By Tom Hull

Tyshawn Sorey tops the Francis Davis Jazz Poll at mid-year, spurring a reflection on signal vs. noise in a crowded jazz landscape.

Editor’s Note: This contains the poll results for the New Jazz Albums category. For Rara Avis (Reissues/Archival), see The Old World Gets Weirder. For a more general overview, see Warming Up a Riff. For even more results, ballots, and notes, go to the poll archive website.

Francis Davis had a knack for taking the vast pile of data produced by his annual polls and finding some overarching theme, which varied from year to year. I’m too literal-minded to do that. While I can find lots of variety within any given year, as a totality each year looks pretty much like any other. I think this is somewhat analogous to the differences between weather and climate: weather changes significantly from day to day, even hour to hour, while climate change is extremely hard to detect with one’s immediate senses.

After initial skepticism, I eventually came around and conceded the reality of anthropogenic climate change. But it took a lot of analysis, both gathering tangentially related evidence and seeing how theory fit it together. And it took a time frame much longer than a single year. Statisticians preach the need to separate the signal from the noise. In their view, climate is the signal that is obscured by the plentiful noise of weather. Longer-term shifts in jazz are similarly obscured by the broad range of artists and the enormous numbers of albums they produce. Pace Francis, when I look at any given jazz critics poll, I tend to see the literal, which is to say the noise.

But in my desperate search for a handle on this essay, I took a look at Francis’s old essays, and found one from 2019 that seems relevant today: The Fringe Fills the Gap. The “gap” was something that Francis often thought about: the loss of critical consensus. In retrospect, I doubt that jazz critics have ever been so much in agreement as they were in 2006, his poll’s inaugural year, when Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar appeared on 80% of all ballots. Just one year later, the winner (Maria Schneider’s Sky Blue) only appeared on 44.8% of the ballots, and no album has done better since. That still felt like some kind of consensus was possible, but when Sonny Rollins won with 29.5% (in 2011) and Wayne Shorter with 24.2% (in 2018) the gap had opened wide.

Aside from Schneider, who won again in 2020 after a “tie” in 2014, and Henry Threadgill in 2016, the older musicians listed above gave way to younger generations, led by Vijay Iyer (with three wins), with two wins for Mary Halvorson and James Brandon Lewis, and one each for Jason Moran, Steve Lehman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kris Davis, and Patricia Brennan. Those, and another dozen, perhaps as many as twenty, names have dominated our poll since the mid-2010s (with elders like Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, and Charles Lloyd still hanging on). None of those (except possibly Lewis) seem to have any ambitions, let alone prospects, of crossing beyond the narrowly circumscribed universe of serious jazz. But as Francis noted:

A musician’s arrival is now measured by Guggenheims and MacArthurs, orchestra commissions, university appointments, and maybe a week at the Village Vanguard. But a major-label contract or an appearance on late-night network TV? Out of the question. At risk of being self-serving, but thinking of Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Steve Lehman, Mary Halvorson and Tyshawn Sorey, among others, another sure sign you’re gaining a reputation might be finishing at or near the top of a survey such as this one . . . And I’ll go one boast further in saying that a surprise showing in this particular poll, more than simply reflecting a musician’s arrival, sets the wheels for it in motion.

Or perhaps the critics are following the MacArthurs? Halvorson won hers in 2019, then topped the poll in 2022 and 2025 (after 6 top-ten finishes through 2018). Sorey got his in 2017 (after 3 top-ten finishes, with more to come). Moran and Iyer have MacArthurs, as do our perennial Latin and Vocal winners (Miguel Zenón and Cécile McLorin Salvant). So does Tomeka Reid, who wound up one vote short of Sorey in this Mid-Year poll. (Both Sorey and Reid started off by winning Francis’s Debut category, and have 3rd place finishes in 2017 and 2019.) Sorey appeared on 35.4% of the 127 ballots, which is a higher share than the winners of the previous Mid-Year polls (30% for Iyer in 2024, 30.9% for Lehman in 2025), and higher than any annual share since Schneider’s 36.2% in 2020.

I’ll have more comments, but first I want to point out a few things. We sent out invitations to a large number of print and broadcast journalists, including a few who, like myself, mostly just self-publish (I have a long-running blog and also now a free newsletter). We received ballots back from 127 voters, which is up from the 90 and 113 voters from the 2024-25 mid-year Polls, but only 75.5% of the 168 voters who voted in the 20th Annual poll at the end of 2025. Like the “midterms” in US politics, interest slacks off in what’s perceived as a lesser-stakes election, especially one that occurs in the middle of summer, when people are easily distracted and often unprepared. Whether that skews the results is hard to say.

We asked critics to list up to 10 New Jazz Albums, preferably released in 2026 (but 2025 releases were allowed), in ranked order or not. If ranked, we use the points only to break ties between albums that receive the same number of votes. So all voters are given the same importance. The points are only available as extra information. In the table that follows, the votes are in parentheses, after the points. A high points-to-votes ratio may indicate that voters who rank lists liked it better, but that tells you nothing about the critics (31 this year, so 24.4%) who didn’t rank their lists.

Here are the top 58 New Jazz Albums, including all the albums that got 5 or more votes:

The full list is available here.

You may also click on the arrow icon at the end of each album line to get a list of all of the critics who voted for that album. You may then click on a voter name to see that voter’s ballot, and possibly to click on another album. The website has more detailed notes on every aspect of the poll.

New Jazz Albums are defined as the first release as an album of music that was initially recorded within the last 10 years, so since Jan. 1, 2017. Any album that contains previously released music, or any music recorded before the cutoff date, should be considered instead under Rara Avis. Inevitably, some albums are hard to classify, and some critics have their own ideas of what these words mean, so voters are given considerable leeway to vote for a record in whichever category makes the most sense to them. The website explains this in greater detail, but the upshot is that some albums appear in both category lists, and we make vote adjustments to treat them fairly. Also, some albums only get votes in the “wrong” list, and we leave them there.

For further notes on the New Jazz Albums totals list, follow this link.