The Best of 2025

By Fritz Byers

What a difference a year makes . . .

I can’t bear to assay all the things about the world that look and feel different from how they looked and felt a year, or a little more than a year, ago. If you can keep track of which side likes Russian autocracy and which side misses the good old FBI, you’re better at cultural ping-pong than I. (Speaking of which, after watching Marty Supreme my family has launched a movement to replace the dining-room table with a ping-pong table. That’s the kind of change I can believe in.)

I’ve noticed that two of my longest-running friendships, both of which thrive on jazz but also involve other immersions, regularly challenge me to try to figure out and express what I like about the emerging present and what I miss about the past. That’s not because we spend a lot of time talking about the good old days. But we do spend a lot of time taking stock of art and nature and sports, sharing our perceptions and discernments and trying to induce the occasional broader point about what we like, and why.

Said another way, as we age and come to terms with what is past, and passing, and to come, our relationships with tradition change.  And I think we come to sense, in C. Vann Woodward’s unimprovable phrase, that history has happened to us, in our part of the world.

As I mused about this, I remembered what a friend of mine wrote:

Every tradition grows ever more venerable – the more remote is its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.

And I remember another friend, who invariably insisted that what does not change is the will to change.

I suppose anyone who is as fixated on and fond of an art form as I am about jazz would say the same thing about their passion, but from my point of view you couldn’t find a better subject than jazz on which to test your thoughts and refine your judgments about the interaction between tradition and innovation. That dyad, along with the related dialectics between the individual and the ensemble and between composition and improvisation, provide a highly useful way to think about jazz.  I suspect these pairings apply much more broadly, although I’m not sure applying them will help you decide which changes in your life, or in the wider world around you, you should embrace and which you should discard or at least ignore.  But I’m confident they will illuminate in interesting ways what you’re hearing and help frame your approach to listening, whether you’re digging the Original Dixieland Jass Band or one of the releases that populate my list of the Best of 2025, which appears below.

Before I invite you to check out the list, a few scattered thoughts about the selections:

• A close friend with whom I shared the list asked how many records I listened to this year, and how I selected my favorites. I don’t know how to answer the first part of the question – I don’t keep a daily listening diary, although I’ve resolved to do so for 2026. But going through the music folders on my desktop and checking the “Date Modified” column, I’m pretty sure I listened to all or substantial parts of between 200 and 250 new releases. And how did I choose among them? About a month ago, I went through the Jazz Spectrum set lists for the year and a few things I wrote to friends, and I made a list of 75 albums that registered with me in some lasting way. From there, I chose about 35 that I really liked. Getting from 35 down to 24, to fit my idea of devoting one set of 15-20 minutes to each selection, as I do on this weekend’s shows (12 sets each night), was agonizing.
• If you’ve followed these lists for the last decade or so (I’ve been doing them since the show began, in 1989), you’ll notice several of the usual suspects – Dave Douglas, Tomas Fujiwara, Mary Halvorson, James Brandon Lewis, Charles Lloyd, Linda May Han Oh. It’s gotten to the point that if the Best of Year list doesn’t have these names, they probably didn’t release anything. But what’s striking is that each of these regulars put out something markedly innovative this year. Merely by way of example, check out Tomas Fujiwara’s Percussion Quartet on Dream Up. He’s been my favorite drummer for many years and a Best of Year stalwart, and I’ve heard dozens of his recordings. But this one... whew! If you’ve been worrying lately that the tradition of melodic drummers is disappearing, you can rest easy.
• Speaking of Tomas’s record, the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan is on it. Her 2025 release, Of Near and Far, was one of the last I took off the list.  But not to worry: she’s amply represented, since, in addition to being an integral part of Dream Up, she plays on the records by Arturo O’Farrill, Dave Douglas, and Mary Halvorson.  
• The three overt tribute albums – Steve Lehman’s nod to Anthony Braxton, Arturo O’Farrill’s paean to Carla Bley, and Branford Marsalis’s reimagining of Keith Jarrett’s epochal 1974 release, Belonging -- honor composers who, although each is considered a renegade innovator, occupy vastly different niches.  I wouldn’t have seen any of these tributes coming from these sources, but upon reflection I think they have an ineluctable logic: Steve Lehman’s Braxton project is a formidable intellectual undertaking, wrangling Braxton's elusive compositional structures into a format that can make them more legible without simplifying them.  I’m not surprised Steve was drawn to it, but I’m still shaking my head over how he recognized that Mark Turner would be the perfect companion.  The result would probably my choice for album of the year, if I had to choose.
• Arturo’s Carla Bley tribute is timely, affecting, and prescient.  Her death in late 2023 propelled many reconsiderations of her legacy, including a two-part tribute on Jazz Spectrum.  I would not have guessed that Arturo’s was exactly the right sensibility to honor her particular blend of playfulness and architectural sophistication.
• And all these years on, it’s easy to forget how adventuresome Keith Jarrett’s early recordings were. Branford’s recording of all the tracks from the original Belonging reminds us of how adroitly Keith blended delicate melodic beauty, down-home blues vamps, and free-verse flights. And it also reminds us of what a fertile compositional gift he had back then. This record would be marvelous without its roots in Jarrett’s original work. But that it takes those materials and makes them new in this comprehensive, illuminating way is a powerful statement about, well, tradition and innovation.  

There’s much to be said about the rest of the list, but that’ll do for now. Here are my selections for the Best of 2025.  

* denotes a special favorite.

• Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet
• *James Davis's Beveled - Arc and Edge
• Dave Douglas- Alloy
• Amir ElSaffar - New Quartet Live
• Joe Farnsworth - The Big Room
• *Fieldwork - Thereupon
• *Tomas Fujiwara - Dream Up
• Nicole Glover - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
• *Mary Halvorson - About Ghosts 
• Bill Hart - Multidirectional
• *Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner - The Music of Anthony Braxton
• James Brandon Lewis - Abstraction is Deliverance
• Charles Lloyd - Figure in Blue
• *Branford Marsalis - Belonging
• Amina Claudine Myers - Solace of the Mind
• *Arturo O'Farrill - Mundoagua - Celebrating Carla Bley
• *Linda May Han Oh - Strange Heavens
• John Patitucci - Spirit Fall
• Emma Rawicz - Inkyra
• Jaleel Shaw - Painter of the Invisible 
• *Craig Taborn, Nels Cline, & Marcus Gilmore – Trio of Bloom
• Rebecca Trescher - Changing Perspectives
• *Webber/Morris Big Band - Unseparate
• Miguez Zenon - Vanguardia Subterranea