jazz

Jazz has more new output than at any point in decades. Genre tags are almost useless for navigating it.

There is a great deal of new jazz being released and very little useful signposting. The labels are the map.

You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist's music, and know more about the artist's work by scrolling down the page.

PLAYLIST

More Output Than in Decades

Jazz is currently producing more new recorded output than at almost any point in its history, and the volume makes navigation genuinely difficult.

Cheap recording, direct distribution and a healthy international scene mean that a very large number of records appear every month, from established figures and from musicians with no wider profile.

That abundance is good for the music and unhelpful for anyone trying to find the worthwhile records, because the usual filtering mechanisms handle it badly.

Genre Tags Are Nearly Useless Here

The standard categorisation systems break down almost completely on contemporary jazz, and relying on them produces poor results.

A single tag covers straight-ahead acoustic quartets, free improvisation, large-ensemble composition, electronic hybrids, spiritual jazz, and material closer to hip-hop or club music than to anything in the tradition.

Those are not variations within a style; they are unrelated musical propositions. Being told a record is jazz narrows the field almost not at all, which is why tag-based browsing fails.

Genre tags fail here partly because they are applied by distributors filling a required field rather than by anyone who listened. That is worth knowing, because it means the tag reflects an administrative default rather than a judgement.

Labels Are the Working Filter

The effective substitute is following labels, and jazz labels have unusually strong and consistent identities.

Because most operate at small scale with an identifiable artistic director, their catalogues are coherent in a way that a genre tag never is. Knowing that a particular label releases a specific kind of record is far more actionable than any classification.

A handful of well-chosen labels covers most of what is worth hearing in a given direction, and their release schedules are short enough to follow completely rather than sample.

Sidemen Are the Best Lateral Route

The other high-value method is following personnel rather than leaders, which suits how jazz actually organises itself.

Musicians appear on each other's records constantly, and a rhythm section that works well together tends to recur across multiple leaders' projects. Tracing a bassist or drummer whose playing you like leads reliably to related records.

This is more productive than following leaders alone, because it maps the actual network of working musicians rather than the smaller set of people who release under their own names.

Personnel-following also reveals recording dates. Musicians work in clusters, and a rhythm section appearing on several records within a few months usually indicates a shared session period and a shared approach.

Scenes Are City-Based

Contemporary jazz remains strongly clustered by city, and those clusters have distinct characters that are easy to identify once you know they exist.

Particular cities have developed recognisable approaches, built around specific venues, education institutions and groups of musicians who play together regularly. Records from one scene share assumptions that records from another do not.

Identifying which scenes produce music you respond to narrows the field enormously, and it is a far better filter than any stylistic label.

Specialist Coverage Still Exists

A small number of publications, radio programmes and reviewers cover this material seriously, and they are doing the listening that no individual can.

Their value has increased as the volume has grown, since the ratio of output to available attention has moved sharply. A reviewer who hears two hundred records a month and writes about ten is performing a service worth having.

Between labels, personnel, scenes and a few trusted critics, the field becomes navigable. Attempting it through genre categories and recommendation feeds does not work, and the abundance is the reason.

Radio remains disproportionately useful in jazz because the specialist programmes are frequently presented by working musicians, whose selections reflect what the scene itself rates rather than what a label is promoting.