The Best Jazz Albums Released in the Last Two Years

Jazz in 2023 and 2024 was vibrant, diverse, and more accessible to new listeners than at any point in decades. The genre's leading voices are pulling from hip-hop, electronic music, and global traditions while maintaining the improvisational core that makes jazz jazz.

Nubya Garcia's Odyssey is a masterwork of modern British jazz. The London saxophonist blends Caribbean rhythms, dub production, and spiritual jazz into something that honors her heritage while sounding unmistakably contemporary. The album flows like a live set.

One practical filter: play the last three minutes of a track before the first. Jazz records live or die on whether the band can end something, and much of what gets praised as adventurous is a good opening idea that runs out of road. Odyssey, on Concord Jazz in 2024, passes because Garcia uses her string section as structure rather than decoration.

Makaya McCraven's In These Times was seven years in the making. The Chicago drummer and producer layered live improvisations with studio manipulation to create compositions of extraordinary density and beauty. It's jazz that rewards both active listening and ambient immersion.

If you want a shortcut, follow a label rather than an artist. International Anthem in Chicago has put out McCraven, Jeff Parker, Angel Bat Dawid, Damon Locks and Irreversible Entanglements, and its hit rate is absurd. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet's The Way Out of Easy, from 2024, is four long tracks recorded live at ETA, a small bar in Highland Park, Los Angeles, where the quartet played Monday nights for years.

Shabaka's Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace marked the artist's pivot from saxophone to shakuhachi flute and clarinet. The album is meditative and spacious, a departure from the intensity of Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming. It's one of the most surprising reinventions in recent jazz.

Shabaka Hutchings' pivot is more drastic than the record alone suggests. He announced at the end of 2023 that he was putting down the saxophone, wound up Sons of Kemet, and spent the following year on shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute with no keys, where pitch is controlled by the angle of your face against the mouthpiece. André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Floating Points and Brandee Younger all appear, and none of them play loudly.

Samara Joy's Linger Awhile and its follow-up confirmed the 24-year-old vocalist as the most exciting traditional jazz singer to emerge in decades. Her voice, a rich contralto that channels Sarah Vaughan without imitating her, brings warmth to standards and originals alike. The Grammy for Best New Artist was earned.

Other essential releases include Joel Ross's Nublues for vibraphone-led modern jazz, Irreversible Entanglements' Protect Your Light for free jazz with spoken word, Arooj Aftab's Night Reign for Pakistani-American vocal jazz, Meshell Ndegeocello's The Omnichord Real Book for genre-defying experimentation, and Marcus Strickland for spiritual jazz modernism.

Buy from Bandcamp rather than the streaming service if any of this lands. On Bandcamp Fridays the platform waives its cut, a download is £7 to £10 and vinyl is £25 to £35. For live music, Cafe OTO in Dalston programmes the experimental end most nights for £12 to £20, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra has played the Village Vanguard in New York every Monday since 1966, a standing gig older than most of its audience.

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