“Best Jazz” of 2025 Comes from 1985!

Having vented my frustration with “Ten Best” lists this past Sunday, I was amused to discover how The Guardian, one of my favorite sources of news from the other side of the pond, decided to deal with this practice. The title of the article was the expected prototype: “The 10 best jazz albums of 2025.” However, the content of one of those albums was a collection of live recordings made in November of 1985.

The title of the album was (no surprise) Quartet (England) 1985. It consisted of thirteen tracks recorded between November 19 and November 26, only the last of them being a studio recording. The quartet was led by Anthony Braxton playing, as usual, a diversity of reed instruments. Rhythm was provided by pianist Marylin Crispell, Mark Dresser on double bass, and percussionist Gerry Hemingway. Considering the fact that Braxton’s Opus 82 was performed by (according to the Mosaic booklet) “Four 39-piece orchestras from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Kenneth Moore, Gene Young, Robert Baustian, [and conductor] Murray Gross,” Quartet (England) 1985 is a rather intimate offering, including “encores” of “All the Things You Are,” “Four,” and “After the Rain.”

The “Ten Best” list itself was compiled by John Fordham, identified on his Web page as “the Guardian's main jazz critic.” It is not easy to tell from that Web page what the extent is of his listening experiences. However, I think it would be fair to say that any Braxton performance was conceived as a challenge to listeners, whether in a concert hall or through the luxury of a recording that can be played many times. For my part, I enjoy that latter luxury, particularly when the music reflects influences from sources including Arnold Schoenberg, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane.

To be fair, Fordham had to confine each of his ten selections to description in a single paragraph. For those unfamiliar with Braxton’s work, Fordham had written an article explicitly about the Braxton album this past July 25. Sadly, that article consisted of only three paragraphs, which did little to orient an attentive listener encountering a Braxton performance for the first time. To invoke an old joke coined by Anna Russell, reading that article is likely to leave many readers “as befogged as before!”

Anthony Braxton on the cover of the box set being discussed (from the Discogs Web page)

My own effort to try to make sense (for myself as well as for my readers) of Braxton’s work appeared on this site almost exactly seventeen years ago. The good news is that Discogs maintains a Web page for one of my primary sources of his recordings: The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton. This was first released in October of 2008. As of this writing, eight of those box sets are available at prices between $29.99 and $308.75. Sadly (for some, at least) the media price is currently $250, which is unlikely to tempt those curious about Braxton and his approaches to making music!