Just before New Year’s, I posted three columns outlining my picks as the Top Ten Jazz Albums of 2009.  (The final column is here, with links to the others.)  Now, as promised – and one New Year’s recovery plus a subsequent killer head cold later – here are my picks for the Top Ten Chicago Jazz Discs of last year. 

Don’t read this as some sort of Hometown Heroes Consolation Parade.  As you’ll see Tuesday, the first album on this list finished second in my overall Top Ten selections (as reported on this site as well as the winter edition of Jazziz Magazine).  Another on this list bubbled just below my overall Top Ten as an Honorable Mention.  Many of my other picks, as well as several other Chicago recordings, received glowing reviews in respected national press outlets, and some did in fact finish in the Top Ten lists of other writers from around the country.  In other words, Chicago jazz artists have attracted plenty of well-deserved attention in the last year.  

So my main purpose here is not to establish lower standards by which “even” Chicago artists can compete; I leave that to one or two other noted critics so mired in boosterism that they no longer survey an even playing field.  Rather, I mean to call attention to excellent recordings made by the folks who live and work in Chicago and who best represent the city’s durable and multifaceted jazz scene.  I received some 60 discs this year from artists based in the immediate Chicago area (I include northwest Indiana), and these were my favorites.

#10 – Kyle Asche Organ Trio, Blues For Mel (Tippin’ Records).   This one took me completely by surprise.  It’s because these guys are doing anything unexpected, but because they’re doing it so perfectly, and under the leadership of a fairly unheralded guitarist.  Kyle Asche moved to the city over a decade ago but still hasn’t hit the radar of most Chicago jazz fans, despite a spacious, uncluttered style that should remind listeners of guitarist Peter Bernstein – who happens to be New York’s go-to guitarist for organ groups.  Asche’s soloing finds a lovely correlative in that of legendary Wisconsin organist Melvin Rhyne, whose iconoclastic simplicity in the late 50s offered an alternative to the dominant style of Jimmy Smith and his many followers.  This unpretentious set swings hard from first note to last, with a fine mix of standards interspersed with a handful of Rhyne’s originals.  But how could it not?  Listening to the bebop beauty “Swedish Schnapps,” and even before I checked the personnel list, I pegged the drummer as George Fludas: no one in Chicago, and only a handful of drummers nationwide, can match his command of the hard-bop pocket, yet still sound so fresh.  (If I knew how he did it, I would tell you.  I don’t, and for me, that’s part of the charm.)
 

#9 – Dana Hall, Into The Light (Origin).  According to every joke on the subject, drumming ain’t exactly rocket science.  I hasten to disclaim the stereotype such jokes presume; and in fact, I mention it only because Chicago drummer Dana Hall so neatly destroys it: he earned a degree in aerospace engineering before embarking on his music career.  Hall’s studies have taken him to the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, even as he maintains a faculty position at the UI Urbana-Champaign – all this while serving as drummer and music director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and performing with a panoply of important artists.  A few years ago, he found time to establish his own quintet, featuring three stellar New Yorkers – trumpeter Terell Stafford, saxist Tim Warfield, and pianist Bruce Barth – plus the classy bassist Rodney Whitaker (now based at Michigan State) – and this, their debut disc, bursts with finely stoked fire and mutual respect.  The band offers a state-of-the-art example of the modern mainstream, with exacting interpretations of eight originals compositions, six by Hall himself.  And with two hornmen able to absorb and channel Hall’s enormous energy at the drums, it becomes one of the sharpest quintets on the scene.
 

#8 – KLANG, Tea Music (Allos Documents).  The leader of this quartet, clarinetist James Falzone, is a committed modernist and only a part-timer when it comes to pure jazz; much of his work has focused on folk music and contemporary chamber music).  Yet speaking about KLANG’s front-line combo of clarinet and vibes, he readily admits: “One can’t hear that sound and not think of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton,” the first and still most famous jazz musicians to blend these instruments in a quartet.  It’s telling, though, that Falzone names clarinetist and composer Jimmy Giuffre as his real inspiration for KLANG.  Giuffre’s small-group experiments, from the 50s through the 80s, have proved visionary in their ecumenical inclusion of non-jazz elements and their refusal to adhere to orthodox limitations of rhythm and swing – qualities that KLANG has used in their evolution of a distinctive group voice.  In this, Falzone can also rely on open-eared invention from three of Chicago’s most admired younger improvisers: bassist Jason Roebke, drummer Tim Daisy, and especially vibist Jason Adasiewicz (whose own disc, Varmint, appears a bit higher up my list, as you’ll see tomorrow).  These guys have a remarkable ability to play both inside the tradition and outside the lines – sometimes in the course of a few measures – resulting in this eclectic but wholly unified album.

 TOMORROW: Numbers 7 through 4 on the Chicago Jazz CD Countdown.