2021: MY FAVORITES
2021 has been another year well-stocked with high quality releases. Not as much as 2020, but still a lot. To avoid the rabbit hole of an endless list, I narrowed the choices down to 15 and I only picked from records I actually bought. The list is at the bottom of this post and, except for the first choice, it’s in alphabetical order.
My #1 pick is the latest effort by Canadian (but Brooklyn-based) tenor saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber. ‘Idiom’ is a double album (actually, a double cd, as it’s not available on vinyl) walking the thin line between avant-jazz and contemporary classical music. Anna herself described it as a way to bring her compositional and improvisational vocabulary closer together, and she tried to achieve this balance by using some unusual approaches borrowed from her improvisational language. She calls them “extended techniques” and, if you’re a geek for this stuff like I am, you can find additional info in the liner notes and on the website of her label, Pi Recordings.
Two different line-ups were used: cd 1 is a super-tight trio with Anna, Matt Mitchell on piano, and John Hollenbeck on drums; cd 2 is an ensemble of 12 musicians including strings, brasses, synth, and rhythm section. The whole thing is so dense with musical ideas that it took me time and multiple listens to “digest” it all, but that’s exactly the best part of such a challenging record. It spurs you to revisit it, and every new play reveals more subtleties. I have a slight preference for the trio material, for how it manages to keep a high degree of complexity while still sounding somehow “straight in your face” (and you often wonder how it’s possible that it’s just three of them); the ensemble material is more of a grower, but definitely top quality.
