Nubya Garcia’s moment seems to have come at last. And it’s weird to say “at last” about someone who’s only in her early thirties, but I’ve been listening to her music for the better part of a decade.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin has been blasting through the jazz world like a comet the last couple of years. She’s been around for a while — her debut, Retox, was released in 2012, and her next album, Rise Up, in 2018 — but her third, Pursuance: The Coltranes, was her first truly great record. Its 13 tracks were all written by John and Alice Coltrane, including pieces from throughout both artists’ careers like “Syeeda’s Song Flute,” “Liberia,” “Central Park West,” “Going Home,” and “Turiya And Ramakrishna.” The music was performed by a stunning array of guests, from bassists Ron Carter and Reggie Workman (both of whom played with the Coltranes) to harpist Brandee Younger, vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater and Georgia Anne Muldrow, violinist Regina Carter, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, and more. But Benjamin was always the focus, her sharp and fluid lines cutting through in a way that bridges multiple genres and generations.

Bill Laswell, the legendary bassist and producer, is in rough shape these days. He’s had a lot of health issues since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and since he’s been effectively unable to work, he’s been in danger of losing both his home and his New Jersey studio, Orange Music, which he’s been running for over 20 years since leaving his former longtime spot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There’s a GoFundMe to help him stay afloat, but another way people can support Laswell is by subscribing to his Bandcamp page, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. For $22 a month, you get access to a tremendous amount of music from his vast archives, much of it previously unreleased.

Alto and soprano saxophonist Kenny Garrett is an explorer. He’s constantly seeking new situations, new sources of inspiration, and new ways to expand the boundaries of his own musical conception.

The Black Art Jazz Collective came together in 2013, with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, trombonist James Burton III, pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Johnathan Blake. Burno died suddenly in December of that year, though, and the other members recruited Vicente Archer to replace him.

I’ve been listening to Vijay Iyer’s music for almost 20 years. We first met in 2006, when I was the editor of the world music magazine Global Rhythm and he had just released Raw Materials, an album of duos with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. They came up to the magazine’s offices and I interviewed them together. It was a very interesting conversation; what struck me the most was something Iyer said about cultural identity, that Asian-Americans “become the boundary by which American identity is defined… we are always the people who are on the either-or side of the American fence.”

Pianist Ethan Iverson released his first album, School Work, in 1993, when he was 20. In about 1997, he started playing with bassist Reid Anderson, and at the turn of the millennium, they connected with drummer Dave King and formed the Bad Plus. That trio was one of the breakout jazz groups of the early 21st century, releasing 13 albums in 16 years and selling a surprising number of records along the way. They were a lot of listeners’ gateway into jazz, particularly because of their habit of arranging pop and rock songs like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” for piano trio. But once the covers got people in the door, they heard tightly arranged, high-energy original compositions by all three members.

2023 has been a transitional year for jazz. We lost one of the genre’s most brilliant composers and performers, Wayne Shorter; free jazz flamethrowers Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle; genteel pianist Ahmad Jamal; bassist, composer and Spike Lee’s father Bill Lee; singer Tony Bennett; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes; bassist Richard Davis; pianist and composer Carla Bley; saxophonist Mars Williams, known to some as a modern free jazz hero and others as the dude from the Psychedelic Furs; and some people I consider jazz-adjacent, like Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and guitarist Jeff Beck, who made a series of excellent fusion albums in the mid ’70s. And while Shabaka Hutchings is still alive, he announced his intention to quit playing the saxophone, and disbanded all of his current groups: Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka And The Ancestors.

Did you listen to André 3000’s 90-minute collection of semi-ambient flute jams, New Blue Sun? I did, and I… didn’t hate it! I mean, he stacked the deck by featuring some of the most interesting players in LA on it, including percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Carlos Niño, keyboardist Surya Botofasina, and others. (Niño has just released an album with South African keyboardist/singer Thandi Ntuli that’s discussed below, and he put out his own album, (I’m Just) Chillin’, On Fire, back in September — André 3000 is one of many guests on that record.) But the music on New Blue Sun is surprisingly blissful, if somewhat meandering, and I think the album could have a real half-life beyond the initial social media explosion if Sony mails a copy to every acupuncturist in the US for in-office play.

