2010 In Review

Tomorrow I'm off to Miami for the holiday, so I will leave you with my year-end roundup. As the usual disclaimer goes, since I am but an amateur critic, I only review a handful of albums released in a given year, so be sure to check out the best-of lists of the more than capable critics after the break. But before that, here are the albums which I enjoyed the most in 2010, in alphabetical order by artist:

• The Bad Plus: Never Stop
• Vijay Iyer: Solo
• Jason Moran: TEN
• Paul Motian: Lost in a Dream
• Polar Bear: Peepers
• Christian Scott: Yesterday You Said Tomorrow
• The Wee Trio: Capitol Diner Vol. 2

Also, some of my favorite nonjazz of 2010:

• Beach House: Teen Dream
• The Black Keys: Brothers
• Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record
• Spoon: Transference
• Vampire Weekend: Contra
• The Walkmen: Lisbon
• Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
• The Whigs: In The Dark

And below the break, the compilation of critics' lists. [more]

• David Adler (Lerterland) 
• All About Jazz (big band albums)
• AllMusic
• Amazon.com
• Chris Barton (LA Times)
• Nick Bewsey (Jazz In Space)
• Philip Booth (Between the Grooves) 
• Troy Collins (All About Jazz)
• Thomas Conrad
• John Chacona
• Nate Chinen (NY Times)
• Lawrence Donohue-Greene (AAJ-New York)
• Alain Drouot
• Ken Dryden
• Ken Franckling
• David Franklin  
• Steve Greenlee Boston Globe
• George Grella (The Big City)
• James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)
• Eyal Hareuveni (All About Jazz)
• Tad Hendrickson (AOL/Spinner)
• Geoffrey Himes
• Lyn Horton
• Tom Hull 
• Peter Hum (JazzBlog.ca)
• Patrick Jarenwattananon (NPR/A Blog Supreme)
• Willard Jenkins (The Independent Ear)
• Fred Kaplan (Slate)
• John Kelman (All About Jazz)
• Bill King (ejazznews.com)
• Bruce Lindsay (All About Jazz)
• Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz)
• Dan McClenaghan (All About Jazz)
• Bill Milkowski
• Ralph Miriello (Notes on Jazz)
• Tim Niland (Music and More) 
• PopMatters
• Doug Ramsey (Rifftides, WSJ)
• Ben Ratliff (NY Times)
• Howard Reich (Chicago Tribune)
• Alex Rodriguez (Lubricity)
• Hank Shteamer (Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches)
• John Szwed
• Derek Taylor
• Jacob Teichroew (About.com) piano albums
• Mike West 

Major thanks goes to Largehearted Boy and A Blog Supreme, whose compilations of year-end lists across all genres were very helpful. Also, thanks to the Jazz Journalists Association for archiving its members' lists in one place for easy reading. This year I tried something new, compiling as many top-ten lists as I can into this spreadsheet to calculate which albums showed up in the most lists. My criteria: I only included lists of 10 or fewer albums (with one exception: PopMatters, since it was written by two critics). Every entry received equal weighting, since some people did not rank their top ten. You can view my full spreadsheet here. Below are the leaders. Unsurprisingly, 2010 was Jason Moran's year.

1.        Jason Moran: TEN
2.        Rudresh Mahanthappa & Bunky Green: Apex
3.        Steve Coleman: Harvesting Semblances and Affinities
4. (tie) Charles Lloyd: Mirror
           Vijay Iyer: Solo
6. (tie) Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden: Jasmine
           Mary Halvorson: Saturn Sings
8. (tie) Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Deluxe
           Matthew Shipp: 4D
           Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Forty Fort

Finally, I bid one more farewell to Hank Jones, Gene Lees, Bill Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Herman Leonard, James Moody, Herb Ellis, Dennis Hopper, Jose Lima, John Wooden, Mike Cuellar, Howard Zinn, JD Salinger, Manute Bol, Leslie Nielsen, and anyone else I forgot.