Local papers offer "best of 2005" jazz picks

The venerable journalistic tradition of the year-end wrap-up is in full effect on the Net and TV and in newspapers this week, and the Post-Dispatch's music writers have weighed in with their "best of 2005" picks in this weekend's edition. Pop critic Kevin Johnson offers an overview of the last 12 months of local music news, including some jazz-related items, here. Meanwhile, Terry Perkins and Calvin Wilson write about their jazz favorites from the past year here.

Over at my own home in print, the Riverfront Times, we didn't get quite as much space to expound, with a year-end wrap-up format that limited our picks to one favorite recording and one "overlooked" recording per writer. Frankly, though I chose to write about the Pat Metheny Group's The Way Up as my favorite recording, there were easily a half-dozen others that were just as good in their own way, including the recently discovered Coltrane recordings with Monk and with his own group, the most recent records from Dave Holland's small group, Marty Ehrlich, and the Keith Jarrett-Gary Peacock-Jack DeJohnette Trio, and several others. Plus, there's lots of highly touted stuff from 2005 that I simply haven't gotten around to hearing yet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that these year-end best-ofs are, by their nature, rather subjective and, like all critical rantings, should be taken with a grain of salt. Even those of us who get paid to write about music sometimes have trouble keeping up with everything that's out there. And sometimes, the difference between a record making the cut or not can be determined by something as mundane as the number of words allotted per freelancer.

In this case, with only one record to write about, I chose Metheny's CD primarily because I felt it represented a successful culmination of years of work by one of the major groups in contemporary jazz. In contrast, Ehrlich's terrific record feels to me more like the beginning of a direction that will yield even greater music in time, and the records from Holland and Jarrett, though both excellent, are more of a piece with their other recent works. I chose not to write about the Coltrane recordings simply because I wanted to feature something from a living musician.

My choice for "overlooked recording" was Backstabber's Ball, the excellent debut recording by bassist and St. Louis native Neal Caine, who was just in town this week for the Big River Hurricane Relief concert at the Sheldon. I recently did an interview with Caine, and the resulting feature article - an exclusive to St. Louis Jazz Notes - will be posted here soon.