The best jazz albums of 2024: Jim Gilchrist names his top five

Fergus McCreadie

Fergus McCreadie: Stream (Edition Records) Storm, the opening track of multi-award-winning pianist Fergus McCreadie’s fourth album, pretty well encapsulates what his mercurial, Scots accented and landscape-inspired jazz is all about. As his longstanding trio with bassist David Bowden and drummer Stephen Henderson sounds as impressively and dramatically cohesive as ever, the tune’s dramatic, cymbal-shushing prelude leads into delicate keyboard musings that become increasingly tempestuous. The narrative arc of this album is perhaps more linear than previous recordings, shapeshifting between folky, at times pastoral melodies, moments of serene reflection and turbulent cross-currents, as in the urgent, pulsing of The Crossing or the hymn-like serenity of Mountain Stream. There’s nimble dancing, too, in Stony Gate, before the stream emerges eventually into the open sea in the stately closing track, Coastline.

Playtime: Morse Code Through he Lights (Interupto Music) Edinburgh’s Playtime collective of saxophonist Martin Kershaw, guitarist Graeme Stephen, bassist Mario Caribé and drummer Tom Bancroft surmounted Covid lockdown by inviting guests to join them remotely in live-streamed improvisations. This album captures these extraordinary sessions, at times uncannily other-worldly sounding, considering they’re being created by individuals in enforced, distant isolation. Guests include trumpeter Laura Jurd with a forceful opener, Byron Wallen’s trumpet and Kershaw’s sax flurry around each other in Swing out of Latency while there’s a haunting collaboration with Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger.

Tim Garland: Moment of Departure (Ubuntu Music) The title of this immensely rewarding double album by saxophonist Tim Garland is informed not only by the nature of casting off as an improviser, but by vivid sleeve artwork by migrant artist Esra Kizir Gokcen. It also sees Garland cast aside saxophone to conduct the London Studio Orchestra in his beautiful suite The Forever Seed.”

John Surman: Words Unspoken (ECM) “Is there another jazz reed voice quite like John Surman’s? The Oslo-based English saxophonist is 80, yet there’s no let-up in his expressive and distinctively toned soundings, here in the assured and empathetic company of guitarist Rob Luft, vibraphonist Rob Waring and drummer Thomas Strønen.”

Tim Kliphuis Trio: Pictures at an Exhibition (Own Label) Masters of seamless jazz-classical crossover, violinist Tim Kliphuis and his trio with guitarist Nigel Clark and double-bassist Roy Percy give Mussorgsky’s masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition an often dazzling swing-jazz re-imagining, augmented at times by a string trio. Here, Mussorgsky’s recurring Promenade motif glides rather than promenades, over slickly shifting rhythms. They bring a wonderfully stealthy tension to Gnomus and, amid the stately melancholy of The Old Castle, the troubadour plays a Spanish-inflected guitar. Apart from the Hartmann canvases which inspired Mussorgsky’s original, Kliphuis evokes other artworks including Georgia O’Keefe’s Ritz Tower, portraying Twenties New York with brisk gypsy swing, while Hokusai’s Great Wave gathers pace and roiling mass to a breathless climax.