And the third group, still albums that I liked a lot. Perhaps I would be slightly less surprised if I had changed my
mind about some of these in a few months. I think that is why they are in this group - I am not quite sure yet how tenaciously they will stick in the listening rotation.
But the line between those below and those above is often wafer thin and porous.
Alphabetically:
@Germanprof only recognizing Frahm, Frisell, Herskedal, Loscil, and a few others, that's a lot of new stuff to explore, nicely organized as always. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if NPR is combining the 2019 and 2020 Francis Davis jazz critics poll compilation. ;-) We're already to mid January and no sign of it yet. (Aside: I wonder if the trend towards ever larger mega polls, which in turn seem to take longer to compile, etc., is going to max out at some point and we'll return to just "top 10/20/25-type lists that come out at the end of the actual calendar year. Not a criticism of such lists, just wonder if this is one of those "pendulum" trends that tends to reverse direction after a while...)
The end of the year is upon us, which means that it's time once again
for an Annual Brainwashed Readers Poll. As the longest running online
interactive music poll which allows the readers to BOTH nominate and
vote, we once again open up the nomination round.
As always, please review all the releases that have been entered before submitting, because if duplicates are entered, your whole entry will be deleted!
Nomination round will run for 2 weeks. Voting round will begin
December 22nd and last through the end of the calendar year. Results
will be posted in 2020.
Latest on NPR seems to indicate end of this week, maybe start of next.
Keep in mind that it's not just the compilation of about 150 voter ballots, but also various write-ups encapsulating the year AND getting all of the individual ballots posted onto Tom Hull's site in various sort orders. And since it doesn't appear Tom's site runs on a standard wordpress theme, it may be he has a lot of sweatwork to invest in getting his site to host the kind of search-friendly, heavily cross-linked posts the NPR-FD poll brings with it.
I can't believe this is already my seventh year submitting a ballot.
Latest on NPR seems to indicate end of this week, maybe start of next.
Keep in mind that it's not just the compilation of about 150 voter ballots, but also various write-ups encapsulating the year AND getting all of the individual ballots posted onto Tom Hull's site in various sort orders. And since it doesn't appear Tom's site runs on a standard wordpress theme, it may be he has a lot of sweatwork to invest in getting his site to host the kind of search-friendly, heavily cross-linked posts the NPR-FD poll brings with it.
I can't believe this is already my seventh year submitting a ballot.
Oh I have no doubt that it is a tremendous amount of work. I was just observing a trend, and wondering aloud if that trend had practical limits or would reverse at some point:
2016 NPR Jazz Critics Poll results were published Dec 21, 2016.
2017 NPR Jazz Critics Poll results were published Dec 20, 2017.
2018 NPR Jazz Critics Poll results were published Jan 5, 2019.
2019 NPR Jazz Critics Poll results will be published ... ??? (Sometime after Jan 14, 2020)
Wow. Nice for Kris, didn't see that coming. Also Tomeka and Jaimie Branch. Too lazy to check, but top 10 seems more free jazz/improv-oriented than previous years. While certainly a worthy effort, that AACM album prob benefited from 'living legend' votes that could have gone to Abdullah Ibrahim
I like the "solitary #1s" section, just to highlight those "killer" outliers. A fun angle, though also sorta inherently meaningless in terms of the poll's point of accessing consensus. I guess one could argue those choices are more likely free of exposure and groupthink effects.
Haha. I guess I was a mere matter of hours early in my post wondering when the NPR list would be published this year.
The most interesting aspects of these "poll of polls" type lists for me are (1) the diversity and (2) the general lack of consensus. No album - not even #1 Kris Davis - appeared on even 30% of ballots, and only two albums (#1 and #2) appeared on 1 in 5 ballots. 74% of participating critics did not list the #1 album anywhere in their top 10. 78% of critics did not list the #2 album anywhere in their top 10. In fact, only 15 albums achieved mention on 10% or more of ballots.
The positive takeaway is obviously that, as always, there are lots of great jazz albums out there and a wide diversity of tastes. But the ranking itself reflects fairly narrow differences in rather small pluralities of preferences. Basically, if 1 in 4 critics thinks your album is one of the ten best of the year, you have a good chance of "winning" the NPR poll of polls.
only 15 albums achieved mention on 10% or more of ballots
Wow! That is interesting.
But the ranking itself reflects fairly narrow differences in rather small pluralities of preferences. Basically, if 1 in 4 critics thinks your album is one of the ten best of the year, you have a good chance of "winning" the NPR poll of polls.
I'm not sure that's a "but" so much as an "and". These polls are useful to listeners to supply albums "likely" to intersect with their own tastes because of evidence (the poll) that those albums connected with a non-random selection of other serious listeners. The diaspora of styles and tastes implies the random fluctuations will still yield fairly small poll numbers. Iow, I don't think it would be "easy" to get 1-in-4, so there's still significance regarding the "useful" point above, I think. (There is the potential for the aforementioned "exposure and groupthink effects", but it's hard to gauge magnitude there.)
