If you're old enough, you might recall the comic Godfrey Cambridge from late-night television in the 1960s, when he was one of a new wave of black
Below are the results of NPR Music's 8th Annual Jazz Critics Poll (my 15th, going back to the poll's beginnings in the Village Voice). These are
Dear Club kids,
It’s fascinating, Chris, to hear that the population’s collective shattered nerves were so plainly reflected by the Billboard chart stats. It’s unusually immediate evidence for pop culture as a seismograph of broader social shifts; often cultural historians have to wait years to track those patterns in retrospect. Of course, the other way the arts reflect social change in real time is by explicitly addressing it. So it’s time to talk about 2020 as a year of musical protest, as I noted in my year-end list. It’s been building for the past half-decade, of course, but it really culminated this year.
15 Great Jazz Albums of 2020
Jazz may not have the mainstream cultural dominance that it once did, but it remains a thriving, multi-faceted form of music that continues to have so much more to say. Jazz informs so much of the rap and electronic music that
does have mainstream cultural dominance today, and it s long popped up in indie rock, metal, punk, and other styles of popular music too. Though jazz never went away, the past few years have seen a serious jazz renaissance that continues to grow, branch out into new innovative territory, and attract new listeners. The world of jazz is so vast and we don t claim to be experts of all of it, but if you re looking to catch up on some of the great jazz albums released in 2020, we put together a list of 15 that we strongly recommend. It s not a definitive best-of, and we probably haven t even heard all of the great jazz albums released this year, but we d like to think it s a pretty good place to start.