Gene Seymour's Top Ten Jazz Discs for 2011

Before we get to this year’s Top Ten, some random thoughts: 2011 has been such a mean, tumultuous, uprooting year for me that it was a challenge to keep track of the latest recordings. With the year almost over, I’m factory-sealed certain that I’ve left several worthy candidates behind. See them? They’re glaring at me from behind, standing with hands on hips or waving at my dust trail as if to say, “What?”
Then again, I find myself wondering what the hell they’re doing there. Seems to me I heard at some point this fall that Termination Day for CDs is approaching even faster than one had been led to believe. If we want the latest Keith Jarrett or Aaron Neville, we need only reach into a cloud -- a.k.a. THE Cloud -- and snatch whatever track we want. I still can’t believe that’s all we’ll eventually be left with. But it’s what all the salespeople insist is happening and they’ve never lied to us before. Ever.
And yet, you’re all here, aren’t you? Even though I haven’t yet learned how to download album covers or to make the necessary links to specific tracks. Someday, maybe even next year, that’ll be in place. For now, some tough choices from a tough year…

1.) Sonny Rollins, “Road Shows Vol. 2” (Doxy) – The Greatest Live Act in Jazz, headlined by the Greatest Living Improviser, keeps rolling along, its every flourish and delicacy captured for what promises to be an epochal series of recordings from past and (one hopes) future concerts. This second installment’s tracks are just a year old, but you understand why they needed to be out there in a hurry. They celebrate the start of the Colossus’ ninth decade as observed in Japan and, most notably, at last September’s “Sonny Rollins @80” concert @ New York’s Beacon Theater. On that evening, the celebrant, leonine and fit, sounded frisky and responsive to the electricity of the moment, his furry tone combed to a bristly sheen. He brought out guitarist Jim Hall, his comparably indefatigable 1960s playmate (to dive into “In a Sentimental Mood,” of course) as well as trumpeter Roy Hargrove who, as with the leader, always brings his A-game in front of onlookers. This disc is the next best thing to having been there. Yet it still makes you wish you’d been able to share the audience’s excitement at seeing Ornette Coleman wander on-stage for a characteristically insurgent solo on “Sonnymoon for Two” wherein he lures the Colossus “outside” the regular changes for some buoyant give-and-take. If Rollins is now the de-facto king of whatever it is we mean when we talk about jazz, then this edition of “Road Shows” shows him to be a wise, benevolent ruler whose domain, however small it may seem to outsiders, feels accessible enough to meet your most urgent needs and expansive enough to contain multitudes.

2.) Ambrose Akinmusire, “When the Heart Emerges Glistening” (Blue Note) – Only four years removed from winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, this 29-year-old trumpeter has delivered on his grand promise with an album of startling depth and range. Once you get past the challenges of pronouncing his intimidating surname (ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) and of getting past the album’s knotty title, you’re free to acclimate with his big, brilliant sound or unravel the intricacies of his soloing – which, while layered with the trills, glissandos and arpeggios emblematic of the jazz trumpet’s heritage, share the probing detail and varied attack of sax icon Joe Henderson and of pianist (and album co-producer) Jason Moran. For all his agility and command, Akinmusire leans heavily on his band-mates (tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown); all of whom are worthy collaborators, collectively and individually. Word is out that these guys are all part of a big band that Akinmusire is leading. Can’t wait to hear what that’s like.

3.) Noah Preminger, “Before the Rain” (Palmetto) – At age 24, Preminger, a front-rank tenor saxophonist on just his second album as a leader, plays ballads as if he were a seventy-something road-warrior. He already knows, on instinct, how to approach a melody from behind; where to hang the drapery on a chord change and when to gently pull it away. And he doesn’t seem in a hurry to disclose everything he knows, not even on his original compositions (the title track, “Abreaction,” “Jamie”) or on Ornette Coleman’s “Toy Dance.” As with Akinmusire, Preminger is blessed with a eerily compatible rhythm section of bassist John Herbert, drummer Matt Wilson and pianist Frank Kimbrough, who contributes a couple of his prodigious compositions (“Quickening,” “November”) to the cause. By the time this group gets to massage a sturdy war horse such as “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” you’re utterly convinced that Preminger is the real thing – and that he’s coming along quite nicely.

