If you missed my post Wednesday, I offered my choices for numbers 1 through 6 on my Top Ten list of Chicago jazz CDs for 2010. (You’ll find that column here – including the ground rules, my rationale for the list, and why it features six [rather than five] of the Top Ten.)

I promised you the remaining choices would appear Friday. So a day late, and you don’t want to know how many dollars short, here are the remaining picks. I’m still enjoying every one of them.
 

#7 – Vox Arcana, Aerial Age (Allos Documents). Chicago percussionist Tim Daisy has made himself an indispensable part of numerous other bands, including the Vandermark 5, KLANG, the Resonance Ensemble, and a few groups under the leadership of reedist Dave Rempis – one of which, The Engines, had the #3 album on this list (due in no small part to Daisy’s contributions). No wonder he hasn’t found much time to lead his own band. He formed Vox Arcana in early 2008, and it was worth the wait, just to hear Daisy focus on his own heady and flexible compositions. But the trio also comprises clarinetist James Falzone and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (who also plays electronics), both longtime associates of Daisy’s and two of the city's top improvisers. It makes for music both expert and inspiring in its mix of strongly stamped compositional conceits and a variety of improvisational approaches. And apart from that rather dry description – in defiance of it, actually – the music sails, soars, swoops, and excites.

# 8 – Jeb Bishop, 2009 (Better Animal Recordings). Over the last five or six years, the evolution of trombonist Jeb Bishop has been fairly breathtaking. A strong voice on the city’s new-music scene from the time he showed up in the early 90s, he became increasingly vital to a wide range of bands, both here and in Europe, providing solid, journeyman solos in every case. But in the mid-2000s, Bishop’s own style suddenly turned a corner, reached a new plateau, found new depths – choose whichever topographical metaphor you prefer; the point is that almost overnight, Bishop vaulted from a valued Chicago contributor to being one of the most important new-music trombonists in the country. (This event is not in my imagination; I asked him about this a few years ago, and he knew exactly what I was talking about.) This is the first album under Bishop’s name since his “transformation” – an open trio comprising bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly that allows Bishop to fully exploit everything he’s been working on, from surprising new instrumental effects to the laser-like focus of his soloing. (By the way, like Tim Daisy [above], Bishop is yet another member of The Engines; that each of them released such a strong disc on his own this year helps explain the success of that quartet as a whole.)

#9 – John Goldman, Outside The Box (JG Music). Saxist and flutist John Goldman provides a kinder, gentler sound in Chicago jazz, summarized by the cover photo of this album, which shows him in eastern garb against a leafy backdrop. But on this album, he doesn’t allow that impulse to muddy this music, or to turn it into the sonic or emotional mush that characterizes the work of less skilled contemporaries. With summery, uncluttered compositions, and strong collaboration from his band Quadrangle, Outside The Box echoes the power-flower esthetic of the 60s saxists Pharoah Sanders and John Klemmer – minus Sanders’s karmic bombast and Klemmer’s echoplectic psychedelia. The album creeps up on you (or at least, it did on me), achieving some mysterious hybrid of nostalgia, meditation, and solid musicality, manifest in Goldman’s own solos, with their dark tone, spacious phrasing, and clean, clear narratives. There’s really nobody else in town doing anything like this, let alone succeeding at it – which merits recognition on its own.

#10 – Rich Corpolongo Trio, Get Happy (Delmark). Chicago sax veteran Rich Corpolongo has been something of a forgotten man here in the 21st century: his previous album is 12 years old, and his uncompromisingly fervent improvisations have rarely graced the city’s high-profile venues. (His next show takes place at the Cultural Center at noon on January 18.) That’s all rather surprising, as this album reminds some of us and proved to others. With mainstream veterans Dan Shapera on bass and Rusty Jones on drums, it’s an unspoken tribute to Sonny Rollins’s groundbreaking pianoless trio dates of the 1950s. Corpolongo sticks exclusively to Rollins’s instrument, the tenor sax – instead of the alto and soprano, on which he established himself in the 70s and 80s with careening, impassioned coruscations – and even slips in several Rollins trademarks in his solos. In dialing back his natural hyperkinetic energy, Corpolongo echoes the more measured arcs of Rollins’s style; the result is a combination of vintage tenor and Corpolongo’s considerable imaginative powers.