Here is my extended list of top recordings and books from 2022. Of course, there is a lot to listen to and such a list is limited to what I’ve actually written about or listened to many times with good intentions to write something.
The reason for this is that I have the honor of running and participating in the Top 10 list at the Free Jazz Blog, participating in the 17th Annual Jazz Critics Poll run by Tom Hull, and contributing to Jazz Podium’s best of 2022. At the Free Jazz Blog, we put restrictions on ourselves to only include what we have covered on the blog during the year, thus there are some recordings that haven’t been covered there but that I would like acknowledge. So, I consider this my long-list of recordings that I am winnowing down somehow to develop my top 10 choices:
- Bill Frisell – Four (Blue Note)
- Cécile Cappozzo Quintet – “Hymne d’automne” (Ayler)
- Charles Lloyd – Trios: Chapel (Blue Note)
- Colin Stetson, Billy Martin, Elliott Sharp & Payton MacDonald – Void Patrol (Infrequent Seams)
- Dave Gisler Trio with jaimie branch and David Murray – See You Out There (Intakt Records)
- Eve Risser Red Desert Orchestra – Eurythmia (Clean Feed)
- Gordon Grdina’s Nomad Trio – Boiling Point (Astral Spirits)
- Ivo Perelman – Brass and Ivory (Mahakala)
- Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp – Fruition (ESP Disc)
- James Brandon Lewis Quartet – MSM Molecular Systematic Music (Live) (Intakt)
- Kaluza/Roder – Am Frankfurter Tor (Relative Pitch)
- Mary Halvorson – Amaryllis/Belladonna (Nonesuch)
- Miles Okazaki – Thisness (Pi Recordings)
- Myra Melford – For the Love of Fire and Water (Rogue Arts)
- John Oswald, Henry Kaiser, Paul Plimley – At One Time (Improvisations for Cecil Taylor) (Metalanguage, 2021)
- Patricia Brennan – More Touch (Pyroclastic)
- Rodrigo Amado – Refraction Solo (Trost)
- Samo Salamon – Dolphyology: Complete Eric Dolphy for Solo Guitar (Samo Records)
- Tim Berne & Gregg Belisle-Chi – Mars (Intakt)
- Zoh Amba – Bhakti (Mahakala Music)
Historical Recordings:
- Cecil Taylor – The Complete, Legendary, Live Return at The Town Hall NYC November 4, 1973 (Oblivion Records)
- Peter Brötzmann / Fred Van Hove / Han Bennink – Jazz in der Kammer Nr. 71 (Trost)
- Sam Rivers – Caldera [Sam Rivers Archive Project, Volume 6] (NoBusiness)
- Soft Machine – Facelift – France & Holland (Cuneiform Records)
Books:
- Markus Müller – FMP: The Living Music (Wolke)
- Phil Freeman – Ugly Beauty (John Hunt)