4.) Allen Lowe, “Blues and the Empirical Truth” (Music & Arts) – Is it music or is it scholarship? Or musical scholarship? Is it criticism of the blues or just critical of them (or at least of what people say about them)? These and dozens of other questions aroused by “Blues and the Empirical Truth” are far more significant than any answers I or anyone else pretending to know more about music than Allen Lowe can cobble together. Lowe is a gnomic, compulsively idiosyncratic polymath who lives in Maine, plays a red-hot saxophone and has for years put together epic inquiries into the history and nature of American music and how it shapes – or doesn’t – the national character. On this three-disc set, recorded over a two-year period, Lowe arranges, composes and plays “inside” and “outside” jazz as well as such makeshift forms as neo-gutbucket-progressive-punk (at least that’s what I’m calling it for the moment.) He is backed by a typically eclectic guest list that includes guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Matthew Shipp, trombonist Roswell Rudd and Lowe’s fellow musicologist Lewis Porter, contributing here and there on keyboards. Along the way, tribute is made to civil rights activists Pauli Murray and Ella Mae Wiggins, forgotten or obscure musicians such as saxophonist Dave Schildkraft and pianist Blind Tom Bethune and…Doris Day, who should have been invited to Portland to jam with this crowd; except you have to wonder what she would have made of a song list with such titles as “Speckled Shaw Crippled Pete Boogie,” “Blues in Transfiguration,” “Elvis Died With His Sins Intact,” “In a Harlem Ashram” and “(Bull Connor Sees) Darkies on the Delta.” Guess it doesn’t matter as long as no animals were harmed in the process.

5.) Muhal Richard Abrams, “SoundDance” (Pi) – Just so you know, Sonny Rollins isn’t the only octogenarian legend who’s still getting the job done. Abrams, the peerless pianist-composer who co-founded the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) nearly 50 years ago, marked his own ninth decade by engaging in colloquies of such breadth and magnitude that they each needed their own disc. One of these is a dialogue with tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson that took place in October, 2009, a year before the latter’s death, though it’s a strain to detect signs of sagging energy in his playing. Both Abrams and Anderson seem energized by the task of extending or enhancing each other’s thoughts and even listeners resistant to free-form improvisation won’t miss a beat (so to speak). A year later, Abrams engaged in a sonic pas de deux with fellow innovator, author and AACM veteran George Lewis, who brought both his trombone and his laptop to the party. These two masters of orchestration create intricate, spiraling patterns that are at once imposing and puckish. You can wander in and out of their gallery of sound and find something strange, shiny and, in a peculiar way, companionable.

6.) Craig Taborn, “Avenging Angel” (EMI) – A title of one track could easily apply to most of the others: “A Difficult Thing Said Simply.” Taborn, who owns one of the most eclectic curriculum vitae in contemporary music (Tim Berne AND James Carter?), approaches the art of solo jazz piano as if he were translating complex code from a distant star. Often, he binds the information in tightly-wound chords struck down as if on anvils to forge unusual shapes. At other times (the aptly-named “Glossolalia”), he lets things twirl in the air like dazed, tiny phantasms squeezed out of an overcrowded basement. As with the early work of Keith Jarrett, Taborn is prone to lean to too hard on a riff, but (again, as with Jarrett) the digging can occasionally lead to an illuminated strike. In what’s been a vintage year for solo jazz piano discs (see the honorable-mention list below), this stood out for one simple reason: It sounded the most different from what its genre had yielded before.

7.) Youn Sun Nah, “Same Girl” (ACT) – Didn’t know a thing about her when this disc slipped into in my mailbox earlier in the year. After one track, I found myself asking, “Where has she been all my life?” (In Europe, apparently, where this album was first released last winter.) She is steeped in the French chanson tradition, but as with the most interesting singers beyond the boomer generation – Is she really 42? – she’s willing to try anything from Broadway (“My Favorite Things”) to Brazil (“Song of No Regrets”), from the folk music of her native Korea (“Kangwondo Aririang”) to the mellow sounds of Metallica (“Enter Sandman”). And she can scat real good, too, as proven on the quiet-fire “Breakfast in Baghdad.” The minimalist backing she gets from guitarist Ulf Wakenius, bassist-cellist Lars Danielson and percussionist Xavier Desandre lets her rangy, limber voice roam, run and leap about at will, even when the material is dipped in deep blue. Nothing seems to scare or stop her. Good as this disc is, it makes you wish she’d dare even more.

