The argument that jazz is dying tends to be made by people who stopped listening around 1970. The music didn’t stop. It changed — as it has always changed — and the recordings being made right now are as vital as any from the canonical eras.
These ten albums span the past fifteen years. They are not a complete picture, and they are not ranked. They are a starting point: a way in for someone who loves the tradition and wants to know what happened next.
Kamasi Washington — The Epic (2015, Brainfeeder)
Three hours, a 32-piece orchestra, a 20-person choir, and a tenor saxophonist from Los Angeles who had decided that jazz did not need to be modest about its ambitions. The Epic announced a generation that wasn’t apologising for anything. Start with “Change of the Guard,” the opening track, and see if you make it to the end of disc one without wanting more.
Listen for: The choir entering behind Washington’s saxophone. The sound is enormous. It is meant to be.
Esperanza Spalding — Radio Music Society (2012, Heads Up International)
Spalding is a bassist, vocalist, and composer whose work refuses the genre categories that would contain it. Radio Music Society is the most accessible of her records — built around songs rather than extended improvisation — but the musicianship underneath is extraordinary. Her bass playing here makes the case, again and again, that the bass is not a support instrument but a lead voice.
Listen for: “Crowned & Kissed.” The relationship between her voice and her bass line is the whole argument.
Mary Halvorson — Meltframe (2015, Firehouse 12)
Halvorson is the most distinctive guitarist in contemporary jazz — her sound immediately identifiable, her approach to harmony unlike anyone else’s. Meltframe is a solo guitar record, and it is the place to start. She plays pieces by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, and others alongside her own compositions, building from the oldest (Ellington’s “Solitude”) through to work by her contemporaries. The record holds together as a document of a singular musical intelligence.
Listen for: The way she uses delay and pitch-bending not as effects but as compositional tools.
Makaya McCraven — Universal Beings (2018, International Anthem)
McCraven’s method — recording live improvisation and then editing it in the studio, layering and restructuring — produces music that sounds spontaneous and considered at the same time. Universal Beings was recorded across four sessions in four cities, each with a different set of musicians, and then shaped into a record that moves with the logic of a dream. The method itself is the argument — four cities, four ensembles, one drummer finding the logic in all of it afterward.
Listen for: The seams — or rather, the absence of them. Four cities, four different groups, one continuous logic: it takes a few listens to find it.
Ambrose Akinmusire — On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment (2020, Blue Note)
Akinmusire’s trumpet playing is lyrical and demanding at the same time. This record was made in the early months of the pandemic and carries that weight without being consumed by it. The title is a sentence that describes the music precisely: tenderness that comes from somewhere difficult.
Listen for: The interaction between Akinmusire’s trumpet and Sam Harris’s piano on the slower tracks. Two musicians listening to each other with unusual care.
Vijay Iyer — Accelerando (2012, ACT Music)
Iyer treats a jazz piano trio the way a physicist treats a problem — with rigour and genuine curiosity about what comes out. Accelerando is the record that proved the combination could swing. The trio — Iyer on piano, Stephan Crump on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums — plays with a rhythmic intelligence that draws from jazz, funk, Indian classical music, and hip-hop without sounding like any of them. It won five categories in the DownBeat Critics Poll the year it came out.
Listen for: “Optimism,” which opens the record. The way it builds is worth studying.
Nubya Garcia — Source (2020, Concord Jazz)
Garcia is a London-based tenor saxophonist whose music pulls from jazz, reggae, Afrobeat, and the Black British experience. Source was her full-length debut on Concord Jazz and it arrived fully formed — a record that sounds like it knows exactly what it is. Her tone on the saxophone is rich and unhurried, and the compositions give it room.
Listen for: The title track — twelve minutes long, building from near-silence to something that earns every second of its length.
Irreversible Entanglements — Protect Your Light (2024, International Anthem)
Already in the Jazz Diggs catalogue as a reviewed record, worth placing here as context: Irreversible Entanglements are what happens when free jazz meets Black feminist theory and political urgency, and they are doing something no other collective is doing — free jazz as political argument, made with the discipline to back it up. Protect Your Light is their most recent work and their most fully realised.
Listen for: Moor Mother’s voice as an instrument — the way it occupies space.
Terrace Martin — Velvet Portraits (2016, Sounds of Crenshaw/Ropeadope)
Martin plays alto saxophone and was a key collaborator on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Velvet Portraits is the record where he steps out as a leader, and it sounds like someone who has absorbed every jazz tradition and is not interested in reproducing any of them. The record features Kamasi Washington and the Washington, Robert Glasper, Thundercat, and Lalah Hathaway, among others — the West Coast circle working together.
Listen for: The production — the way jazz improvisation sits inside arrangements that feel closer to soul and hip-hop than to the jazz club.
Sons of Kemet — Black to the Future (2021, Impulse!)
Shabaka Hutchings leads a band with two drummers and a tuba player — no piano, no standard harmony — and the result sounds like nothing else in contemporary jazz. The lineup: Hutchings on saxophone and clarinet, Theon Cross on tuba, Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick on drums. Black to the Future is political and celebratory at the same time, with guest vocalists including Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, and grime artist D Double E. It was their final album before disbanding in 2022.
Listen for: Theon Cross’s tuba. In another band it would be background. Here it carries the whole bottom end and a good deal of the melody too.
A Note on What’s Missing
Ten is not enough. This list doesn’t include Ravi Coltrane, Tyshawn Sorey, Craig Taborn, Arooj Aftab, or dozens of others who deserve the same attention. It doesn’t represent every geography, every tradition, every way the music is being extended and transformed right now.
The best contemporary jazz isn’t trying to sound like anything except itself. That’s always been true of the music at its most alive.
