2010-2020

In Italy, it doesn't get much traction. Sure, GoGo Penguin, Portico, and the Yussef Kamaal duo have played the odd date, even at some fairly prestigious festivals. But nobody really talks about it. It's not serious business for hardcore jazz buffs — it's a bit too easy-listening, isn't it? Sounds like dance music, rave stuff. It lacks depth, continuity with the greats of the past… and what's this business about them not always improvising? — nor is it a sound that could interest anyone who, coming from pop, rock or electronic listening habits in line with indie sensibilities, might consider approaching jazz as the next step on their path toward ever-broader horizons. Kamasi Washington, now he's the real deal. Put the record on and you can really hear it: wow, this is proper jazz. The real thing, no compromises. Plus, even Kendrick Lamar likes him…

And yet, on 20 October 2018, at the “birthday celebration” for Gondwana Records' tenth anniversary, London's Roundhouse was packed to the rafters. The savvier among you will point out: the Roundhouse is always packed. True, but that night even the corridors of the great Camden venue were jammed. Beneath the splendid wood-and-metal vault that, until a few decades ago, housed a railway turntable, the bill included Portico, Mammal Hands and STUFF, among others. The first two, long since signed to Gondwana, were the night's main draw. The third, a Belgian band, had recently released their second album on Sdban — being far less well known, anyone who wanted to could get a really close look at them, while the cosmopolitan youth in regulation hipster t-shirts headed off to grab a drink.

In the UK, nu jazz is a big deal. Well, sure, it helps that over there almost everything, musically speaking, gets more visibility and a bigger following than it does here. But it's also down to the absence of those rigid audience divides that make it so hard, back home, to build lineups around acts that are neither fish nor fowl: too youthful for old-school jazz devotees, too polished for those approaching the genre in search of some presumed expressive authenticity (and everyone else, in any case, isn't exactly rushing to a jazz gig that doesn't sound like jazz).

Not that divisions are absent among London's music crowd, but the situation is more fluid. The offering is broad, movement between scenes is easy, and it's more natural to stay open even to things that might not be your cup of tea. Among musicians, the phenomenon is even more pronounced: people meet, perhaps, at one of the city's many university music schools, take different paths, bump into each other again by chance, and one thing leads to another.

Borderlands

Nu jazz is, in the end, exactly this: a middle ground, a space of overlaps and crossings. Mapping it out is a risky, approximate business, requiring an acceptance of substantial areas of uncertainty. Because the territory is, like any border zone, inherently loose and uneven; and dealing as it does with outposts at the edges of the empire, the areas already explored are potentially fewer than those still waiting to be discovered. Sketching a map, then, is in a way an act of summing up stories: the routes traveled so far — or at least those from which, however fragmentary and however by chance, some dispatch has reached these makeshift geographers with sufficient clarity.

No atlas, however, deserves the name without an attempt at synthesis: the search for a unifying key that lets whoever consults it draw a general idea, an overall impression, from countless details — something to guide future explorations and analyses. So let's give it a try. Let's start here, with an attempt to identify, if not the shared traits, then at least the recurring elements of the territory we're about to map. What, exactly, is this ‘nu jazz'?

It's what happens when a generation of musicians raised on jazz studies and electronic listening can't decide which side to take, and opts to straddle both. Not borrowing jazz phrasing to build electronic tracks (roughly speaking, the intuition behind acid jazz); nor, as future jazz did, stretching post-bop or avant-jazz improvisational language over beats and rhythms descended from techno, house, ambient, downtempo and drum'n'bass. With nu jazz, the division between the two fields disappears: there aren't two phases or two separate levels to the process — everything is simultaneously the product of the interpenetration of both languages. The drums are drum'n'bass, swung in triplets; the basslines are at once free, elegant and fully aware of the effect of a good subwoofer; the melodic choices strike a balance between immediacy and surprise, harmonic richness and repetition.