8.) Bill Frisell, “Sign of Life” (Savoy) – At its most inquisitive and unfettered, Bill Frisell’s music can be as evocative of the “the old, weird America” as Bob Dylan’s 1967 basement tapes. (Come and get me, Greil Marcus!) He has a boho-folk artist’s affinity for both the pastoral and the abstract. Beneath even his most glowing, spacious-skies landscapes, there are flickering shadows and misshapen objects that don’t distort the view, but are blended to make a slightly cockeyed, but still arresting picture, “Sign of Life,” performed by his 858 Quartet of violinist Jenny Schienman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts, is his best-realized sound painting since 2001’s “Blues Dream,” whose noir-ish cloaking devices I still appreciate, even if others didn’t. This is a sunnier compound of motifs and riffs that give off an aura of mystery, even danger – especially when the irrepressible Scheinman starts throwing paraphrases and adornments like left jabs. It’s clearer than ever that with both this disc and the John Lennon tribute released in the same year, Frisell can’t be stopped – or even contained. Only sampled – and what would NPR do for filler between news stories if his music weren’t around?

9.) Miguel Zenon, “Alma Adento: The Puerto Rican Songbook” (Marsalis Music) – Not only was this the year’s best Latin jazz album, it was also among the more inspired examples of that overpopulated subgenre, the tribute album. Zenon’s homage isn’t to a single artist or composer, but to the men and women who wrote the classic pop tunes of his native land. He and arranger Guillermo Klein practically reinvent crooner Bobby Capo’s “Incomprendido” as a slow-drying lament. Conversely, Rafael Hernandez’s “Silencio,” revived by the “Buena Vista Social Club” some years back, is given a near-chimerical, tempo-shifting transformation. The centerpiece, literally and figuratively, comprises two pieces by Sylvia Rexach: the title track and “Olas y Areenas,” both of which are treated by Zenon and Klein with passionate intensity and solicitous intelligence. Zenon may sometimes risk going overboard with his ambition and with his playing, but that’s part of the attraction. And if his alto-sax soars like a rocket plane, he’s becoming more adroit at gliding to pinpoint landings.

10.) Evan Christopher, “Remembering Song” (Arbors) – If you paid close attention to “Treme” this year…no, wait. I have to digress just a little here. I’ve been hearing fans of “The Wire” complain that they find “Treme” too slow, too dense and not as – what? – urgently engrossing as its predecessor. I am compelled to remind these folks that it took at least three seasons for “The Wire” to find a following. And that only when it was nearly over did people begin thinking of it as a “classic.” So though it’s no longer fashionable in pop-culture circles to counsel patience, call me unfashionable. Watch and wait…Anyway, if you did pay close attention to “Treme,” you probably saw Christopher jamming with Tom McDermott and the luminous Lucia Micarelli on Scott Joplin’s “Heliotrope Bouquet.” He has been one of Crescent City’s most lyrical and stalwart clarinetists and this love letter to his adopted hometown is both a wistful lament for the unshakable legacy of Katrina and a bittersweet celebration of the spirit that refuses to wither or retreat from that legacy. His original compositions – e.g., “The River by the Road”, “You Gotta Treat It Gentle” – show that he’s not trying to reinvent tradition, but fulfill its demands. Sometimes, you don’t need to listen to something that changes the world. Easing its pain is enough. And for me, this year especially, it was more than enough.

