Month / December 2025

by Andrew

The best music I heard in 2025

Another good year for music. Thanks to some lucky coincidences I saw the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Knoell Scott, three times this year. Every show was different, and each a fun and life-affirming musical experience—see them if you can! Their most recent studio album is very charming, even if it lacks the wild avant-garde energy of yesteryear. The best-known standard-bearers of today’s jazz avant-garde, guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, both had outstanding albums this year (About Ghosts and Abstraction Is Deliverance) that have been widely reviewed; if you follow jazz you probably know about them already. I liked both records a lot, but for my list this year I wanted to highlight some other names. Here are my favorite discoveries from a year of listening, listed by date of original release:

  • Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – Defiant Life (2025). At 84, Smith remains astonishingly productive, a true jazz elder at the height of his powers. His second collaboration with pianist Iyer is if anything even more wrenchingly beautiful than the first, A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke from 2016; they should record more than once a decade. Smith’s abstract yet lyrical trumpet playing also appeared this year on another duet album, Angel Falls with Sylvie Courvoisier—also worth hearing but for me not quite at the same level—and two records with Danish guitarist Jakob Bro that I haven’t heard yet but look promising.
  • Nels Cline – Consentrik Quartet (2025). One of the best small-group jazz albums of the year, out of a strong field. Cline’s quartet, featuring his guitar with the twisty tenor of Ingrid Laubrock, Chris Lightcap on bass and Tom Rainey on drums, feels like a real band with its punchy rhythmic drive. But the group isn’t locked into one style, and the varied tunes cover a lot of compositional ground.
  • Cosmic Ear – Traces (2025). Christer Bothén was one of Don Cherry’s collaborators during his Scandinavian sojourn in the 1970s, and for this recording he gathers some fellow travelers for a heartfelt homage to Cherry’s style of spiritually inflected world jazz. It’s as good or better as anything from that era. Bothén’s bass clarinet is also featured on Jorden vi ärvde by the Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra, a marvelous large-ensemble recording.
  • Webber/Morris Big Band – Unseparate (2025). The two co-leaders use the resources of the jazz big band in nontraditional ways, finding all kinds of new combinations of sounds. Continuously inventive and surprising; a sterling example of what people are calling the “New Brooklyn Complexity.”
  • Marty Ehrlich – This Time (2025). The horn-bass-drums trio is perhaps the most fundamental type of jazz group, and I find increasingly gravitate toward the directness of this format. The veteran multi-instrumentalist Ehrlich sticks mostly to alto sax for this one, an unusual choice in a trio. He plays tributes to Andrew Hill and Arthur Blythe, references that give a good idea of the inside-outside flavor of this excellent session. Ehrlich’s debut record, The Welcome, recorded some 40 years ago, was also a trio and is worth hearing too.
  • Chad Taylor – Smoke Shifter (2025). Another standout small-group jazz session with a timeless feel, simultaneously recognizable and fresh. The sax-trumpet-vibes frontline recalls some of the forward-looking Blue Note dates of the 1960s while being thoroughly contemporary (the WSJ review is nice). Taylor is also the drummer for in the unique trio Hears & Minds, alongside Jason Stein on bass clarinet and Paul Giallorenzo on synthesizers. Their latest album, Illuminescence (2025), mines some of the seams first opened up by Sun Ra, and unearths new treasures.
  • Augustus Pablo – King Tubbys Meets Rockers At 5 Cardiff Crescent, Washington Garden, Kingston (2025). A new collection of mostly unheard music from the great Pablo; it’s a sign of how productive the 1970s golden age of reggae was that there is still material of this quality out there. This collection of instrumental tracks is a stellar example of dub as vernacular avant-garde: the forms of pop music–three-minute songs performed on guitar, keys, bass, drums–are transmuted into mysterious slabs of rhythmic energy.
