Sunday, December 27, 2020

My Favorite Jazz in 2020

I'm not a jazz connoisseur. The lifeblood of my listening day is, without a doubt, rock and pop, with various acoustic troubadours thrown around the edges. Music with words. However, I've also always been a music-first / lyrics-second kind of guy. Meaning that the first thing to grab me about the music I hear is usually not the words but the sound of the music. Good lyrics are just icing on the cake for me, most of the time.

This means that I've always had a soft spot for genres like jazz and electronic music. More jazz this year than electronic, for some reason. The changes in lifestyle brought on by the COVID-19 "shelter in place" restrictions/quarantines also gave me a bit more listening time that I might have had otherwise. Perhaps that was one silver lining?

In an effort to both document a good listening year (at least for me) as well as to share some of the cool stuff I've discovered, I present to you my Top 10 jazz albums list for 2020...


My Top 10 Favorite Jazz Albums of 2020

10 - Avishai Cohen • Big Vicious
 9 - Immanuel Wilkins • Omega
 8 - Nubya Garcia • Source
 7 - GoGo Penguin - GoGo Penguin
 6 - Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride & Brian Blade • RoundAgain
 5 - Get the Blessing • Rarer Teas
 4 - Tigran Hamasyan • The Call Within
 3 - John Law • Configuration
 2 - Moses Boyd • Dark Matter
 1 - Hubert Dupont, Antoine Berjeaut & Steve Argüelles • Trio Kosmos

A Spotify playlist of these albums, in ranked order, is included below. I'd like to suggest that you just shuffle play. I do that from a much larger playlist to see what will stick to my ribs, and it always seems to make for an interesting listening experience. I hope you hear something you like and, if you've got jazz favorites from this year that aren't on this list, tell me about them in the comments! My doors are always open. 



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