HONORABLE MENTION:
1.) Gonzalo Rubalcaba, “Fe Faith” (5Passion)
2.) Matthew Shipp Trip, “The Art of the Improviser” (Thirsty Ear)
3.) Larry Goldings, “In My Room” (BFM)
4.) Charles Lloyd & Maria Farantouri, “Athens Concert” (EMI)
5.) Terrell Stafford, “This Side of Strayhorn (MaxJazz)
BEST NEW ARTIST
Chris Dingman, “Waking Dreams” (Between Worlds Music)
BEST VOCAL
Youn Sun Nah, “Same Girl” (see above)
BEST LATIN ALBUIM
Zenon, “Alma Adento: The Puerto Rican Songbook” (see above)
BEST REISSUE
Julius Hemphill, “Dogon A.D.” (Arista/Freedom) HONORABLE MENTION: Bill Dixon Orchestra, “Intents and Purposes” (RCA/Dynagroove)

PREMIERE of SEYMOUR DANCE COLLECTIVE

An evening with the Seymour Dance Collective

Northland Performing Arts Center
4411 Tamarack Blvd (near Morse and Karl Rd)Columbus, OH

Seymour Dance Collective presents Physical Graffiti a night of eclectic and exciting new choreography.

The Collective involves interchangeable roles between performers and choreographers who are utterly committed to sharing their personal perspective and collective voice through movement.

Physical Graffiti is a night of “tags” or glimpses into the lives and work of these combined artists. Featuring music ranging from dub-step to Animal Collective to original compositions.

Physical Graffiti promises a night of performances with a little something for everyone.

Tickets: $10 at the door

There will be a reception/dance party following Friday's show.

For more information message me or email: seymourdancecollective@gmail.com.

Hope to see you there!

new dance works with choreography by

Mike Abbatiello

Quentin Burley

Rebecca Quintrell

Alexandra Runyon

Chafin Seymour

Funding provided by the Ohio State Univeristy College of Arts & Sciences and Denman Undergraduate Research fund. Additional support provided by the Ohio State University Department of Dance.

Sunrise Prospect Park January 7 2011

This is what makes walking Bliss worth it!

"Slick Venus" New Choreography by Chafin Seymour - Brooklyn Performance - Feb 5

See “Slick Venus” – a new dance choreographed by Chafin Seymour
has been selected by Ohio State University School of Dance to be performed at the DANCEWAVE'S “Dance to College” Festival

Saturday, February 5, 2011 – 3pm
Kumble Theatre – Long Island University –
Brooklyn, NY/ University Place (@ Flatbush Avenue & Willoughby Street),

Tickets, $20 from http://www.kumbletheatre.org/ or
$15 group ticket if you reserve with Gene Seymour at seynah@aol.com.

BROOKLYN HOLIDAY GREETINGS!

And then he said. . .
1. Gene & Chafin are on Facebook; Marie is on the bus.
2. They come & go all the time. I can't remember which of my people are coming home.
3. Do you think Obama will ever have a public employment job program.
4. Do I look like I have matches?
5. What do you mean you forgot to bring treats with you today?

Happy Holidays from All of Us in

Brooklyn, Washinton, DC & Ohio!

Gene Seymour Interviews Dave Brubeck

Gene Seymour interviewed Dave Brubeck, who turned 90 years old. The interview was published December 5, 2010 in the LA Times
Photo by Carolyn Cole, LA Times