  • Ebo Taylor – Jazz Is Dead 022 (2025). The Ghanaian music legend recorded this new session with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad at the age of 88; his voice is weaker than it once was but the beats are as compelling as always. Also now reissued and readily available are his early albums Ebo Taylor (1977) and Conflict (1980), true classics.
  • Jeff Parker – The Way Out of Easy (2024). Long, trance-inducing tracks selected from the years that Parker’s quartet played a regular Monday-night gig in L.A. Together they define almost a new genre of groove-oriented jazz that takes inspiration from other contemporary forms of beat music while staying improvisational and exploratory. Friends who don’t like much jazz like this.
  • Ben Goldberg – Here to There (2024). Another unusual horn-bass-drums trio: the clarinet is rarely heard in this exposed format. Goldberg and his trio mates Todd Sickafoose and Scott Amendola have an affinity for Thelonious Monk: their album Plays Monk from a few years ago was excellent, and this one extends the engagement, developing new tunes from bridges of Monk songs.
  • Seun Kuti – Heavier Yet Lays The Crownless Head (2024). The younger sun of Nigerian legend Fela Kuti, Seun Kuti inherited his father’s band Egypt 80, and much of his charisma and energy. I saw him on tour this year, and after a rocky start he delivered a stunning show. I like his new record a lot, the interlocking horn and drum parts are captivating as in the classic Afrobeat style, but the tunes more compact and focused.
  • Lee “Scratch” Perry x Bob Riddim – Destiny (2023). A posthumous collaboration between the legendary Perry and a younger producer. The last few albums Perry released before his death in 2021 were not very strong, but this one is fantastic, a more suitable capstone to his long career. On the record Perry has an old man’s voice, weak and quavery, but it somehow makes the songs even more intense and moving.
  • Charles Lloyd – Sangam (2006). Although I listened to a lot of Indian classical music this year, I didn’t put any on this list, as I still don’t really know how to talk about it. But I feel confident in saying this is one of the absolute best recordings of Indian-influenced jazz or jazz fusion. The interplay between the legendary tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain and jazz drummer Eric Harland is tremendously exciting.
  • Craig Taborn – Light Made Lighter (2001). I may be a sucker for the horn-bass-drums trio, but I don’t love piano trios as much as a lot of other jazz fans seem to. This early effort by the amazing Taborn, though, is consistently interesting, one of the best contemporary piano trio records. I was turned on to it by Vinnie Sperrazza, in his appreciation of the work of drummer Gerald Cleaver.
  • Joe Lovano – Sounds of Joy (1991). Lovano’s first (but not last) trio recording, this often-overlooked album is an essential example of the form. The legendary drummer Ed Blackwell makes one of his last appearances on record with the two much younger musicians, Lovano on multiple reeds and Anthony Cox on bass.
  • Amina Claudine Myers – Song for Mother E (1979). Myers on piano and organ is accompanied only by drums on this unusual early recording, which doesn’t sound like anything else out there. The propulsive spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane is one reference, though Myers is inspired more by gospel than Indian music. This album is now widely available for the first time in decades as part of the ongoing reissues of the catalog of Leo Records.
  • Miles Davis – On The Corner (1972). Like many jazz fans when On The Corner this record first came out, I just didn’t understand it the first time I heard it. What is this crap? I thought it was just bad funk. But when I went back to it this year, I could finally hear the music correctly. There are definitely highs and lows to Miles’ electric period, but this is one of the highs: dark and complex and intense.
  • John Coltrane – Expression (1967). When I saw Ravi Coltrane’s group this year, he closed the set by announcing he would play one of his father’s tunes, the title track of this album. It was a beautiful piece but I didn’t recognize it, and I thought I knew most of the late-period Trane. I had missed this one, his last studio recording, and a great session. Although some of the intense workouts of his group with Alice and Pharaoh can be unlistenable, here Trane is more focused and structured. It was a new direction that he never finished exploring: John would pass a few months later, when Ravi was only two.

