*The WDR Big Band's "Bluegrass" (MCG Jazz), feat. mandolinist Mike Marshall, violinist Darol Anger and saxophonist/ WDR music director Bob Mintzer, earned plenty of spins on "Breaking Jazz" over the last year. But was it good enough to earn being called Breaking Jazz's Top Album of the Year? Here's a hint, it's on the list, but you'll have to keep checking to see if it earns the top spot.
Between now and the end of the calendar year, I’ll be revealing my favorite albums of the past year. I’ll present a new one each day or every couple of days, one at a time. It’ll be a list that will continue to grow as we approach the final day of 2025. Whether on paper or on digital screen, lists are inert, but for our purposes you might liken this list to something organic, a thing you can almost see growing in real time, like jazz itself.
This first group of ten albums comes from a group of musicians I call The Varsity. These are artists of proven, consistent excellence. They don’t audition for anyone anymore. They’ve developed signature sounds — and yet, they’re always evolving.
Note: There is nothing definitive about this list, except that it is mine. It doesn’t speak for jazz as a whole, nor does it attempt to prescribe how anyone else (but me) ought to define jazz or the scope of its boundaries; it speaks only for the Breaking Jazz universe as I’ve conceived it.
Airing every Sunday evening from 6:30 to 8 p.m., “Breaking Jazz” brings you the music and musicians of the moment — jazz as it’s being played today.
Breaking Jazz, to me, champions diversity of sound within and across the jazz landscape. It champions the music and musicians of the moment, musical omnivores with superb jazz training, the products of which are truly awe-inspiring technique, facility, and feel. How about respect for the giants on whose shoulders they stand? That reverence for tradition; the curiosity about history, timelines, lineages…it’s all there. These are artists who’ve had great mentors, and jazz is about nothing if not that. L’dor v’dor. Generation to generation.
They make music and leave the categorizing to the record labels and publicists.
If all that sounds a bit too postmodern for you, I get it. Stick to the rivers and lakes you’re used to. The best thing about jazz today is that the waters are warm and teeming with life everywhere! I’ve asked my colleagues here at the radio station to share their own year-end best-of lists with me, and I hope they choose to do so. I will happily publish their lists here, on our humble website, right alongside my own. My hope is to provide our audience with jazz’s entire sonic kaleidoscope.
So over the next couple weeks, I’ll present my favorite albums of the year. Not necessarily the best, but those that feel most representative of the Breaking Jazz aesthetic, such as it is. As we get closer to the new year, I’ll unveil Part II of this series, my favorite of those presently on the come-up.
I call this group my Select Team.
The future of the Varsity, the Select Team is assembled of young, up-and-coming talent with less name recognition right now…but that’s only temporary. The Select Team exists to push the Varsity, to prevent against laurel resting. It is not unprecedented for the Select Team to upstage the Varsity if and when the senior club grows sluggish, complacent, or static.
It’s not a matter of if the Select Team becomes the new Varsity; it’s just a matter of when…
In the meantime, though, we’ll start with 10 brilliant records — covering the expansive cross-section of jazz’s sonic palette — by the established ones, those from whom genius is consistently expected and most consistently delivered: The Varsity.
Coming in at No. 10 in Breaking Jazz's Varsity Category...
Brad Mehldau: Ride Into the Sun, released Aug. 29 | Nonesuch Records
Earlier this month, Brad Mehldau’s “Ride into the Sun” was nominated for a Grammy at this February’s awards in the Best Alternative Jazz Album category.
Hearing Mehldau play Thom Yorke or Jeff Buckley or Nick Drake is like watching how Cézanne might use watercolors on canvas to reinterpret an Ansel Adams photograph. Mehldau’s sorcery is nothing short of supernatural. But it’s also incredibly humble. He brings colors to the fore with so much respect for the source material that he makes you believe they’d been there the entire time, just dormant, waiting to be unlocked. He’s the type of guy who applies just the right amount of elbow grease to open the most stubborn of pickle jars only to credit those who attempted before him with doing all the heavy lifting by loosening it up.
And, to be sure, the musical muses he so thoughtfully chooses (or, maybe better stated, choose him) do deserve a lot of credit; Mehldau can’t get blood from a stone, so to speak, and it doesn’t serve him to try. The trick is, he trusts his massive ears. He hears what’s there, of course, but, most importantly, he hears what’s not quite there but could be; he hears the ghost notes and feels the unexpressed emotional contours of a piece of music…and then he re-animates them.
In the 1990s, the chemical company BASF had a TV ad that went something like this: “At BASF, we don’t make a lot of the products you buy; we make a lot of the products you buy better.”
So it’s kind of like that with Mehldau and Ride Into the Sun, his tribute to the late indie/folk singer-songwriter Elliot Smith. But, then, also…this album presents four incredible Smith-inspired Mehldau originals.
Prior to making this album centered around the late Elliot Smith’s songbook, Mehldau had worked with Smith’s producer, Jon Brion, on two albums, 2002’s “Largo” and 2010’s “Highway Rider.”
So, how you like them apples, BASF?!
Understanding Mehldau requires close listening, but he makes it easy; this music draws you in as comfortably and naturally as going home. The massively talented Chris Thile contributes voice and mandolin to two tracks, unforgettably so on “Colorbars,” where Thile presents the tone of Smith’s clever lyrics faithfully, nailing the addictive personality’s self-loathing side square and true.
Breaking Jazz’s favorite cuts: “The White Lady Loves You More,” “Sunday,” “Sweet Adeline,” “Sweet Adeline Fantasy,” “Colorbars,” “Satellite”
