2019/2010s in review

*2019 all-genres-in-play list, plus runners-up, songs and shows.

*2019 jazz list.

*2010s all-genres-in-play list, plus runners-up and songs.

*2010s jazz list.

I've also updated the two archives of prior top 10 lists:

*All-genres-in-play lists, 2005 through the present.

*Jazz lists, 2008 through the present.

/////

This year, I released 10 episodes of the Heavy Metal Bebop Podcast, featuring interviews with Black Sabbath's Bill Ward, Living Colour's Vernon Reid, Jan Hammer, Dave King and more. Please check them out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podbean if you haven't already. More to come in 2020!

And thanks to these and other music/etc. podcasts that have enriched and inspired me; I strongly encourage you to give them all a look/listen:

-The 5049 Podcast
-The Trap Set
-Kreative Kontrol
-The Heavy Hole
-Dean Delray's Let There Be Talk
-Radical Research
-Crash Bang Boom Drumming Podcast
-Burning Ambulance
-Noisextra
-Washed Up Emo
-Everything Went Black
-You Don't Know Mojack
-Henry & Heidi

I wrote a lot this year, but the pieces I'm most proud of were the King Crimson–related stories, namely:

*A Robert Fripp interview.

*A two-part deep dive into the history and influence of "21st Century Schizoid Man."

*And a career-spanning interview with Bill Bruford.

And thank you to anyone still making their way to this webspace! It's less active than it has been in years past as more of my work appears elsewhere, but it's still meaningful to me as a personal archive and occasional writing outlet.

Best of 2019: Jazz

Here, via Rolling Stone, is a rundown of some of the 2019 jazz releases I enjoyed most. I'm not remotely able to keep up with everything these days, so I'm grateful to The New York City Jazz Record; Downbeat; Jazz Times; The Wire; Phil Freeman's monthly Ugly Beauty column at Stereogum; Giovanni Russonello's regular coverage at The Times; the work of writers such as Seth Colter Walls, Piotr Orlov, Andy Beta, Marcus J. Moore, Matthew Kassel and Mark Richardson at Pitchfork and other outlets; some of the same writers and others at Bandcamp Daily; and The Free Jazz Collective; as well as the artists and publicists who send me music directly, for helping me keep up.

The 2019 top 10 I submitted to Francis Davis' annual critics' poll, the results of which should be online before too long, is as follows. Each of these titles is discussed at least briefly in the RS piece; there are also links there to my prior coverage of some of the artists/albums, and links to hear/buy the music via Bandcamp, where applicable. Two notes on the selections:

1) Categories ultimately mean very little to me, but yes, I do think the Messthetics album could reasonably be called a jazz record; I argue the case a bit in the aforementioned article.

2) The 10³²K album did in fact come out in 2018, but it emerged late in the year, and I was not really aware of it till this year. Regardless, I think it's fantastic, and I stand by its inclusion here. This process remains very much an inexact science!

New Releases

1. Angel Bat Dawid, The Oracle (International Anthem)
2. Branford Marsalis Quartet, The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul (Okeh)
3. The Messthetics, Anthropocosmic Nest (Dischord)
4. Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity, To Whom Who Buys a Record (Odin)
5. 10³²K, The Law of Vibration (self-released)
6. Joel Ross, KingMaker (Blue Note)
7. Chris Lightcap, SuperBigmouth (Pyroclastic)
8. Blacks' Myths, Blacks' Myths II (Atlantic Rhythms)
9. Steve Lehman Trio & Craig Taborn, The People I Love (Pi)
10. JD Allen, Barracoon (Savant)

Reisisues/Historical

1. Eric Dolphy, Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions (Resonance)
2. Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA, Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (Dark Tree)
3. Masayuki Takayanagi New Directions Unit, April Is the Cruellest Month (Blank Forms Editions)