John Zorn turned 70 in September. And, as if he’s decided to celebrate by giving everyone else a gift, his label, Tzadik, has made its catalog available on streaming services. There was no PR announcement, because Tzadik has almost never done PR for any of its activities, but word spread quickly among the devoted, and now there are hundreds of albums’ worth of adventurous, boundary-breaking music to listen to that had previously been available only to CD buyers. (They sold MP3s via iTunes and Amazon, too, but you get my point.)

Chief Adjuah, formerly known as Christian Scott, has been one of the most exciting musicians around for close to two decades. Since releasing his debut as a leader, 2006’s Rewind That, and particularly the following year’s Anthem, he’s been traveling a path that incorporates jazz, electronic music, trap, and all the percussive and rhythmic traditions of his native New Orleans. Since signing with Ropeadope a little over a decade ago, he’s put out a string of records that exist within a new genre he calls “stretch music,” best exemplified on his 2017 trilogy of Diaspora, Ruler Rebel, and The Emancipation Procrastination.

Charles Mingus might be the ultimate example of someone who’s “jazz famous.” Within jazz circles, he’s revered, but he should be as well-known as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, or John Coltrane. His name should be as familiar as theirs to people who know almost nothing about jazz, but it’s not, for a variety of reasons. He had a volcanic temper that was at one time or another turned on almost everyone in his personal and professional life — bandmates, record labels, managers, wives (he had four), even audiences. He famously destroyed a bass onstage at the Five Spot in response to heckling from the crowd, and punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth during a rehearsal, knocking out one of his teeth and ruining his embouchure.

Are GoGo Penguin jazz? Their first album, Fanfares, came out just over a decade ago, in November 2012; it was released on Gondwana, a label run by trumpeter Matthew Halsall, whose own music is quite beautiful spiritual jazz. They stayed with Gondwana for their 2014 breakthrough release, v2.0, but then signed with Blue Note for 2016’s Man Made Object, 2018’s A Humdrum Star, and 2020’s self-titled release, which was followed the next year by the remix album GGP/RMX.

Wayne Shorter died this month at 89. Although he stopped playing live a few years ago due to health issues, he’d been doing some really fascinating work up until the end, including composing the opera (Iphigenia) in collaboration with Esperanza Spalding — with sets designed by Frank Gehry! He’d also been leading a quartet with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade since the turn of the millennium, one of the longest-running bands in jazz.

One of the last live jazz performances I attended, on February 1, 2020, was by a one-off group called Ghidorah that appeared at the Jazz Gallery for two nights and has to my knowledge never reconvened since. They were structured like the three-headed monster that was their namesake, with bassist Eric Wheeler and drummer Rodney Green in back and a trio of tenor saxophonists (with one or another occasionally doubling on soprano or bass clarinet) up front: JD Allen, Stacy Dillard, and the man who put the project together, Marcus Strickland. They played two sets each night, and at the show I caught, Strickland began things with a short discussion of the history of the tenor saxophone and a roll call of legends, including Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and paying special tribute to Jimmy Heath, who had died less than two weeks earlier, on January 19.

Pianist Jason Moran does things on his own terms. Since leaving Blue Note Records almost a decade ago (his final album for them was 2014’s All Rise: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller), he’s become the Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and started Yes Records, releasing his own music on Bandcamp since 2016. He charges $20 for his albums, which is about twice what most people charge, and when I asked him about that in 2017, he said, “I think about music as, ‘What do you value it at?’…I could charge $50 for this, and if a person wants it, they want it. If they don’t, they don’t. It’s totally fine…The way music has been sold, this thing where I should be able to stream the entire thing before I buy it is unfair, and I think it’s unfair that musicians should fall into the mode where they would do that automatically. I don’t believe in that.”

