Capturing the breathtaking beauty, range, and diversity of jazz released in 2025 through a list of “10 best albums” feels as challenging, vainand ultimately disappointingas trying to photograph the Grand Canyon at sunset by placing a pinhole in front of a rudimentary digital camera’s lens. Sure, a picture will be taken. It might even prove you were there, at that time, when the shutter clickedprovided that those who look at the photograph can tell there was a canyon, and a sunset. But can anyone grasp the majesty that surrounded that thickly pixelated sunset fragment frozen in the frame?
Every year, the assignment is the same: come up with a “top ten.” And yet every year, more albums are released than the year before. So, every 12 months, I fail a little more spectacularly at the impossible task of compressing an ever-growing flood of new albumsdebut albums, unearthed gems, original releases, box sets, delightful surprisesinto a neat list of ten. I try, though. I really do.
Throughout the year, I set aside the records that strike me, the ones I know I’ll return to. Inevitably, the list grows week by week. The feeling of failing the assignment grows at the same rate, until, at some point in December, my perspective invariably shifts, and the more I look at the mammoth list, the more I like how it offers a higher-resolution picture of what actually happened.
As such, the list deliberately de-emphasizes the significance of individual albums that populate “top ten” rankings, often compiled with a photo-finish mentality and a sense of competition foreign to an art form that was never meant to be a race. Instead, it gives a sense of how there is a community, a scene shaped by countless individual contributions; it offers a snapshot of the jazz ecosystem in a given year.
Of course, we all know what happens even when we photograph that breathtaking Grand Canyon sunset with the best camera money can buy: the image still falls short. That sunset can only be fully experienced by being there. And yet we take the picture anyway. Not because it does justice to the moment, but because the moment was so powerful we wanted to hold onto it, to freeze it in time, to have something that might later jolt a memory. The photograph’s value lies precisely therenot in accuracy, but in recollection. And recollection is always personal. Two people standing side by side will frame the same scene differently.
So it is with year-end lists. They freeze-frame a personal memory. No matter how long the list, or how fine the resolution, the memory it captures can only ever be a personal one. Still, one hopes it might resonate with othersleaving enough space between the pixels, or the albums, for readers to insert their own experiences, or to create new ones.
I love reading end-of-the-year listicles for exactly this reason: they often lead me to albums I somehow missed, despite their obvious quality, and into the rabbitholes that follow those discoveries. And for that I am grateful to the colleagues that share their listicles. I hope the list below does the same for youand perhaps helps you stumble upon a few new favorites along the way.
Must Haves
Sista Forsoket
Agnas Bros.
Moserobie
