At Slate, Fred Kaplan lists the best new jazz albums of 2005, but first he lists the three truly best jazz albums released this year.
The three best jazz albums of 2005 were recorded 40 to 60 years ago….
It’s a mere, if wondrous, coincidence that those three recordings of yore were all discovered this year. And they are discoveries; nobody had even known they existed. Dizzy Gillespie-Charlie Parker, New York, Town Hall, June 22, 1945 (Uptown Jazz), recorded shortly after the two fathers of be-bop formed their quintet with Max Roach on drums, is as electrifying as anything they would set down ever again. Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note), made in November 1957 shortly before that group broke up, finds Monk playing his most archly elegant piano and Coltrane his most relaxed yet searching tenor sax. John Coltrane’s One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note (Impulse!), recorded in the spring of 1965, in a Manhattan club that Trane used as a sort of workshop, captures his great quartet streaking on the knife-edge between structure and freedom.
All three easily rank among the best jazz albums of all time.