Again, this is me reporting what I think are the consensus picks, not my personal opinions:
1. Best jazz album of the year: Charles Mingus Sextet with the Eric Dolphy, Cornell 1964. Personally I like this CD very much, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already know most of the essential Mingus. Dee Dee Bridgewater, who sings jazz over a kora background from Mali, was another popular selection. I often find jazz singing too facile but the African mix provides an appropriately meaty counterweight.
2. World music: Tinariwen, Aman Iman: Water Is Life. They’re the desert nomads who were described as the world’s greatest rock and roll band by Slate.com. Runner-up would be Segu Blue, by Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba. Acoustic string music from Mali is in this year, plus there is Bembeya Jazz National, from Guinea. Here is a very good NPR list of top world music picks.
3. Haitian CD: Erol Josue, Regleman. A clear winner in this category.
4. Lee Perry collection: Ape-ology. The best of the best. Again. It’s funny, but this category has a winner just about every year. In the Coasian durable goods monopoly game, price is falling rapidly…
Wow, listening to the clips of the Dee Dee Bridgewater album, I totally know what you mean. It sounds like terrible snore-inducing jazz singing over awesome backing tracks. Kind of weird. I might actually get it.
I’m an Haitian and a regular reader of this blog. I was surprised to find a Special category for Haitian CDs
in your list.Do you have any special connection with Haiti?
Speaking of berber bands, does anyone know the title of the cassette Souad Massi made with Atakor?
Shouldn’t that be the best jazz album of 1964? It’s irritating that so many jazz critics fixate on the 1960s at the expense of promoting innovative musicians playing today. It’s true that the decade produced some of the most exciting, creative new sounds the genre has seen. If you share the (commonly expressed) view that modern jazz music has relatively little value and has only really emulated the sounds of that period, that’s fine, but you should go join critics of Baroque music in their academic ghetto. If you think as I do that criticism should play a relatively active role in promoting artistic and cultural progress, I can’t see why you would think an album recorded in 1964 belongs on a “Best of 2007″ list.
For the record, I regrettably haven’t listened to much new jazz this year, but my favorite album was Chris Potter’s “Follow the Red Line”.
I do have a longstanding connection to Haiti, dating back a bit more than ten years. I’ve been five times, maybe I’ll blog about it soon. I also follow Haitian music a bit, more generally I like to have a category or two that gets away from the usual.
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