The best jazz of 2018 - new heights scaled and legends revisited

The Guardian 0

John Coltrane’s previously unreleased 1963 recordings dominated, but Myra Melford took improv to new places, and the UK had its most diverse scene in years

In almost any year of its century-and-counting existence, the coolly cliffhanging art of jazz stays fascinating to its hardcore devotees, and in some years reaches an intrigued new crowd beyond. That happened in 2018, as a diverse and mostly young UK new wave accelerated their adventurous hitching of jazz ideas to urban dance grooves, R&B, grime, sampling, contemporary art-music and beyond. They brought a fresh frisson to the fascinating end-of-year game of weighing up of the legacies of departed giants, against the ways ingenious newcomers pull them out of shape.

June saw the PR-savvy unveiling of previously unreleased 1963 recordings by saxophone visionary John Coltrane, released in both boiled-down and full 14-track versions. The latter was a listening marathon, but its multiple takes of the same tunes revealed more tellingly how inspirational the early 60s Coltrane quartet was, for its attitude to ensemble musicmaking as much as for its revolutionary techniques.