Dec 31 2019
Now up: Best Jazz on Bandcamp in 2019
And here we go.
It was pretty much an impossible task to cobble together a Best of 2019 list for Bandcamp, limited, as I was, to just 15 slots. Too many great recordings in 2019, too few opportunities to train a spotlight on them. Rather than do a typical ranking, I went with the approach of presenting a cohesive picture of the modern jazz landscape, a snapshot of its diversity and how that leads to new and exciting forms of expression… including many that leave the 1950’s bop sound far behind.
Some of these albums will be familiar to you from the monthly recommendations columns to already hit The Bandcamp Daily, but there are also a few that will be new to this column. 2019 was the best year ever, and this list is just a fraction of the evidence supporting that claim.
And on that note, let’s begin.
Follow this LINK to read those recommendations and listen to music from each album.
Check out past recommendations by running through my contributor archives.
Have fun going through the list!
Cheers.
Though both had made their respective marks while on the NYC scene, it wasn’t until after Rebecca Martin and Guillermo Klein had each relocated to upstate New York that the two ultimately collaborated. It was worth the wait. Their respective balance between folk musics and modern jazz sync up perfectly on The Upstate Project, and lead to a series of poignant moments rich with melodicism… and this applies to the union of their voices as well as between guitar and piano. A reworking of Bill Frisell’s classic song “Throughout” is nice bonus to accompany some beautiful original pieces. This collaboration should happen far more often.
Feb 15 2020
Best of 2019 #06: Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos – “Cristal”
Guillermo Klein is counted among those giants. The pianist has been responsible for some of the most stunning, beautiful music of the modern era. No better proof of this claim are the recordings made with his Los Guachos ensemble. Klein brings about a communion of modern post-bop and Argentinean folk, and is capable of generating epic melodic journeys and sublime harmonic reveries all within the span of one piece, no one element outshining the other, and all feeding into one another, like stars sharing the role of lighting up the night sky. As I summed up for The Bandcamp Daily, “Cristal is yet another sign that we no longer have to wait for the next anything. [And] when historians attempt to pinpoint the modern equivalent to 1959, they will almost certainly select a year that saw a Guillermo Klein Los Guachos recording hit the shelves. Hell, it may even be 2019.”
Your album personnel: Guillermo Klein (piano, vocals), Miguel Zenon (alto sax), Bill McHenry (tenor sax), Chris Cheek (soprano, tenor & baritone saxophones), Diego Urcola (trumpet, flugelhorn), Taylor Haskins (trumpet, flugelhorn), Sandro Tomasi (trombone), Ben Monder (guitar), Fernando Huergo (electric bass), Jeff Ballard (drums), and Richard Nant (percussion, trumpet).
Released on Sunnyside Records.
Music from New York City.
I wrote about the album for The Bandcamp Daily.
Listen | Read more | Available at: Bandcamp – Amazon
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By davesumner • Recap: Best of 2019 • 0 • Tags: Best Jazz of 2019, Guillermo Klein, New York City, Sunnyside Records