Looking at the wealth of albums released in 2024, it’s evident that polymorphism still rules. There will always be new micro ’scenes’ that generate heat, but these soon stabilise and become part of contemporary music’s infinitely expanding tapestry.
Across the year, there were several exciting releases from artists stretching jazz into refreshingly new, genre-blurred shapes while acknowledging the genre’s deep history.
Kicking off in January was Fabiano do Nascimento And Sam Gendel’s The Room, in which the Brazilian seven-string guitarist and US saxophonist whipped up airy and sweetly soulful originals using the bones of Latin American folk tunes and old Brazilian popular songs as inspiration. At the other end of 2024, leading a quartet featuring Gendel, do Nascimento dropped a delicate, divinely incandescent version of Hermeto Pascoal’s ‘Ilza na Feijoada’, a taster of his captivating Solstice Concert, due out in 2025.
There was plenty going on in between: LA bassist and repeat Gendel collaborator Sam Wilkes united with Craig Weinrib (on drums) and Dylan Day (electric guitar) for a self-titled set of dulcet, jazz-adjacent improvisations tending toward folk and laid-back country, which were recorded outside in one Californian evening. Saxophone titan Kamasi Washington released Fearless Movement, which saw him shifting away from transcendence into more hedonistic (or at least feel-good) territory, though still turning on bravura performances with a cast including George Clinton and Thundercat.
Guitar supremo Jeff Parker and The ETA IVtet gave us The Way Out Of Easy, a freeform, melodically questing double album recorded during sessions at a Los Angeles cocktail bar, and IVTet member Anna Butterss released a terrific second album, Mighty Vertebrate, filled with playful creations informed by post-rock, hip-hop and film scores.
SML – a Los Angeles quintet made up of Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum and guitarist Gregory Uhlman – delivered their first album, Small Medium Large. Both beguiling and adventurous, it combines jazz, funk, Latine styles and wonky electronics, adding a strong percussive drive and sly sense of humour.
Outside of the jazz scene, 2024 was enriched by both established acts and newcomers. Veterans Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds triumphed with Wild God, a batch of rich and joyous quasi-pop songs which feel truly exhilarating, despite the fact they deal with death, grief and suffering.
Former Portishead singer Beth Gibbons shone with her solo debut, Lives Outgrown. A decade in the making, its moody, modern folk songs draw on the experience of middle-age, with its difficult truths and accumulated losses, their author’s extraordinary, blues-tipped voice as exquisitely anguished as ever.
Born Horses was Mercury Rev’s first set of original material in nine years and saw them retreating from the symphonic, psych-pop overload of previous records in favour of greater poignancy, as on Jonathan Donahue’s epic, spoken-word opener, ‘Mood Swings’. NYC’s darlings of smart, soukous-inflected collegiate pop, Vampire Weekend, meanwhile, released Only God Was Above Us, which sees them taking stock of the band’s history and their relationship to it, as LA residents. This reflectiveness is carried by music that (deliberately) echoes their own back catalogue while mixing in extras like a choir, millennial garage-rock and hip hop.
At the opposite end of the career spectrum, 2024 delivered terrific, full-length debuts from Nia Archives, Bingo Fury, MEMORIALS and Mermaid Chunky. Nia Archive’s offering Silence is Loud sees the Yorkshire producer and singer-songwriter Dehaney Niah Lishahn Hunt boldly repurpose jungle by cutting it with drum’n’ bass, alt-rock and even Britpop, to thoughtful, vulnerable and brashly upbeat effect.
As Bingo Fury, Bristol’s Jack Ogborne impressed with his Bats Feet For A Widow, where glockenspiel, piano, cornet and tape manipulations are agents of a dark, confident fusion of jazz, math rock, Scott Walker-ish balladry and experimental pop.
Musical duo MEMORIALS (Verity Susman and Matthew Simms)’s debut Memorial Waterslides proved them to be skilful wranglers of eccentric, intriguingly otherworldly pop, blessed with an appreciation of some sounds’ innate comic value.
Slif, slaf, slof, meanwhile, highlighted Mermaid Chunky as underground stars-in-waiting: the Gloucestershire duo’s mix of jazzy soul, wistful folk-pop, disco-punk and skew-whiff electronics demonstrates their compositional nous and feels as celebratory as it is self-aware. It’s little wonder the hip label DFA has since snapped them up.
As the year drew to a close, we were also treated to some strong trailers for albums due out in 2025.
Among them was ‘Our Home’, the lead single from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s forthcoming release, The Purple Bird. A warm, country-folk paean to domestic openness and conviviality, it comes with Appalachian back-porch and barn-dance overtones, thanks largely to the fiddle work. The Delines teased Mr Luck & Ms Doom (due in February) with the irresistibly easy-swinging ’Left Hook Like Frazier’, an(other) example of the US band’s unbeatable, Southern-soul chops, while Sharon Van Etten and her new project flagged up their debut, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, with ’Afterlife’. A darkly glittering, synth-led asking of the Big Questions, it comes with a dash of ’80s power-ballad drama.
Others include ‘Five Spots To Caravan’, from James Brandon Lewis Trio’s Apple Cores and ‘Defense’ from Animal Collective member Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift. The former is a characteristically nimble and fiery, soulful exposition from a lauded US saxophonist and composer; the latter a sweet, slow cartwheel of a pop song with psych-gospel flavouring, featuring Patrick Flegel (formerly of Women) in their Cindy Lee guise.
