Number 6 on my list; number 1 among the nation's critics

Continuing the year-end countdown of Top Ten jazz CDs in 2009 (which began yesterday and concludes tomorrow), let me take a moment to refer you to a whole bunch of other Top Ten lists – and also clarify an apparent inconsistency in my own approach.

The other Top Ten lists are part of the Fourth Annual Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, the results of which came on line yesterday.  The poll encompasses 99 jazz critics from around the U.S., myself included; you can see the overall results here, and also look up all the individual ballots here. 

As it turns out, one of the albums in yesterday’s posting – This Brings Us To, vol.1, by Henry Threadgill -- was selected #2 overall in the Voice poll, while my sixth pick (see below) came in first among the Voice voters.  More intriguing to me is that the Voice poll’s #4 pick (which was also #4 on my list), was a runaway favorite for “Best Debut” album, indicating a significant concurrence among the nation’s writers. 

On the other hand, you could equally argue that the critical establishment is as balkanized as ever, since the #1 album received mentions on only 33 of the 99 ballots.  In other words, for two-thirds of these voting critics, the “Jazz Album of the Year” didn’t register at all among their Top Ten.  Even in the topsy-turvy 2000 Presidential election, George Bush could claim a greater mandate than that.

Finally, about that “apparent inconsistency” I alluded to above.  The Voice poll barred critics from voting for albums in which they’d participated.  It’s a perfectly reasonable restriction, but one that I have ignored in presenting my picks to you here.  As you’ll see tomorrow, my #2 album of the year is one for which I in fact wrote the liner notes, forcing me to omit it from the Voice voting – and thus moving each of the others up one place in the voting.  (Just in case you cared.)

On with it, then:

#6 – Vijay Iyer, Historicity (ACT).  Iyer’s intense and riveting music stitches together mathematics (he holds a master’s in physics); echoes of the musical legacy of his ancestral India; and a jagged and powerful lyricism.  From these materials he has created an intellectually ferocious music that also moves the body and soul.  He colors his epic solos with the spirit – and occasionally the complex rhythms – of raga, and during this decade, his recordings have placed him at the forefront of modern jazz attempts to balance Western and Eastern modes of expression. (They’ve also made him a critics’ darling: in addition to winning this year’s Village Voice poll, for example, Historicity was also named #1 by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR.)  Almost all of Iyer's previous work has featured another solo voice, usually the saxophone of fellow Indian-American Rudresh Mahanthappa; this trio album makes clear that Iyer can level an audience with the same impact using only his exquisite trio.

With Solal at the piano, the listener supplies the love.

#5 – Martial Solal, Live At The Village Vanguard (CAM Jazz).  Now 82, the Algerian-born, Paris-based pianist Martial Solal vigorously smashes two hoary jazz stereotypes each time he hits a key.  First is the canard that Europeans can’t really capture the spirit of American jazz: Solal has few peers on either side of the Atlantic in terms of swing, virtuosity, creativity, and in a rarefied musicality that makes his every note sound inevitable.  The second myth is that jazz musicians must strike a compromise as they grow older, replacing energy with experience: Solal plays with undiminished capacity and vitality, and sometimes seems to have actually grown stronger in recent years.  In this unaccompanied performance from New York’s most famous jazz club, the grand old man of European jazz engirdles a history of the piano, from the other-worldly virtuosity of Art Tatum’s swing to the elliptical mystique of such later artists as Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, and Brad Mehldau.  It’s a joy from start to finish.

Darcy James Argue seems to come out of nowhere; actually, it was Vancouver.

#4 – Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam).  Until this fall, you couldn’t find a better-named performing ensemble.  Darcy James Argue’s 18-piece jazz orchestra had never made an album: for those outside of New York, the band existed primarily in rumor and reputation.  And Argue himself was probably – well, arguably – better known for his extensive and entertaining blogging.  Then comes this collection of seven brilliantly scored, utterly inventive, masterfully performed large-scale works, each brimming with high energy and new sounds, but also showing a firm command of the big-band tradition.  The Vancouver-born Argue studied with Bob Brookmeyer, a legendary figure in jazz orchestration, known first for his work with Gerry Mulligan in the 50s and then, in the 80s, with what is now the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.  But I hear in Argue’s work a more direct link to the man who provided the seeds for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra – the composer and arranger Thad Jones, who rewrote the book on jazz composition in the 1970s.  (And in my book, praise doesn’t come much higher than that.)