Previous lists: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

A lot of the stuff I am looking forward to listening to next year is on my Bandcamp wishlist.

The Sun Ra Arkestra live in Beijing, September 2025

by Andrew

The best books I read in 2025

Here are the most memorable of the books I read this year, listed in roughly the order I read them. It seems like reading 19th century authors was a theme in the culture this year, and I ended up participating in this trend without really planning to: Twain, Stevenson, Whitman were some of my highlights.

Fiction

  • Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest. I re-read all of Hammett’s novels this year, and this, his first, held up the best. The later and better-known books seem more and more artifacts of their time: The Maltese Falcon is implausible and its plot famously incomprehensible; The Thin Man‘s clever repartee feels empty. Red Harvest has both a harsh portrait of the breakdown of state capacity and the effects of social violence (the setting is based on Butte, Montana) and a truly harrowing detective plot (the narrator suspects himself).
  • Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I read this in tandem with Percival Everett’s James, which re-narrates the same events from a different perspective. Despite all the accolades for James, Twain’s original is, still, the better book. What is remarkable is how much the flaws and virtues of the two novels mirror each other: both start strong, with an immediately captivating narrative voice, and then fall apart at the end, as the characters perform unrealistic actions in service of some authorial conceit.
  • Samantha Harvey, Orbital. One of the most perfectly crafted pieces of prose I’ve ever read; short, basically plotless, almost unbearably intense. It is hard to call the book anything other than science fiction, since it is literally fiction about science, though it was mostly ignored by the genre community. Yet it succeeds more in evoking what used to be called the “sense of wonder” than most stuff in the genre does these days. Going to space is awesome.
  • Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. A hard-boiled mystery set in an alternative 1920s America, by turns familiar and strange. Spufford is frank that he is imagining a utopia in which the Native American population was not erased by disease and thus could negotiate a political settlement with the European colonizers. But what gives the book its grit and charm is how messy and non-utopian his imagined mixed society is: prejudice, violence, and corruption persist.
  • Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety. How many novels are there that take as their main subject adult friendship? Stegner’s last, great work is an understated, closely observed portrait of the relationship between two couples. There are no affairs, and only the ordinary dramas of work and family. This year I also re-read his The Big Rock Candy Mountain, written more than 40 years earlier, which is an amazing but very different book: a more ambitious portrait of the character of America, or at least of one very American character.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb-Tide. Stevenson’s last published novel is not particularly famous but deserves to be better known. It came out in 1894, and the connecting line of inspiration and influence to Joseph Conrad, whose first book came out in 1895, is clear. There’s a South Pacific setting, a focus on interior psychology, a concern with colonialism. Scott Sumner thinks it might be Stevenson’s best novel.

Nonfiction

  • Robert Louis Stevenson,  The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays. Stevenson is best known as a novelist, but I think I prefer his nonfiction: he had an interesting life and was interested in lots of things, and the sentences are marvelous and daring. All of the essays are out of copyright and readily available online, but this is a good curated selection that is easier to manage. I picked out some of my favorite excerpts here.
  • Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot. Nominally a biography of Patrice Lumumba, this book is actually a gripping, blow-by-blow account of how the Congo stumbled to independence from Belgian rule. The events are tragic, not just for Lumumba but for the people of the Congo, who never really had a chance at being governed well. It’s a thematic and chronological sequel to Adam Hochschild’s earlier King Leopold’s Ghost, which documented the horrific excesses of Belgium’s colonial rule.
  • Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology. Out of all the reading on India I did this year to prepare for my first visit, this was my favorite: compact, punchy, and argumentative, packed with erudition and information. I also enjoyed Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, an investigation into the long-running argument over the causes of World War I through biographical sketches of historians. Not many writers have this kind of range.
  • Walt Whitman, Specimen Days. In his introduction, Whitman called this collection of his diaries “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” and it may still qualify for that distinction even 143 years after its publication. There is a lot of material from his visits to military hospitals during the Civil War; many long, quiet spells observing nature in southern New Jersey, as well as a journey out West. Tying them all together is Whitman’s love for the American landscape and people, and his unique voice, so fresh he still seems like a contemporary.
  • Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success. One of the lessons I learned as a young student of anthropology is that culture is both subjective and objective: it exists in our heads, but also outside of our heads as a reality that shapes us. Henrich’s book is a remarkable effort to synthesize some of the core insights of anthropology with evolution and psychology (culture, or the “collective brain,” is the secret to humanity’s success). Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
  • Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea. The last voyage of Captain James Cook is one of the more interesting and unique events in history: he was the first European to find the Hawaiian Islands and talk to the people there, and later, returning to the islands after mapping the coast of Alaska, was killed by them. The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook’s final expedition.
  • Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (translated by Jack Hargreaves). Perhaps the best of the various gig-worker memoirs published in recent years. It’s less of a sociological document and more of a personal one, a story of how someone not well served by China’s educational system or job market gradually found a voice as a writer. (It’s interesting that none of the writers he mentions as inspiration are Chinese.)

Previous lists:

2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012

The best books I read in 2025