By Tom Hull

Since 2014, the category has been dominated by previously unreleased music, mostly live shots.

In 2005, the year before Francis Davis organized his Jazz Critics Circle at the Village Voice, Blue Note released a previously unknown 1957 tape of Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. The new recordings were unanimously received as a momentous discovery (one quote cited in Wikipedia: “the musical equivalent of the discovery of a new Mount Everest”). The only debate was whether the album of the year should be grouped with new music or old.

Francis Davis started out in the new-music camp, so when he laid out the rules for his first annual poll, he insisted that previously unreleased music of any vintage be treated as new, while “Reissues” were just that: items that had appeared previously. In 2006 that mattered little, but in 2007 a Mingus tape from 1964 came in second (after another 1965 Mingus set, briefly self-released and long out of print, had won the 2006 Reissues category), and Sonny Rollins won in 2008 and 2011 with his mixed-vintage Road Shows discs, which other publications had classified as “Historical.” In 2014, Davis relented, expanding “Reissues” to include what he called “Rara Avis,” defined as anything recorded 10 or more years ago. That allowed New Jazz Albums to focus on music that was truly (as opposed to accidentally) new, and spared the living from having to compete with Coltrane, Monk, and Eric Dolphy (who have seven Rara Avis wins since 2014; Mingus and Miles Davis have three each, but four are actually reissues).

Since 2014, the category has been dominated by previously unreleased music, mostly live shots. Major labels have been big winners here — Blue Note won in 2024 with McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson, and finished a very close second this year with Horace Silver — but a smaller label, Resonance, has made a strong showing in recent years (a 2019 win with Eric Dolphy, a second-place finish with Mingus, and a third-place with Rollins and more).

Resonance won this year with Mingus, and scored five of the top eight spots, with two sets by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and one each by Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham. But the winner’s vote total (28) was the lowest ever (16.7% of all voters), way down from 35.8% in 2024, even more from 2023’s 41.5% (Coltrane & Dolphy), let alone 2018’s record 53.5% (Coltrane again). There are several possible reasons for this drop, but first let’s look at the charts.

We asked voters to pick up to five Rara Avis jazz albums released in 2025 (or 2024 albums that were “new to them” in 2025). An album was considered Rara Avis if any of the music on it was recorded more than 10 years ago (in or before 2015), or if any of the music had previously been released (so was being reissued). The totals are sorted by votes (the number in parentheses), with ties broken by points (the preceding number).

Here are the top 33 Rara Avis albums (down through 5 votes):

1. Charles Mingus, Mingus in Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts (1977, Resonance) 38.8 (28)
2. Horace Silver, Silver in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse (1965, Blue Note) 34 (27)
3. Freddie Hubbard, On Fire: Live From the Blue Morocco (1967, Resonance) 36.2 (25)
4. Anthony Braxton, Quartet (England) 1985 (Burning Ambulance) 38.6 (23)
5. Kenny Dorham, Blue Bossa in the Bronx: Live From the Blue Morocco (1957, Resonance) 29 (21)
6. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Vibrations in the Village: Live at the Village Gate (1963, Resonance) 26.2 (17)
7. Stanley Cowell, Musa: Ancestral Streams (1974, Strata-East/Mack Avenue) 24.4 (17)
8. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Seek & Listen: Live at the Penthouse (1967, Resonance) 22 (16)
9. Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley, Flashing Spirits (1988, Burning Ambulance) 19.8 (14)
10. Irène Schweizer – Rüdiger Carl – Johnny Dyani – Han Bennink, Irène’s Hot Four (1981, Intakt) 18.4 (13)

11. Music Inc. [Charles Tolliver – Stanley Cowell – Cecil McBee – Jimmy Hopps], Live at Slugs’ Volume I & II (1970, Strata-East/Mack Avenue) 17 (13)
12. Roy Brooks, The Free Slave (1970, Muse/Time Traveler) 16.2 (12)
13. Pharoah Sanders, Love Is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings (Transcendence Sounds) 15 (10)
14. The Bottle Tapes (1996-2005, Corbett vs. Dempsey) 15.8 (9)
15. Thelonious Monk, Bremen 1965 (Sunnyside) 14.6 (9)
16. Dave Burrell & Sam Woodyard, The Lost Session: Paris 1979 (NoBusiness) 12.2 (8)
17. McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson, Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ (1966, Blue Note ’24) 10 (8)
18. James Moody, 80 Years Young: Live at the Blue Note March 26, 2005 (Origin) 11.4 (7)
19. Pharoah Sanders, The Complete Pharoah Sanders Theresa Recordings (1980-87, Mosaic) 10.4 (7)
20. Frank Kimbrough, The Call (2010, Sunnyside) 10 (7)

21. Masabumi Kikuchi, Hanamichi: The Final Studio Recording Vol. II (2013, Red Hook) 9 (7)
22. Bill Evans, Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings (1959-61, Craft) 10.6 (6)
23. Charlie Parker, Bird in Kansas City (1941-51, Verve ’24) 9.2 (6)
24. Sun Ra, Nuits De La Fondation Maeght (1970, Strut) 8.8 (6)
       Ryan Truesdell Presents Gil Evans Project, Shades of Sound: Live at Jazz Standard, Vol. 2 (2014, Outside In Music) 8.8 (6)
26. Pharoah Sanders, Izipho Zam (My Gifts) (1973, Strata East/Mack Avenue) 8.4 (6)
27. Marco Eneidi Quintet, Wheat Fields of Kleylehof (2004, Balance Point Acoustics) 7.4 (6)
28. John Surman, Flashpoints and Undercurrents (1969, Cuneiform) 7.2 (6)
29. Snakeoil, In Lieu Of (2012, Screwgun) 8.2 (5)
30. Keith Jarrett – Gary Peacock – Paul Motian, The Old Country: More From the Deer Head Inn (1992, ECM ’24) 7.2

31. Sun Ra, Uncharted Passages: New York Piano Soliloquies 1977-79 (Modern Marmonic) 6.8 (5)
32. Michel Petrucciani Trio, Jazz Club Montmartre (1988, Storyville ’24) 6.2 (5)
       The Charlie Rouse Band, Cinnamon Flower: The Expanded Edition (1977, Resonance) 6.2 (5)

The full list of all 208 albums that received votes is here.