The point distribution is useful to consider. #1 was 260, #2 185, and decadal medians: 01-10: 135 11-20: 78 21-30: 64 31-40: 49 41-50: 37
So flattens out fairly quickly, demonstrating your "positive takeaway".
Comments
https://www.allmusic.com/year-in-review/2019/favorite-jazz
i agree with two of these (Break and Solastalgia).
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/lists.php
Well, I have been sick for a week, but finally found the energy to compile my own best of 2019 list for the edification of anyone here who has the patience and a few Facebook friends who check in on it each year. All the usual caveats – it’s not the top 20, I only listen to a tiny sliver of what’s there, and it’s just what I liked best out of a fair bit of listening. The point of the list is just to help beautiful things be noticed. My method was to make a playlist of everything I spent time with this year that was a 2019 release (whole albums only), spend December with it (adding things I found in December!), and gradually remove albums that did not feel like close companions until I did not feel like removing any more. The 23 that were left felt as if they fit roughly into three tiers, and because they are the ones left, all three tiers are recommendations. Where possible the links go to where the album can be streamed for free; a few go to samples at Amazon.
First, these are the albums that right now feel like long-term additions to my life, things I will return to again and again. These albums had that extra something special that drew me in close, kept me there, and still has me wanting to hear them more. Two of them (Cockburn and Morse) I was privileged to see live and bought the CD at the show. In alphabetical order:
Darren McClure – On Opposites (Ambient/Drone)
Deaf Center – Low Distance (Ambient/Modern Classical)
M. Grig – Mount Carmel (Ambient/Microsound)
Neal Morse Band – The Great Adventure (Symphonic Progressive Rock)
Nils Frahm – All Encores (Elecronic/Acoustic/Ambient)
Porya Hatami/Aaron Martin/Roberto Attanasio – Sallaw (Ambient/Modern Classical)
***
This next bunch are great too – perhaps just a little less immediate on my instinctive “I have to listen to that again soon” horizon, but really rewarding. Note Porya Hatami, Darren McClure, and Neal Morse all getting a second mention already; some of my favorite artists had good years. (And this Morse album has an extra niche in my memory because much to my surprise, I found the CD at the back of a little market stall in Kyiv, Ukraine during a visit). Again, in alphabetical order:
Barock Project – Seven Seas (Progressive Rock)
Bill Frisell & Thomas Morgan - Epistrophy (Jazz)
Bruce Soord – All This Will be Yours (Rock/Singer-Songwriter)
Daniel Herskedal – Voyage (Jazz/Modern Classical)
Darren Harper – Paths (Ambient/Drone)
Masaya Kato – Wavefront Aberrations (Sound Art/Experimental)
Neal Morse – Jesus Christ the Exorcist (Progressive Rock/Musical)
Zahn/Hatami/McClure – Ypsilon (Ambient/Electronic)
***
And the third group, still albums that I liked a lot. Perhaps I would be slightly less surprised if I had changed my mind about some of these in a few months. I think that is why they are in this group - I am not quite sure yet how tenaciously they will stick in the listening rotation. But the line between those below and those above is often wafer thin and porous. Alphabetically:
Aukai – Reminiscence (Ambient/Modern Classical)
Caterina Barbieri – Ecstatic Computation (Electronic/Modular Synth)
Corey Fuller – Break (Ambient)
Dream Theater – Distance Over Time (Progressive Metal)
Kevin Hays & Lionel Loueke – Hope (Jazz)
Kryshe – Continuum (Ambient/Modern Classical)
Loscil – Equivalents (Ambient/Electronic)
Rafael Anton Irisarri – Solastalgia (Ambient/Drone)
A Closer Listen’s Best Electronic Albums of the Decade
2019 Readers Poll: The Results
Oh I have no doubt that it is a tremendous amount of work. I was just observing a trend, and wondering aloud if that trend had practical limits or would reverse at some point:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/795888693/the-2019-npr-music-jazz-critics-poll
I believe the following are available from Bandcamp (by my count about half):
The only one I know is available at eMusic is the Catherine Russell (Vocal 3)
The most interesting aspects of these "poll of polls" type lists for me are (1) the diversity and (2) the general lack of consensus. No album - not even #1 Kris Davis - appeared on even 30% of ballots, and only two albums (#1 and #2) appeared on 1 in 5 ballots. 74% of participating critics did not list the #1 album anywhere in their top 10. 78% of critics did not list the #2 album anywhere in their top 10. In fact, only 15 albums achieved mention on 10% or more of ballots.
The positive takeaway is obviously that, as always, there are lots of great jazz albums out there and a wide diversity of tastes. But the ranking itself reflects fairly narrow differences in rather small pluralities of preferences. Basically, if 1 in 4 critics thinks your album is one of the ten best of the year, you have a good chance of "winning" the NPR poll of polls.
The point distribution is useful to consider. #1 was 260, #2 185, and decadal medians:
01-10: 135
11-20: 78
21-30: 64
31-40: 49
41-50: 37
So flattens out fairly quickly, demonstrating your "positive takeaway".