Top 10 Jazz Albums Of 2010

The jazz musician of 2010 has nearly 100 years of recorded jazz history to grapple with. This is both alarming and liberating: alarming because the task of coming to grips with your roots is bigger than ever, and liberating because there are so many exciting places to start doing so.

My favorite jazz records of 2010 often explicitly interacted with history. Perhaps the musicians were recasting jazz gems from the '50s with their own language (Bill Carrothers, Mike Reed) or using predecessors' aesthetics and sonic signatures as points of departure (Geri Allen, Jason Moran).

But just as often, musicians felt liberated to embrace whatever they felt like from outside the standard jazz narrative, from an Argentine folk composer (Guillermo Klein) to The Band (Fight the Big Bull) to hip-hop (Maurice Brown). This natural eclecticism also seems somehow appropriate to our age: If all recorded music ever is fair game, then why can't it be on the jazz musician's playground, too?

Of course, some great records reflected music history in less direct ways -- they just were. Chris Lightcap and Mary Halvorson don't get to play with their own bands nearly as much as they support others, but maybe their records this year will help change that. And Steve Coleman has been pioneering entire musical systems with a band called Five Elements for nearly 30 years; the latest recorded incarnation is a force to be reckoned with.

As always at A Blog Supreme, we'd like to hear from you. These lists are incomplete by necessity, so what were your favorite albums of 2010? Here are some others' lists. And please feel free to leave a comment below.