Lists could be ranked or unranked. Albums on ranked lists were counted using a sliding scale starting at 2.0 for 1st place, 1.6 for 2nd, 1.4 for 3rd, 1.2 for 4th, and 1.0 for 5th. Albums on unranked lists were awarded 1 point each. (In effect, they were all treated as 5th place albums.) Ranked lists provide more useful information, but we don’t want to penalize voters who for whatever reason don’t like to rank, so the totals are sorted by votes (in parentheses), with points (the preceding number) only used as a tiebreaker for albums with the same number of votes. Of our 168 voters, 148 (88.0%) voted in this category, with 50 (29.7%) voting for fewer than the maximum 5 albums. Of those who voted, 25 submitted unranked lists (17.0%). Fewer unranked lists here is mostly explained by more short lists.

This year’s record-low winner share (16.7%) is extreme, but there have been years when the lack of a major-label archival find results in a severe dip, usually down around 25%. For instance, in the 2022 lull between Coltrane landslides (49.3% and 41.5%), Cecil Taylor won with 25.1% (on points, as a Mingus album on Resonance got six more votes, for 29.1%); more similar to this year was in 2016, when Resonance swept the top three spots, with Larry Young winning with 25.8%.

Other factors to this year’s low winner share: more mid-level contenders than usual; a lot of straight vinyl reissues, mostly from majors but notably from two long-out-of-print labels (Strata-East and Muse); a relatively large number of absent ballots (20, or 11.9%); some surprisingly strong efforts from small avant-oriented labels. While several out-of-print reissues placed well — Stanley Cowell at 7, Music Inc. at 11, Roy Brooks at 12; Strata-East got votes for 13 albums — the luxury vinyl repackagings of classics, like two new editions of A Love Supreme and even more Miles Davis, went nowhere. The highest any of the vinyl-focused reissues placed was 22: Bill Evans’ Haunted Heart, which was disguised as something else. (Although Craft mostly exists to reissue vinyl, they sometimes mix the packages up, and also reissue their remasters on CD and digital, so they get slightly broader interest than the Blue Note and Verve vinyl series.)

For evidence of a less-than-compelling field, one might also note the unusually high tallies for new votes for 2024 albums from McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson (8 votes, for 17th place) and Keith Jarrett (5 votes, for 30th, not counting two more votes for the new “Complete” reboxing of last year’s “More” album). The only 2024 album to get more votes this year than last was Michel Petrucciani Trio, Jazz Club Montmartre, which qualified it to carry over its 2024 vote total.

Sun Ra and band performing at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz festival, 1973. Photo: Michael Ullman

The most noteworthy thing here is that the second-highest point total wasn’t second-place Silver or third-place Hubbard, but Anthony Braxton’s Quartet (England) 1985, which got second-place points on fourth-place votes. Braxton’s 1980s Quartet, with Marilyn Crispell (piano), Mark Dresser (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums), is one of the most storied in all of jazz history. Their 1985 tour of England already produced two superb 2-CD sets on Leo. This 9-CD package, released on a label so small it’s a part-time concern of a jazz critic who depends on an unrelated day job, scooped up four more concerts, two sets each, plus some extras. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and was still blown away. Not many voters managed to hear it — nor, most likely, have many voters heard the previous Leo sets — but those who did gave it a very high points/votes ratio.

One of the perennial questions of poll design is how to balance off votes and points, which is to say, popularity and passion. The ranking within the list of Resonance releases measures passion, since the publicists made the albums available to the same critics — sure, some voters bought or streamed the albums, but publicists rule the upper reaches of the rankings — but comparison between different labels also reflects how many voters were exposed to the albums, and that varies significantly by label. So when you go down the list and notice an especially high points/votes ratio — Davis, following J. Hoberman, referred to this as the “passion index” (PI) — it’s often not just passion that you’re noticing; you’re also likely to find small labels with limited PR operations.

The Braxton album has the highest PI (1.678) of any album in the top 13. The fewer votes an album receives, the more common it becomes to produce a high PI, as is shown by The Bottle Tapes (at 14 with 1.755) and Bill Evans’ Haunted Heart (22, 1.776). The Braxton, as well as the 9th-place Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley album, was released on Burning Ambulance, while The Bottle Tapes came out on Corbett vs. Dempsey. They are probably the biggest surprises in the poll, although in retrospect they had two advantages: both are huge sets, and gigantism is often taken as carrying extra weight, and both labels are run by jazz critics (Phil Freeman and John Corbett), who know and are known by many of us. (Freeman is a very active writer and a long-time voter; Corbett is less reliable, but has voted in the past. We have a rule against voting for your own album, which wasn’t violated here.)

The Bottle Tapes (14) is also a surprise, a 6-CD box that cherry-picks a decade’s worth of avant-jazz in Chicago, a series of concerts arranged by Corbett and Ken Vandermark. About half of the artists are Europeans, in a reversal of the usual pattern of Americans searching out audiences in Europe. Another surprise came at (16): the piano-drums duo of Dave Burrell & Sam Woodyard, an unlikely pairing which appeared on the Lithuanian label NoBusiness. They’ve made some inroads into Rara Avis, picking up albums — including some notable ones from Japan — that defy business calculations.