The year in music

Unlike last year, I didn’t buy many jazz CDs this year.  My meta-list recognizes two releases as popping up most frequently on year-end "best of" lists:

Charles Lloyd Quartet, Rabo de Nube

Bill Frisell, History, Mystery

Both are high quality but neither is a game-changer.  I liked Miles from India, a combination of Miles Davis’s jazz fusion with Indian riffs; that would be my jazz pick of the year.

From a previous post, here are the classical music meta-list picks for the year.

I’ve found one extant meta-list for popular music, here.  It is OK for a slow year; I won’t pass along the meta-list I came up with myself because I happen to believe its contents are mediocre, noting that my copy of Santogold has yet to arrive in the mail.  If you wish, scour these lists to construct your own meta-list.

In popular music what I enjoyed most this year was:

Roger McGuinn’s acoustic cover (listen here) of Leadbelly’s On Easter Morn He Rose (there is a different version of the song, free, at that link), and

Neil Young’s 1968 acoustic takes on Buffalo Springfield songs, and

The Kevin Shields/Patti Smith two-CD collaboration, which oddly lots of people don’t seem to know about.

I’m not usually so old-fashioned.

Here is a Times of UK list.  You’ll find a zillion Amazon lists here, most are OK but too mainstream.  I’ll cover world music — which had a good year — soon.

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