Six Months' Of Listening

Never one to resist the latest web trend, especially when the days are long and slow, I'll throw in my bids for the recordings that have caught my ear at the halfway mark of 2014.

In chronological order as I received them:

1. Alfredo Rodriguez – The Invasion Parade (Mack Avenue)
2. Vijay Iyer – Mutations (ECM)
3. Ambrose Akinmusire – The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier To Paint (Blue Note)
4. Oran Etkin – Gathering Light (Motéma)
5. Sonny Rollins – Road Shows, Vol. 3 (Okeh)
6. Dave Douglas & Uri Caine – Present Joys (Greenleaf)
7. Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio – Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio (Concord Jazz)
8. Wolfgang Muthspiel/Larry Grenadier/Brian Blade – Driftwood (ECM)
9. Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden – Last Dance (ECM)
10. John Coltrane – Offering: Live at Temple University (Impulse!/Resonance)

Can you read anything into my list—say, the fact that Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are there? Probably not, and you shouldn't assume that anything else I may have heard in the first half of the year will not make it to my final list for 2014; that's not necessarily the way I either listen to, or 'hear', things. I usually check out earlier releases as time allows, and some things that strike me the first few times I hear them won't stay with me when I do my final review sometime in the fall. But that's the list for now.