Jazz and electronica, then. But which jazz, and which electronica? At the risk of sacrificing absolute precision for every single artist, we can attempt more specific characterizations. IDM: this is the first pillar of nu jazz. “Listening” electronica, in its many guises: the abstract techno of Autechre, the hyper-segmented rhythms of Squarepusher, the wonky stumbles of FlyLo and his acolytes, the soft, meticulous cut'n'paste of Four Tet. As for the jazz, it's well-mannered. It can be fusion, funky, third stream, or a light avant- with a whiff of ECM: possibly from the straight eighth, but without too much timbral or expressive radicalism.

And then there's the matter of minimalism. Thinking about it, it's fairly obvious that this is where things were headed — building a bridge between opposite shores that links cerebral rigor, discipline and (let's just say it) easy-listening shamelessness. Reich, Glass, of course, but also Nyman, Mertens and names as pop as Ludovico Einaudi. By now it should be clear: most nu jazz musicians couldn't care less about what's cool and what isn't. Ostinatos, odd time signatures, layers in or out of phase; or crystalline melodies, reverb, easily digestible hazy atmospheres: any idea is welcome, as long as it shapes music that's pleasant, evocative, vital, challenging, at times intoxicating.

Deviation and Standard

So far we've kept it simple. But nu jazz, like any genre still in the making, is less an in-or-out grouping than a blurred category: very few artists, in some sense central to it, possess all its defining traits; a great many others, no less significant for that, are patchworks of characteristic elements, odd ingredients, and thoroughly personal reworkings.

The little story of jazz musicians raised on club music works for some, but certainly not for everyone. Some arrive at the ‘nu' formula via a math- lineage (see Italy's own Satelliti), and there are bands that come to jazz sideways, with recipes that wouldn't be at all out of place on a post-rock bill: the two Japanese acts, some of the Poles, the already-mentioned STUFF., the Tangents. For some (Jaga Jazzist, John Ghost) one could even speak of avant-prog; someone like the Czech Floex is so eclectic he'd need a genre (or more than one) all to himself. And then there are all those British artists of Black musical heritage… it's clear their concerns, not just musical but cultural too, are a different matter from the white, and rather nerdy, abstractions of other nu-jazz artists from their own country (not that this stops them from happily playing together).

Only in recent years has a handful of new bands, taking as their starting point not outside influences but the linguistic babel built up by others, gone some way toward defining a canon, turning the pre-existing pidgin into recognizable grammar. We're at the beginning of the process, but it's not hard to spot signs of it in the post-STUFF. deconstructionism of Anton Eger and Otis Sandsjö, or in the baroque extremization of the GoGo Penguin style at the hands of Glass Museum. Some will see in this phenomenon the beginning of the decline of a genre that was already something of a footnote to begin with. We, being more optimistic — or maybe simply cursed with worse taste — hope instead that this creolization marks a further step for the field toward prog, reworking the many stylistic cues scattered across the map into structures that may be more mannered, but are also bolder, more imaginative and more masterful in the art of rhythmic-melodic mindfuck.

Drawing a Line

So, on to the selection. Yes, because the thirty albums didn't choose themselves. We had to set an aesthetic horizon (“only good records,” obviously by our own judgment), and above all commit to an act that goes against everything written so far: narrowing the field. The first and most drastic dividing line was chronological: out with everything before 2010. This spares us from having to work out where acid-, future- and broken beat end and ‘nu' as we mean it begins, but it inevitably also means cutting ties with the precursors, giving up on telling the stories of entire lineages. The ambient-techno forays of trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and Eivind Aarset, later reshaped in a Middle Eastern guise under the direction of Dhafer Youssef. The road that leads from the transcendental drum'n'bass of 4 Hero to the fractured fusion of New Zealand's Mark De Clive-Lowe. The cubist school of Amon Tobin and his various (and sometimes skillful) imitators; the role of JoJo Mayer and his Nerve in translating drum'n'bass rhythmic constructions into a jazz idiom; the heavenly downtempo of the Cinematic Orchestra, forerunner of the poetics of so much nu jazz to come… No, there wasn't room for everything. We'll simply mention these names, somewhat at random, hoping that anyone wanting to dig deeper can use them as a starting point for their own explorations.

