Month / December 2024

by Andrew

The best music I heard in 2024

My favorite listening experiences this year, both concerts and recordings, listed roughly in order of release date to highlight the newer material. A lot of the recent stuff is in my Bandcamp collection, feel free to browse.

  • The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, Live at the Clock-out Lounge (2024). I was lucky enough to catch this combo on the last night of their tour, when they were hot and fully in sync. The energy was extraordinary, drawing on both rock (Brendan Canty and Joe Lally are the best rock rhythm section since the Minutemen) and jazz. The same tunes are on their studio album, but for me it lacked the punch of the live show. I also very much enjoyed two other James Brandon Lewis albums with a more conventional jazz quartet., Transfiguration (2024) and Code of Being (2021).
  • Bill Frisell, Breaking the Shell (2024). Over the past decade or so, guitarist Frisell has collaborated with legendary drummer Andrew Cyrille on a series of recordings with shifting personnel but a shared aesthetic of atmospheric improvisation. This project combines them with pipe organist Kit Downes for a unique and spacious sound.
  • Exploding Star Orchestra, Live at the Adler Planetarium (2024). A suitably cosmic venue for Rob Mazurek’s mind-expanding big band. The lineup captured at this concert was particularly powerful, driven by two drummers and two keyboardists.
  • William Parker, Heart Trio (2024). On bass Parker is a peerless jazz virtuoso, but he periodically puts his main axe down to play an assortment of flutes and strings in a kind of non-specific world music style. This record documents his entrancing occasional trio with pianist Cooper-Moore, here playing homemade instruments, and drummer Hamid Drake.
  • Vinnie Sperrazza, Sunday (2024). A programmatic suite from drummer Sperrazza; the focus throughout is on the tunes, played with great sensitivity and clarity by his quartet Apocryphal.
  • Mary Halvorson, Cloudward (2024). Halvorson is without question the leading guitar player of her generation, but she may be even more talented as a writer for ensembles. My favorite records of hers are for larger groups, and this session by her new sextet is full of compact, complex arrangements that showcase all the players.
  • Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (2024). A marvelous, meditative session by two revered jazz elders–both are now in their 80s. It’s easy to call such a meeting historic, and it is, but the music is simply beautiful.
  • Hu Vibrational, Live at BRIC (2024). Adam Rudolph’s group, consisting of four percussionists and four harmony instruments, played one of the quietest and most fascinating concerts I’ve heard. Their recordings, though, seem to be a quite different vibe.
  • Tony Allen, Jazz is Dead 18 (2023). It’s a treat to have this posthumouly released session by the great Nigerian drummer, on the producer Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead label. The music is in the same vein as, and stands up to, Allen’s late-career masterpieces The Source and Tribute to Art Blakey.
  • Ned Rothenbeg, Crossings Four (2023). An all-star quartet of New York players delivers a set of complex, moody pieces; Rothenberg’s bass clarinet is a standout.
  • Jason Adasiewicz, Roy’s World (2023). The Chicago jazz scene produced an unbelievable string of great music in the 2010s, and continues to do so today. This vibraphone-based quintet of local luminaries recalls classic Blue Note sessions while being absolutely fresh.
  • Sylvie Courvoisier – Chimaera (2023). Gorgeous, dreamy work from a band of top-flight improvisers. The music is a tribute to the unclassifiable French artist Odilon Redon, and it feels quite close to the floating clouds of color in his late works. Here’s a nice appreciation by Richard Williams.
  • Celestine Ukwu, No Condition Is Permanent (2022). A welcome reissue of one of the legendary recordings of Nigerian highlife from the 1970s. Veterans of the old music-blog scene will recall the great African music blog named after this record.
  • Ted Nash – Rauschenberg In Jazz: Nine Details (2022). An undeservedly obscure recording of a 2016 concert in Beijing. The American saxophonist worked with a group of China-based musicians to pull together a suite inspired by the concurrent exhibit of the work of Robert Rauschenberg; it’s exciting and unusual ensemble music.
  • Kirk Knuffke – Gravity Without Airs (2022). Moody, exploratory chamber music from an unusual trio. Knuffke’s cornet is alternately breathy and keening, and the great Matthew Shipp on piano and Michael Bisio on bass are constantly inventive.
  • Sonny Rollins, Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 (2015). An important document: six hours of Rollins in a pianoless quartet with Don Cherry. The group is truly experimental, in the sense that the players are obviously working out their concept, and not all of it works. But a lot does, and the highs are very high.
  • Beno​î​t Delbecq, Ink (2015). Delbecq’s translation of the prepared piano into the jazz piano-trio tradition is fascinating and atmospheric.
  • Jemeel Moondoc, The Zookeeper’s House (2014). One of the last sessions by the largely unheralded saxophonist, a veteran of the 1970s loft-jazz scene; swinging and spiritual.
  • Darren Johnston, The Edge of the Forest (2009). Creative arrangements and great interplay from clarinet, trumpet, sax, bass and drums, almost like a modernist version of the old New Orleans three-horn frontline.
  • Keletigui et ses Tambourinis, The Syliphone Years (2009). The definitive collection of one of the great West African guitar bands: the long, looping lines are fantastic.
  • Bill Dixon, Modus Operandi (2007). The late, legendary avant-garde trumpeter made relatively few recordings, so every one is precious. This little-known session with a Canadian bassist and reed player is not in most discographies.
  • Greg Osby, Public (2004). A punchy, inventive live recording, one of a string of great records Osby made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His The Invisible Hand, with Andrew Hill, is a modern classic, but I’ve found almost everything from this period is very worthwhile.
  • Mood – Doom (1997). A one-off masterpiece of atmospheric production and headnodding beats from hip-hop’s golden age.