Gene Seymour's Top 10 Jazz Discs for 2010

1.) Regina Carter, “Reverse Thread” (E1) – For years, I’ve been waiting for the best jazz violinist of her generation to make an album as great as she is. Not that she hasn’t been placed in contexts that complement her range and virtuosity before now, but her previous discs (not counting those where she’s been an often-galvanizing guest star) have in varied ways fallen short of conveying the flamboyant charge of her live performances. This assortment of African-inspired jewels, finally, delivers the goods – and then some. The blend of instrumentalists is zesty – two accordions (Will Holshouser, Gary Versace), two basses (Mamadou Ba, Chris Lightcap), guitar (Adam Rogers) and percussion (Alvester Garnett). Add to this mix Yacouba Sissoko on the kora, a 12-string West African harp used by griots, and you have a disc that is, from start to finish, the most thrilling and gorgeous dance music imaginable from an artist steeped in jazz, but now even more “beyond category” than she was before.
2.) Jason Moran, “Ten” (Blue Note) – The MacArthur “genius grant” he received this year only validates a ticket he’s been carrying around for most of this new century, at least as far as serious jazz heads are concerned. Both the foundation’s gift and this disc combine to provide a fitting capstone to Moran’s decade of habitual brilliance. As with all his best recordings, Moran plays here as if he embodied the whole 20th century of jazz piano from old-time striding to post-bop romanticism to polyrhythmic R&B/hip-hop extensions. (Yeah I know, but if you’re so smart, you come up with a better description of “Gangsterism Over 10 Years.”) “Ten” also firmly establishes his trio, with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Watts, as one of those all-time, all-world combos whose members seem to anticipate each other’s thoughts and intentions in the quicksilver manner of an elite basketball team overpowering hapless opponents on its home court.
3.) Geri Allen, “Flying Toward the Sound” (Motema) – Sooner or later, someone is going to have to declare Professor Allen a national treasure, which is among the precious few honors she hasn’t collected in a lifetime of laudable accomplishments. This “Solo Piano Excursion Inspired by Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock” (her words) is by far her most breathtaking dare yet; a suite of nine pieces whose deliberately crafted format frees her to take off on stunning harmonic combinations, some lyrical and ruminative, others surging off the keyboard with speed, power and poise. As a storyteller trafficking in mystical and spiritual themes, she can caress and upend, often in the same narrative passage. You hear not only the lessons she’s absorbed from the three influences cited above, but also those she learned from Mary Lou Williams, Bud Powell, Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden. I’d be willing to label this her masterpiece if I wasn’t sure she’s capable of even greater astonishments to come.
4.) Henry Threadgill Zooid, “This Brings Us To: Volume II” (PI) –As with Threadgill’s peers who cultivated their artistry under the aegis of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), it is best to consider his music analogous to scientific or spiritual inquiry. Putting it another way, whenever Threadgill hears something that even vaguely offers possibilities if it’s blended with something unfamiliar and/or intriguing, he follows his impulse and doesn’t worry too much about what others think. A long time ago, this kind of thinking was labeled “avant-garde” and Zooid, a quintet which meshes his flute and alto sax with Liberty Elfman’s guitar, Jose Davila’s trombone and tuba, Stomu Takeishi’s bass and Elliot Kavee’s drums, offers wary and credulous listeners alike (relatively) easy access to what remains both unsettlingly bold and oddly familiar about such experimentation. Take hold of whatever instrument, rhythmic pattern or riff you want for ballast and you may end up captivated by what Threadgill and his gang are up to. Not everyone wants to hang around these neighborhoods, but there are unexpected rewards for those who do.
5.) Ted Nash & Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, “Portrait in Seven Shades” (J@LC) – Nash, a quality mensch as a reed player and composer, has been one of the glittering ornaments of Wynton Marsalis’ uptown confab for a decade. The eponymous suite, commissioned by Marsalis, written by Nash and premiered three years ago, uses seven great artists as inspirations for some colorful sonic painting on a big-band canvas. “Dali,” for instance, is propelled by an inexorably eccentric 13/8 tempo upon which solos by Nash and trumpeter Marcus Printup distend themselves like timepieces in “The Persistence of Memory.” By contrast, “Chagall” brings in Natalie Bonin’s violin and Bill Schimmel’s accordion to help evoke the painter’s winsome, carnival-esque theatricality. Perhaps appropriately, it’s “Picasso” that dominates the whole enterprise with motifs that unfurl like giant flags and fire-breathing solos by trombonist Vincent Gardner and Marsalis (who, as always, sounds serenely locked in his comfort zone as a role player).
