The Best Jazz Albums of 2018
SlateIt’s been a lousy year for most things, a very good year for jazz. Fresh off her masterly live two-CD/three-LP quartet album Dreams and Daggers, singer Cécile McLorin Salvant this time does duets with pianist Sullivan Fortner, who plays like Erroll Garner channeled through Chico Marx. Brazen Heart is one of trumpeter-composer Dave Douglas’ most exhilarating quintets, and this two-CD album lays down the 7:30 and 9:30 sets from a Saturday night in 2015 at New York’s Jazz Standard. Best known for his work in Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, Haden was often linked to “free jazz,” but that only meant he glided through a song on whatever paths he chose, shifting from melody to counterpoint to time-keeping to plucking some pattern that went with the mood—and it all worked, especially with ballads, which he treated with romantic flair in offbeat cadences. Another Douglas entry, this one with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and their quintet Soundprints, a play on Wayne Shorter’s album Footprints, which explores a few Shorter tunes but, more than that, his sensibility: its mid-tempo exuberance, infectious hooks, and complex two-horn harmonies.
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