Previous lists: 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, At the Clock-out Lounge, September 14, 2024
by Andrew

The best books I read in 2024

The blog has been on hiatus for a bit due to a press of other responsibilities, but of course I haven’t stopped reading. These were the most memorable books I read this year, listed in the order I read them.

Fiction

  • Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock. This year I completed a long-running and rewarding personal project to read through all of Cather’s writing in order. Her Death Comes for the Archbishop is generally recognized as a masterpiece, and reading it again confirmed that judgment. Shadows on the Rock was her next book, and resembles it most closely, also being deeply researched historical fiction set in early colonial North America, this time Quebec. It’s another triumph of imagination and sympathy.
  • Natasha Pulley, The Mars House. I haven’t been able to get into much recent sci-fi, but I enjoyed this tale of the travails of climate-change refugees in a Chinese Mars colony: compelling and filled with intriguing political and geopolitical speculation.
  • Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors. Contemporary fantasy fiction has also become mostly unreadable for me; too often it is an endless recycling of tropes with minor variations. This book, the well-deserved winner of this year’s Nebula award, is a delightful exception. Its urban quasi-South Asian setting is unexpected, and the fantastical elements are truly mysterious rather than laboriously systematized.
  • Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow (trans. Johnny Lorenz). This Brazilian novel depicting the lives of impoverished sharecroppers on the country’s northeastern frontier has been extravagantly praised, and indeed the first two-thirds was one of the best things I’ve read in ages. For me, though, the last third was a real disappointment, so ultimately a somewhat mixed experience.
  • Guzel Yakhina, A Volga Tale (trans. Polly Gannon). The new novel from the author of Zuleikha, one of my favorite books of the last several years, does not disappoint. A schoolmaster in an isolated German-speaking colony inside Russia survives his trials through immersion in local folktales; the fable-like qualities of his own story intensify as socialism advances on the village. The translation is marvelous and vivid.

Nonfiction

  • David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. The harrowing tale of the Wager is one of the ur-texts of nautical fiction, inspiring writers from Herman Melville to Patrick O’Brian. Grann’s book is a feat of research and writing, creating impressive narrative clarity out of the complicated and contradictory evidence (the LRB review points out a few of the inevitable compromises he made).
  • Eileen Chang, Written on Water (trans. Andrew F. Jones). Chang’s first book of essays, published when she was just 24, shows her as something like the Joan Didion of pre-revolutionary China: a preternaturally sharp and cool observer. She is remarkably comfortable with one foot in Chinese culture and one in English, a stance few have been able to hold so well then or since. Here are some excerpts.
  • Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Though I read lots of China history books, I rarely end up recommending any to non-specialists. I’m happy to say Ian’s latest is an exception: this account of how people today continue to grapple with the harshest episodes in China’s history is written with his trademark grace and sympathy.
  • Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. This fascinating history of little-known episodes in a previous “backlash to globalization” has obvious contemporary relevance. For me, though, the takeaway was how far the 1920-30s popular reaction, driven by understandable fears of the famine and death created by wartime trade embargoes, is from today’s more politically driven trade sentiments.
  • Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. Even-handed and stunningly comprehensive, there is no better way to learn the reality behind the wartime mythmaking. Though Kochanski’s assessment of the accomplishments of the resistance is often deflating, there are still many striking and heroic episodes. To cite just one example, the operation to disable Europe’s only heavy-water plant, in Norway, and thus prevent the Nazis from making an atomic bomb, would make a fantastic movie.
  • Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Critcism and Benjamin Taylor, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. I couldn’t get enough of Cather this year. These two books–both remarkably concise–were just what I needed, helping flesh out the context of Cather’s work during her life and after. While both are nicely done, they are probably best appreciated when, as I did, you have the fiction fresh in your mind.
  • Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter. In a sterling example of historical writing for the “general reader,” Mortimer explains the big waves of social change across centuries in concrete and practical ways. He shows how the differences between the 11th and 16th centuries are bigger in many ways than between the 16th and 21st.
  • Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. After publishing his famous A River Runs Through It, a nearly perfect piece of American prose writing, Maclean spent the rest of his life working on this nonfiction account of a 1949 forest fire. He never finished it, and it shows: the posthumously published manuscript has some longueurs that editing could have solved. But it’s still a compelling meditation on mortality.
  • Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. A marvelous book integrating the historical big picture and the personal, together making for an illuminating guide to the nature and origins of Eastern Europe’s peculiarities. Mostly, though, it’s a vehicle for the author to stitch together lots of the typically Eastern European style of “tragicomic stories” that he has collected over the years.
  • Richard Flanagan, Question 7. Flanagan interrogates the historical forces behind his father’s survival of a Japanese internment camp, and thus his own birth, resulting in an unclassifiable narrative that takes in his own upbringing in Tasmania, H.G. Wells’ romance with Rebecca West, and the making of the atomic bomb. Brilliant; winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction writing.

Previous lists:

2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012