2022 started off really well. A bunch of great albums came out in January, including alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’ The 7th Hand; bassist Luke Stewart’s The Bottom; the Matthew Shipp/Michael Bisio duo Flow Of Everything; 2 Blues For Cecil by the trio of trumpeter Enrico Rava, bassist William Parker, and drummer Andrew Cyrille; John Zorn and Bill Laswell’s first collection of duos, The Cleansing; and Historic Music Past Tense Future, an archival recording by Peter Brötzmann, Parker, and Milford Graves. I hosted a streaming event on New Year’s Day, the Burning Ambulance Festival, that included performances from bassist William Parker, saxophonists Muriel Grossmann, Rodrigo Amado, and Patrick Shiroishi, pianist Lisa Ullén, drummer Gard Nilssen’s trio Acoustic Unity (see the list below), and many other musicians from the worlds of jazz, avant-garde improv, noise, and electronic music. In February, my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, which I’d spent most of 2021 writing, came out. The year held incredible promise.

I’ve known trumpeter Jeremy Pelt for a little over a decade at this point. I started listening to his music in 2009 or 2010 and interviewed him for the first time in 2011. We’ve spoken on several occasions since — he’s one of the more than three dozen artists profiled in my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, which came out in February (available everywhere now! makes a great gift!). He puts out an album every year; this year’s offering was Soundtrack, his third release with pianist Victor Gould, vibraphonist Chien Chien Lu, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Allan Mednard. Back in April, I called it “high-level (mostly) acoustic jazz in the tradition of Seventies power trumpeters like Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, non-disco Donald Byrd, and Marcus Belgrave,” and I’ve come back to it over and over in the months since its release.

Bassist Eric Revis is a very busy man. When I reached him by phone, he had just returned home to Los Angeles after a solid month — “a very solid month,” he said with a laugh — of tour dates with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummer Greg Hutchinson, and two different pianists: Aaron Parks on most dates, and Taylor Eigsti for a West Coast leg. “We did Maine, New Hampshire, Montreal, a few cities in Ohio, Philadelphia, and then somewhere else I can’t think of, and then we went to the [Village] Vanguard for a week, and then after that we did kind of a West Coast thing — Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, LA, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle,” he says with a kind of mild shock.

There’s been a concerted effort the last few years to address the gender imbalance in jazz, on the bandstand and in the studio but particularly in education. A lot of the heavy lifting in this ongoing process has been done by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and a major step forward is coming this month. Born in Massachusetts, Carrington studied at Berklee College of Music, after which she moved to New York, where she was affiliated with the M-BASE collective alongside saxophonists Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, among others, and then to Los Angeles, where she was the drummer for the Arsenio Hall Show band. She’s released about 10 albums as a leader and appeared on dozens of others with artists including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Diana Krall, Esperanza Spalding, Cassandra Wilson, George Duke, and more.

First, an announcement: I’m writing another book! My latest book, Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, came out in February and is available everywhere (Esquire called it one of the Best Music Books of 2022, which is nice), and I’ve just signed the contract to write In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor for the German publisher Wolke Verlag. Don’t worry, the book will be in English. It’ll be a cross between a biography and a critical analysis of various phases and aspects of his work, analyzing key albums from his sizable discography and discussing how his music evolved from his professional debut in the mid ’50s to the April 2016 performances at the Whitney Museum which marked the end of his public career. The plan is for it to be out in spring/summer 2024.

The list of truly great jazz movies — dramas, I mean, not documentaries — is surprisingly short. Most movies about jazz kinda suck, in fact, and in recent years, there have been some really bad ones, like La La Land, Whiplash, Miles Ahead, and Bolden. (At least the soundtracks to the latter two were worth listening to … once.) Things weren’t much better in the past, either; the only two older jazz-related movies I really like are Paris Blues, with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, and The Man With The Golden Arm, which is a noir movie that’s about illegal gambling as much as jazz. (Frank Sinatra plays a junkie ex-con card dealer who wants to be a big band drummer.) One of the supporting characters in Sweet Smell Of Success, which is an incredible movie that you should absolutely see if you never have, is a jazz guitarist, seen performing with Chico Hamilton’s band (the quintet’s real guitarist, John Pisano, recorded the music for the soundtrack), but the movie’s not really about that. Similarly, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club is better than you may have heard, but it’s half about music and half about gangsterism, and its horrible musical-fantasy ending blows any goodwill earned.