So we narrowed our focus down to ten years (eleven, actually). But this is where things got genuinely difficult. Do we include cero or not? Thundercat? Melt Yourself Down? Caravan Palace? There were no convenient, ready-made dividing lines to help us decide. Aware of how arbitrary the choice was, we opted for a fairly restrictive view of the landscape: we based it on the key traits identified above, and “cut” entire scenes. Out with dark jazz (fine, it bores us to death anyway). Out with electroswing, out with everything that owes more to soul/urban than to IDM — we like Alfa Mist, but including him felt like a stretch. Also out of the running, and this time it did hurt, the whole afrobeat branch of the London scene, even though it's closely tied to what's covered here: no Melt Yourself Down, then, and no The Comet is Coming, Ezra Collective, Sons of Kemet. Even the Heliocentrics got cut (but be good and listen to them anyway!). All things considered — we told ourselves — plenty is already written about these artists. And as for at least some of the many “excluded” acts that get less coverage than they deserve — above all the Middle Eastern “circle” of Avishai Cohen, Tigran Hamasyan, Daniel Herskedal, Yazz Ahmed — we'll try to cover them in the future.

So what's left, then? A web of artists, only partly connected, centered on two uneven clusters of British acts. On one side, the Gondwana crowd, give or take — the more minimalist, byzantine, white wing; on the other, the Blacker faction, closer to the spotlight currently enjoyed by Afro-London's leading voices Tom Skinner and Shabaka Hutchings. On the periphery, plenty of small or large national scenes, some developed enough to have their own stylistic traits (see the Japanese and Polish schools, or the one that's recently coalesced around the Belgian label Sdban), others little more than a jumble of unrelated proposals, perhaps only passing through the composite galaxy outlined here by chance.

That's really all. We leave you with just over three hours of playlist, a handful of truly phenomenal live recordings, and of course the thirty records. We've organized them into three groups, not by value but according to a loose criterion of representativeness. When we started drawing up the list, we were implicitly convinced that, for this genre, most of the game was already played: the main bands were obvious, their best records long since out… But that idea changed as we wrote. We came across new acts, discovered promising labels, connected dots pointing toward directions still to be explored. Some of these discoveries found a place in the selection that follows; others arrived when we were already too far along, and we had to settle for slipping in a passing mention in the space devoted to some related artist.

We remain impatiently on the lookout for new developments, but for now our journey ends here and yours begins. Enjoy the listen!

Five Records

Hidden Orchestra – Archipelago (Tru Thoughts, 2012)