6.) Fred Hersch Trio, “Whirl” (Palmetto) – Hersch has pulled himself through physical travail to play with as much craft, energy and passion as he ever did. What makes this characteristically fine album especially gratifying is the showcase it offers for Hersch as composer. He wrote six of the album’s ten selections and each deserves consideration for anybody’s regular repertoire, especially the enchanting title track, the irresistibly hooky “Skipping” and two Brazilian-inspired pieces, “Mandevilla” and “Sad Poet,” the latter dedicated to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s memory. “Snow is Falling…” would be a fine addition to someone’s holiday anthology while “Still Here,” though written in tribute to Wayne Shorter, could just as easily apply to this trio’s imperturbable, seemingly indefatigable leader.
7.) Cassandra Wilson, “Silver Pony” (Blue Note) – It’s been only three years since Wilson’s previous new release, yet it somehow seems a lot longer. Perhaps it’s because so much has happened with her in the intervening years, notably her resettlement in her native Deep South, spending part of the time caring for her ailing mother in Jackson, Mississippi and the rest of it making a new home for herself in N’awlins. What she brings back from that journey is a kind of scrapbook; some live sets, some studio tracks, some original compositions (“Beneath a Silver Moon”), standards (“Lover Come Back To Me”), delta blues (“Saddle Up My Pony”), retro-pop (“If It’s Magic”) and a collaboration with John Legend (“Watch the Sunrise”). In short, she’s throwing everything at you that sums up where she’s been and who she’s become and, even with the disc’s occasional rough spots, you can’t help sensing that she revels in being in a good place now, in more ways than one. And she makes you share her exuberance in ways she never has before on – so to speak – record.
8.) Anat Fort Trio, “And If” (ECM) – The burgundy glow of a winter sunset pervades one’s imagination throughout most of this disc, though “And If” is, in no way, to be mistaken for one of those New Age-y room-fresheners-for-the-ear. Fort’s thematically inventive approach to the piano is aggressive enough to leap off the walls without pushing too far ahead of her trio mates, bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider, who respond with some delicate, ingenious probing of their own. Fort’s spare attack and richly layered harmonies conceal a penchant for subtle traps. Just when she’s got you enraptured with her spacious-skies homage to her home state, “Minnesota,” she lands a wicked combination on your senses with “Nu,” a kind of extraterrestrial beat-box exercise that gives the whole trio room to frolic. This seems sufficient reason to keep your eyes on Fort – or, at least, to never turn your back on her
9.) Charles Lloyd Quartet, “Mirror” (ECM) – It’s by now a conditioned reflex to mention Lloyd in the same breath as John Coltrane But the deeper Lloyd gets into the great late-autumnal phase of his career, one is increasingly tempted to find similarities with the most conspicuous of Trane’s employers, Miles Davis. This resemblance is driven home with the opener, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which remained a constant in the Miles-ian repertoire throughout Davis’ stylistic transitions. But the plaintive beauty of Lloyd’s tone belongs to him alone, especially on ballads, where Lloyd’s Coltrane-esque thematic variations are offset by the almost offhand grace of their resolutions. His “singing” through his sax is especially pronounced – and effective – when he lets the melody do most of the heavy-lifting, as in “La Llorona” or Brian Wilson’s “Caroline, No.” Once again, he’s served well by his band-mates, especially his drummer Eric Harland and the aforementioned genius on the piano, Jason Moran.
10.) Anat Cohen, “Clarinetwork: Live at the VillageVangyard” (Anzic) – It’s impossible to record a bad album in the Basement Shrine on Seventh Avenue., which on the night of Benny Goodman’s 100th birthday (June 5 of last year), showed typically astute judgment in hosting one of the leading avatars of the jazz clarinet’s late 20th century resurgence. Backed by an elite rhythm section of pianist Benny Green, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash, Cohen paid the best possible 21st century tribute to Goodman by plucking items from the Swing King’s song book (“After You’ve Gone,” “Body and Soul”, “Lullaby of the Leaves”) and deftly weaving everything she knows about modern and post-modern jazz into the tunes without doing violence to the essential charm of Goodman’s original interpretations. Such solicitous tugging and pulling of classic material is what jazz repertory, at its best, is supposed to do. It’s also supposed to make musicians such as Cohen more famous than they are now. Ah, well, dig we must, as the saying goeth…

HONORABLE MENTION
The Jazz Passengers, “Reunited” (Justin Time)
Kenny Werner, “No Beginning, No End” (Half Note)
Frank Kimbrough, “Rumors” (Palmetto)
Brad Mehldau, “Highway Rider” (Nonesuch)
Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, “Jasmine” (ECM)
Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, “Double Portrait” (Blue Note)

BEST LATIN ALBUM
Chucho Valdes, “Chucho’s Steps” (4Q)
Honorable Mention: Conrad Herwig, “The Latin Side of Herbie Hancock” (Half Note)

BEST REISSUE
“The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air” (Mosaic)
BEST VOCAL
Wilson, “Silver Pony” (SEE ABOVE)
Honorable Mention: Hilary Kole, “You Are There” (Justin Time)

BEST BIG-BAND ALBUM
“Portrait in Seven Shades” (SEE ABOVE)