I’ve been a huge fan of South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini since hearing his album Ikhambi in 2018. Since that time, I’ve had the chance to see him live, and had several in-depth conversations with him, first on my podcast in 2019 and again a year later via Zoom, when he, trumpeter Ndabo Zulu, and singer/songwriter/historian/public intellectual Mbuso Khoza talked to me about Zulu’s album Queen Nandi: The African Symphony and about a much broader post-colonialist cultural project they’re all embarked on, together with many other South African artists and writers across disciplines. Like Shabaka Hutchings, Soweto Kinch, and others, Makhathini is embarked on a long project of cultural reclamation and reckoning in a post-colonial world.

Saxophonist Nubya Garcia’s been patient and methodical about building her career. Some of that has been by choice, and some hasn’t, but it’s all worked out in her favor. It’s starting to feel like 2022 could be a really good year for her.

When Cecil Taylor began his career, in the mid-1950s, he recorded mostly in the studio, like everyone else. Between 1956 and 1961 he made a half dozen albums, and several more recordings from that era appeared later. But after 1966, the year he made Unit Structures and Conquistador! for Blue Note, studio recordings became a smaller and smaller percentage of his output. Ultimately, he made fewer than 20 studio albums, but scores of live recordings, particularly in the 1980s, his most productive decade.

This year has started off hard. Four key but too little appreciated figures in jazz history died while this column was being prepared.

Tom Breihan wrote a terrific obituary for writer Greg Tate, who died on Dec. 7. I offered a brief comment on his story, but I want to expand on what I said there, because when I think about the importance of his writing to me, I arrive at the same words Dizzy Gillespie used about Louis Armstrong: “No him, no me.” It’s that simple. If I had not read Greg Tate’s writing, I don’t think I would be where I am today. And at a few crucial moments in my “career,” he was there, providing the support that I needed.

Wynton Marsalis turned 60 last month, on October 18. That’s a big life milestone for anybody, so congratulations to him for making it, particularly in an era when a lot of famous Black musicians have died in middle age if not earlier. I probably wouldn’t have given it a whole lot of thought, but Jazz at Lincoln Center presented three nights of concerts from November 18-20, including a retrospective of music from the last 40 years of his career and his first small group performances in the venue’s Rose Theater in a decade. So now I’m thinking about Wynton Marsalis.

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is one of the most towering works of art of the 20th century. It represents an ideal of jazz composition and performance: its simple four-note bassline anchors some of the most passionate playing of his career, and there’s not a single note out of place from anyone in the band. Each of the piece’s four movements flows seamlessly and logically from the one before, and though it’s less than 33 minutes long, when it reaches its conclusion, you realize there’s nowhere else he and his bandmates could have taken the music. (This is particularly true when one realizes that the final track, “Psalm,” is Coltrane reciting, through his horn, the poem that appears in the liner notes. You can actually read along with the music, syllable by syllable.) It’s a perfect album.

Just as live music is starting to come back, one of the most important figures in live music history has departed. George Wein (pronounced ween), the producer of the Newport Jazz Festival and many, many other events, died September 13 at 95.

There were a lot of trumpeters around in the 1960s, but the Big Four were Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, and Lee Morgan. Davis was the most outwardly obsessed with innovation and constant forward movement: His 1965-68 quintet exploded hard bop into shards, and while people were still absorbing that band’s ideas, he moved on, bringing in electric keyboards and ultimately going full-on into fusion.

People still don’t understand what Miles Davis was doing in the 1980s. That goes for record companies as well as critics (and, to a lesser degree, listeners). Sony Music, the label that owns most of his catalog, seems to prefer to think of his career as having ended in 1970. Bitches Brew has been granted icon status and celebrated with multiple reissues of varying degrees of deluxe-ness, but the music that followed has been given far more cursory treatment. The final volume in the generally excellent mid-2000s series of boxes, The Complete On The Corner Sessions, which covered his studio output from 1972 to 1975, is out of print. And his post-comeback albums — The Man With The Horn, We Want Miles, Star People, Decoy, and You’re Under Arrest — have never been given any kind of reassessment. We Want Miles and Star People are only available as import CDs in the US; meanwhile the former, a live album from 1981, has been expanded to a double CD in Japan.

The self-titled debut album by Eastern Rebellion is one of the best acoustic jazz records of the 1970s. And when it was reissued this month, revisiting it sent me down a rabbit hole of something like fifteen other albums, all made between 1972 and 1978 and all worth hearing. Some of them, in fact, are brilliant.