Sound Grammar: The Best Jazz Albums of 2025
I always wanted to write how Miles Davis talked: abrupt, profane, contemptuous, in a stiletto rhythm that jabbed and stung and threw off unexpected sparks of enlightenment and tenderness. Of course, that was a voice that defied imitation.
Fortunately, Quincy Troupe did the next best thing in writing Miles’ Autobiography, where you can almost hear his jagged, bristling voice talking shit, spreading gossip, telling lies that somehow reveal deep truths. We need voices like that now, fearless and defiant. What’s more, we need the kind of music Davis played, improvised music that kept time with the times. Jazz, if that’s what you want to call it, says what words can’t.
Jazz is music made in the moment and our moment is an increasingly perilous one. As a writer trying to keep up, I often feel as if I’ve exhausted the power of words to describe where we are, how we got here and where we’re going. There’s only so much you can say in response to every new outrage, trauma and travesty without repeating yourself and coming face-to-face with your own impotence. But music goes where words can’t. Music gives expression to the ineffable. Jazz especially connects at the level of emotions and deep, even subliminal, feelings. Jazz is capable of communicating outrage, fear, despair, grief, joy, camaraderie and resistance in a way that essays and polemics can never match.
How does one speak about Gaza? It defies description. But we feel the sorrow and rage in Anouar Brahem’s oud playing. How do we describe what it’s like to live in a time when history itself seems to be fracturing around us? I can’t. But the music of Anthony Braxton can or at least it does to my ears. As a crude misogyny becomes government policy once again, I can’t imagine a more subversive response than Yazz Ahmed’s horn-playing. Are you tempted to surrender to despair? Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith offer a musical antidote as the political darkness descends and Marshall Allen, who has seen it all, summons us toward a “new dawn.” Missing the call of Nature, as the forces of exploitation are unleashed on what remains of the wild, drop a needle on David Murray’s luminous and elegiac Birdly Serenade.
Jazz is the existential art form. Not in theory, but, as Sartre would affirm, in being. Jazz is an assertion of freedom in time of restraint, it’s a music that invites you in during a time of exclusion, it’s an art form that moves forward in a time of regression, it celebrates originality in a time of conformity. Jazz connects. Jazz revolts. Jazz agitates. Against all odds, jazz still is.
In that spirit, then, here are the jazz recordings that spoke the most deeply to me in 2025, as submitted to the 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, which is curated on Tom Hull’s compulsively-readable site and in Arts Fuse.
New Releases
1. The Music of Anthony Braxton
Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner
(Pi)
2. After the Last Sky
Anouar Brahem
(ECM)
3. Apple Cores
James Brandon Lewis Trio
(Anti-)
4. Defiant Life
Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith
(ECM)
5. Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)
6. A Paradise in the Hold
Yazz Ahmed
(Night Time Stories)
7. New Dawn
Marshall Allen
(Mexican Summer)
8. Birdly Serenade
David Murray Quartet
(Impulse!)
9. Spirit Fall
John Patitucci
(Edition)
10. Another View
Kalia Vandever
(Northern View)
RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)
1. Love is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings
Pharoah Sanders
(Transcendence Sounds)
2. City Life
Blackbyrds
(1975, Craft/Jazz Dispensary)
3. Landslide
Dexter Gordon
(1961-62, Tone Poet, Blue Note)
4. On Fire: Live From the Blue Morocco
Freddie Hubbard
(1967, Resonance)
5. Seek & Listen: Live at the Penthouse
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
(1967, Resonance)
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