Hidden Orchestra is an enigma. Starting with the project's very identity: it's the brainchild of the sole Joe Acheson (composer, multi-instrumentalist, sound designer), who nonetheless hides behind that name a whole cast of more or less permanent collaborators and members: Poppy Ackroyd (violin and piano), Tim Lane (trombone, percussion and drums), Jamie Graham (drums and percussion). Then there's the purely musical side of things, built from interlocking jazz and hip-hop rhythms, field recordings, folk-tinged melodies and dreamy trip-hop atmospheres. Archipelago is Hidden Orchestra's second album. The instrumentation is enriched with harps, clarinets and bagpipes, in a weave of arrangements more complex than on the previous record, yet no less cohesive or immediate. "Reminder" tells of a dreamlike meeting between Moondog and Amon Tobin, where the Viking's ramshackle minimalism limps its way through a tangle of woodwinds and plucked strings, paving the way for a final triumph of brass and breakbeats as heavy as anvils. In "Seven Hunters", Mary Macmaster's Celtic harp conjures the enchantment of a folk landscape of mist-shrouded cliffs and giants' paths emerging from the sea. There's also room for a cameo from an old friend: "Hushed", written by Tomáš Dvořák (better known as Floex), who also plays clarinet here. A guest appearance that would repeat itself on "Dawn Chorus" and on the soundtrack of the video game "Creaks" (Amanita Design, 2020), where a curious changing of the guard takes place. Dvořák, the longtime composer of soundtracks for Amanita Design, actually stepped aside for Acheson on the Czech company's latest effort. Acheson, who had never written music for a video game before, took on the challenge with courage and no small amount of ambition. It probably would have been easier to play it safe and simply patch together a few leftovers from previous releases. Instead, rejecting any form of linearity, the Scottish multi-instrumentalist had the brilliant idea of reproducing the randomness of the interactions between the player and the game world. So flipping a switch not only turns on a lightbulb, but also triggers a particular melodic pattern, while a slamming door awakens a nest of stringed instruments. Musical fragments forming a mosaic that's always different depending on the player's actions, of which the album can only ever represent a simplification, one possibility out of a million. A project that sits somewhere between Brian Eno's generative music and the "No Man's Sky" (Hello Games, 2016) OST composed by 65daysofstatic. The result, needless to say, is yet another gem. (F. Del Prete)

GoGo Penguin – Man Made Object (Blue Note, 2016)

Lightness, rhythm, spirituality. It could sound like the tagline for some terrifying Ayurvedic holiday resort, but it's actually the stylistic key to the best-known and most exciting band on the nu jazz scene. Three instrumental components give shape to their instantly recognisable formula: the luminous piano playing of Chris Illingworth, double bassist Nick Blacka, the earthy, material soul of the sound, and the acrobatic drum'n'bass rhythms of Rob Turner — unquestionably one of the most gifted drummers of his generation.

It's precisely those rhythmic constructions that first strike the listener, and the element that, right from the start (or at least since their second album, "v2.0"), has made the Manchester trio's approach so structurally different from any other outfit out there — including those to which they're often, a little carelessly, compared: Bad Plus, Brad Mehldau, Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Far from being, as some like to present them, a kind of watered-down version of those illustrious names, GoGo Penguin are in fact a creature whose DNA is built on the mutant rhythms of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, engineered in Ableton Live and infused with vital energy (and a jazz touch) thanks to Turner's exceptional interpretive skills. Turner's cerebral segmentations are counterbalanced by Illingworth's limpid melodicism, which through repetition and sustain absorbs the most effective devices of Ludovico Einaudi's easy-listening minimalism. Nick Blacka's double bass, versatile and always three-dimensional, is the irreplaceable stabilising element.

"Man Made Object" is, to date, the expressive zenith of this pivotal band in terms of production quality and compositional flair. The interplay of joyful slowdowns and accelerations, already at the heart of the previous album's dazzling "One Percent", becomes the central theme of "Unspeakable World". In "Smarra" and "Protest", it's instead the turbulent soul of the Mancunian nu jazzers that dominates: Blacka's vertiginous bass runs, Illingworth's melodic flashes and Rob Turner's intricate patterns fuse together with incredible fluidity — the result, musically speaking, is nothing less than a maelstrom. But it's in the four minutes of "Surrender To The Mountain" that GoGo Penguin's art reaches its highest form: a soft/loud dynamic reworked through the language of nu jazz, a long emotional surge made of rhythmic contortions and a piano that swells like a rising tide until it takes centre stage.

The trio would go on to release "A Hundred Star" — an album that follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, though perhaps with less inspiration — and the flawless EP "Ocean In A Drop", home to some of the grooviest moments of their career. Their latest release came out this year, titled "GoGo Penguin", marking a shift toward a more minimalist style. (F. Del Prete, M. Sgrignoli)

Portico Quartet – Art In The Age Of Automation (Gondwana Records, 2017)

The years between "Portico Quartet" and "Art In The Age Of Automation" tell the story of a departure, that of Nick Mulvey (founder and hang drummer); of a double transformation, from quartet to trio for "Living Fields", and then back to "Quartet" again, with the arrival of Keir Vine (hang and piano), his departure and his eventual return; and finally, of a musical rebirth sealed by their move to Gondwana.

