By Jon Garelick

So what am I saying? That the system is imperfect, corrupted by bad voters like me (there must be a few others who didn’t listen to even close to everything on this list — show of hands?)

The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll — Sharing What We Know at Mid-Year

Let’s talk lists, shall we? Specifically, “best of” lists. The total number of albums receiving votes from 113 writers in this 2025 mid-year edition of the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll was 441. That’s the number of albums released in 2025 through June that writers voted for, counting 52 leftovers from late 2024. Again: That’s just the number of albums voted for, not the number of albums released, or sent to voters. (The total number of new albums receiving votes in the 2024 year-end poll was 613.)

Subtract the 50 leftovers and add another 134 new albums in Rara Avis (reissues, “new” releases of material recorded more than 10 years ago, etc.), and you get a little more than 80 albums a month, or more than two albums a day. And I’ll hazard a guess that many albums these days are at least an hour long, but 70-minutes is not unheard of. Last year, Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra’s magnum opus, Louis Armstrong’s America, Vol. 1 and 2 (Francis Davis’s top pick in the 2024 year-end voting) spanned four discs over two volumes, clocking in at five hours.

I bring this up so as to point out the most obvious and immediate flaw in polling methodology: Few people can listen to that many new albums in a year; fewer still would want to. After all, there are things like doctor’s appointments to make, kids to raise, TV shows to watch, old jazz albums (from 2023, say) that you might want to listen to, and jobs that pay (arts writing of any kind requires subsidies, which as with artists themselves, are often paid by the artists and writers themselves, in the form of a day job or jobs). And hey, maybe there’s a live jazz show you want to check out here and there.

What’s more, if you’re doing the job right — and unless you’re dismissing an album out of hand — you’ll want to hear it more than once. This is especially true for some of the knotty and pleasurably demanding works that landed in this mid-year’s top 10. Mary Halvorson’s About Ghosts (#2), Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet (#3), and Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone (#4) all stretch the jazz language in new directions and aggressively explore new forms. To that I would add Adam O’Farrill’s For These Streets (#4 on my short list, and #13 overall in the poll).

Whatever you say about these albums, none of them follow the lame predictability that the late Harvey Pekar lamented some years ago regarding a certain artist’s typical output of a given year: “two standards, two blues, and two originals based on ‘Rhythm’ changes.”

In fact, the only measure of predictability came from musicians playing “old” music — the Steve Lehman Trio (+ Mark Turner) digging into vintage Anthony Braxton (circa 1974) (#1) and the Branford Marsalis Quartet playing a song-for-song interpretation of Keith Jarrett’s 1974 quartet record, Belonging (#7).

Guitarist Mary Halvorson. Photo: James Wang

So what am I saying? That the system is imperfect, corrupted by bad voters like me (there must be a few others who didn’t listen to even close to everything on this list — show of hands?), a host of inherent biases (“Do I really have to listen to another album by Musician X?” “No rapping, please”), an argument with your spouse, a run of bad health or (we hope not, though it’s inevitable) personal loss. And maybe an exhilarating live show influenced the vote in some cases. (For me, that would probably be the Lehman/Braxton album, but it appears I was validated by a modest consensus.)

And, oh yeah, there is the distraction of keeping up with the news and attending political protests and writing postcards to other voters as our venerable democratic Republic falls down around our ears.

That last is something that it appears the artists covered here are all too aware of, as implied to one degree or another in titles like Defiant Life (Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith, #8), Abstraction Is Deliverance (James Brandon Lewis Quartet, #5), Solace of the Mind (Amina Claudine Myers, #9), Armageddon Flower (Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp String Trio, #10), and not least, Terri Lyne Carrington and Christine Dashiell’s We Insist 2025! (#30), a reprise of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s 1960 Civil Rights-era classic. Those are just the more obvious examples in a list that could also include Akinmusire, O’Farrill, and any number of other vote-getters.

Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. Photo: Arnaud Ghys

So what can we celebrate in all of this? Maybe an artistic determination to be heard in an environment that is stifling to individual voices, creativity, and life itself. (If you don’t think the current administration is in the process of killing people in large numbers, then you haven’t been paying attention.) Here, then, is the assertion of an ongoing and evolving tradition that refuses to be stifled. That there’s actually a consensus about an album that’s a stirring reinterpretation of avant-garde compositions circa 1974 is reason to cheer, as is the move by a bona fide jazz star to take a chance on a major label debut of more “old” music from that year. (Is Lehman and company’s disc this year’s Stitt Plays Bird? It would be nice to think so. Likewise, that Marsalis’s take on Keith Jarrett is giving a whole a new meaning to the idea of “standards.”)

What lists like this offer, then, is an affirmation, much more important than any hierarchical assertions about “winners” and “runners-up.” For my own purposes, I want to find out what other people who listen to a lot of music are listening to and liking. Maybe the best on this list won’t be my personal best, but it will be something I want to know about and check out. And maybe among the titles I did not know before opening this list, I’ll find some unexpected source of that solace Myers is talking about, or just the resolve that can be found in the sustained meditative breath of my #1 pick, Iyer & Smith’s Defiant Life. As the pop critic Ann Powers wrote in a very different kind of mid-year list for NPR Music (including a track each from the Akinmusire album as well as one from a forthcoming Brad Mehldau disc), you can see this list as “an invitation, not an argument.” Or better yet, as my colleague Tom Hull put it, “a playground for exploration.”

Enjoy.

NEW JAZZ ALBUMS

1. Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith, Defiant Life (ECM) →
2. Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts (Nonesuch) →
3. Branford Marsalis Quartet, Belonging (Blue Note) →
4. Adam O’Farrill, For These Streets (Out of Your Head) →
5. Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner, The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi) →
6. History Dog, Root Systems (Otherly Love) →

RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)

1. Charles Mingus, Mingus in Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts(1977, Resonance) →
2. Classic Vanguard Jazz Piano Sessions(1953-58, Mosaic) →

NOTES: I chose to cut off my mid-year list at five, and then, going through my notes, remembered that I really liked History Dog’s Root Systems the first time around. I listened to it again, and again the sexy, subversive, profane spoken-word delivery by Shara Lunon, with a variety of vocalisms, live playing (trumpet, bass, drums, percussion), and electronics, made me laugh with delight, then drew me into a continually surprising and engaging sound narrative. And its seven tracks clocked in at a blissful 36 minutes. Mine was the only vote for Root Systems — another reason to draw attention to it at mid-year. In Rara Avis, my choice of the Mosaic set may have done better if more voters had a chance to hear it — but this was a big-budget item not available as a promo.

As for my other choices, I was surprised to see four of them in the top 10. One of them, Adam O’Farrill’s For These Streets, just missed. I’m not sure what that proves about me or anyone else, but it was nice to be “wrong” at least once.

You can find everyone else’s individual ballots here.

Jon Garelick can be reached at garelikjon@gmail.com.