2024 in progress: best of Q2

Recapping my favorite music of the year

If my annual listening were restricted to the music arriving in any single month, I’d have more than enough good music—in all of my favorite styles—to sustain me for the year. I can’t keep up with all the artists I follow, but every month, even every week, brings happy discoveries. It’s a great time to be a music lover. The riches featured here are albums I’ll be enjoying for years to come.

Ahead of my list I’ll spotlight a few artists who deserve a lot more attention than they seem to be getting.

• aRT (Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson, Julian Thayer). The drummer Pheeroan akLaff may be better known by his playing (with Oliver Lake, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, and others) than his name. Flying almost entirely under everyone’s radar, however, is aRT—the experimental-jazz trio akLaff shares with the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson (reeds, brasss, percussion, theremin) and the double-bassist Julian Thayer (who is, concurrently, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine). Though they’ve been playing shows since the 1980s, aRT only just released their debut album on Robinson’s label, ScienSonic Laboratories. The trio’s near-geologic patience plays out in their superb recording, as does their shared love of ensemble performance, open space, and sound itself. Listen to “Abstract Dance #2.”

• English Teacher. This poppy English quartet formed at Leeds Conservatoire (a music-college partner of Boston’s Berklee College of Music) just as covid-19 hit. Led by the adorably fierce singer/wordsmith Lily Fontaine, they released a single in 2021, a 4-song EP, Polyawkward, in ’22, and a full-length LP, This Could be Texas, this past April. At every step they’ve shown themselves musically and lyrically crafty yet earnest, sensitive yet forthright. Their album reveals them capable of sustaining ideas across a range of moods and subjects, from the dream-pop chorus of “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” (a humble-brag ode to self) to the double-time waltz of the title tune to the claustrophobic foreboding of “The Best Tears of Your Life.” Listen to This Could be Texas.

• Alvaro Rojas. A versatile guitarist from Vancouver, BC, Rojas has a taste for everything from chamber music to doom metal. He composes for small and large ensembles and knows what to do with both; he arranged Moondog’s songs for acoustic guitar; on electric guitar he can shred with the best. His latest project is a song-for-song reimagining of an album by Bad Plus bassist Reid Anderson, The Vastness of Space. Reid’s original is a sax-oriented record for jazz quintet. Rojas pares the arrangements for his rock-leaning power trio (James Meger on electric bass and Dan Gaucher on drums) and lets loose his inner Sonny Sharrock. Listen to Plays Reid Anderson’s The Vastness of Space.

One trend I’m seeing this year is increasingly well-conceived tribute albums. Sometimes these take the form of a collective, with different artists fronting a set of core performers (such as Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra); sometimes it’s a curated free-for-all with a different artist for each song (Everyone’s Getting Involved, a tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense); other times it’s a single ensemble doing someone else’s album (Alvaro Rojas, above; EABS interpreting Tomasz Stańko’s fusion masterpiece Purple Sun; Henry Kaiser’s sextet doing not one but two passes through Steve Lacy’s Japan-only LP The Wire). It’s a joy to hear all the different paths these tributes take!

The following loosely ranked albums all came out between April and June of 2024. These are, for me, the best and most notable of the 250+ recordings to which I extended a fair critic’s shake. I have not attempted to integrate my Q1 favorites. I’ll rank my full-year highlights in January 2025.

For convenience, I’ve posted a YouTube playlist featuring (where possible) representative songs from each of these releases. Albums not represented in the playlist, such as The Sea Trio’s Live in Munich and Bonn, can still be auditioned on Bandcamp using the links below. I offer descriptions of musical style in case they’re helpful, though I realize my phrases won’t make sense to everyone.

1. Matthew Shipp Trio – New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disk’) | Avant-garde jazz

2. Tomeka Reid Quartet – 3+3 (Cuneiform Records) | Avant-garde jazz

3. Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers – Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (Red Hook Records) | Jazz

4. aRT (Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson, Julian Thayer) – akLaff Robinson Thayer (ScienSonic Laboratories) | Avant-garde jazz

5. EABS – Reflections of Purple Sun (Astigmatic Records) | New jazz / fusion

6. Nonkeen – All Good? (Leiter) | Avant-garde ambient / downtempo / art rock

7. Kronos Quartet – Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra (Red Hot Org) | New jazz / ambient / new classical

8. Alvaro Rojas – Plays Reid Anderson’s The Vastness of Space (self-released) | New jazz / jazz-rock

9. Khruangbin – A La Sala (Dead Oceans) | Indie rock / world / post rock

10. Hermanos Gutiérrez – Sonido C​ó​smico (Easy Eye Sound) | Desert surf rock

11. Various artists – Stop Making Sense: Everyone’s Getting Involved (A24 Music) | Pop / funk / indie rock

12. B. Ackley, T. Chen, A. Centazzo, D. DeGruttola, H. Kaiser, M. Manring – Two Views of Steve Lacy​’s The Wire (Don Giovanni Records) | Avant-garde jazz

13. The Sea Trio (Masahiko Satoh, Otomo Yoshihide, Roger Turner) – Live in Munich and Bonn (Confront Recordings) | Avant-garde jazz

14. English Teacher – This Could Be Texas (Nice Swan Records) | Indie rock

15. Andrea Taeggi – Nattdett (Hands in the Dark) | Ambient

16. Awen Ensemble – Cadair Idris (New Soil) | Celtic folk / new jazz

17. Takkak Takkak – self-titled (Nyege Nyege Tapes) | African music / industrial

18. N. Skordas, B. Tomevski, V. Drobicki, F. Bukrshliev, D. Omeragic, D. Teodosiev – The Dust of the Perishable World (PMGJazz) | Balkan jazz / avant-garde jazz

19. Luke Stewart Silt Trio – Unknown Rivers (Pi Recordings) | Avant-garde jazz

20. Kero – XELJAMZ (Detroit Underground) | Detroit techno / electro / glitch-hop