The sound of the hang — a percussion instrument somewhere between a steel drum and a saucepan — is a thread that weaves delicately through the fabric of the arrangements. It's also through the hang that lopsided rhythms fluidly shift into cyclical, obsessive, minimalist beats, and the tracks veer from rarefied jazz towards far more agitated, almost Four Tet-like trajectories. "Art" is a retro-futurist portrait painted with a palette that ranges from the impressionism of Erik Satie to the polychrome minimalism of Terry Riley. The chamber jazz scores dissolve under the influence of production trickery and glitch flourishes, which filter Jack Wyllie's sax and turn the notes into raindrops.

From the description so far, one might think this was a review of "Kid A". And in fact, that wouldn't be too far off the mark (after all, isn't the opening of "Objects To Place In A Tomb" basically "Pyramid Song"?). The starting point here, however, is the mirror image of Radiohead's: starting from jazz, in its most atmospheric, easy-listening form, one arrives at a kind of post-human music that nonetheless manages to reveal glimpses of melancholy beauty even amid the machine's gears. If we want to keep drawing parallels with Radiohead, we could point to "Untitled (AITAOA #2)" as their "Amnesiac". It's an LP stitched together from offcuts of the previous record, but don't let easy assumptions fool you. It may well be an album of "leftovers", yet "Untitled" boasts a variety arguably even greater than "Art", with moments verging on dubstep ("Ruins") and tracks blending modern classical with ambient reverbs in the Harold Budd tradition.

Almost as if living up to the title "Art In The Age Of Automation", Portico Quartet's rebirth coincided with a renewed burst of productivity, as shown by the release of an album and two EPs over the following two years, works that established the four London musicians as the standard-bearers of nu jazz. (F. Del Prete, M. Sgrignoli)

Toshio Matsuura Group – LOVEPLAYDANCE – 8 Scenes from the Floor (Brownswood Recordings, 2018)

In a hypothetical ranking of preferred listening order for the records on this list, the Toshio Matsuura Group's should sit either first or last. First, because in terms of line-up and choice of material (covers of tracks that have inspired and continue to inspire the leader of United Future Organization, the legendary Japanese acid jazz trio) it represents the best possible introduction to the jazz/electronic/hip-hop crossover. Last, because for anyone who's spent time trying to "connect the dots" and get a full picture of the scene, going through its tracklist and hearing the results is one long "Yes, damn it, I was right!" — a satisfying listen, in short.

The story of "Loveplaydance" is that of two producers born ten thousand kilometres apart, brought together by their shared passions for acid jazz and its various Latin-Cuban inflections. One is the aforementioned Toshio Matsuura, the other is Gilles Peterson, who through his label Talkin' Loud ends up releasing the Japanese outfit U.F.O.'s debut album in the UK. It's 1993, and a bridge linking London to Tokyo has been built, though it would take another twenty-five years for something major to cross it again. The two bring together a crew of musicians that includes Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, Tom Herbert, bassist of The Invisible, Yussuf Dayes and trumpeter Yazz Ahmed: a one-shot gathering of talent that released its only album in 2018.

The menu of a scant hour of music (though it stretches out further on the CD version, thanks to the addition of two extra tracks) covers key episodes on the road leading to nu jazz: the jazzed-up drum'n'bass of Roni Size, the techno lyricism of Carl Craig, the inevitable Flying Lotus, the jazztronic explorations of Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft. If in some cases we can talk of a respectful reworking, in others we're dealing with genuine upheavals: from these stylistically disparate pieces emerges a sound that's compact, futuristic and sharply focused, sitting at a crossroads between the sticky, psychedelic grooves of Heliocentrics, the strange, danceable acid hybrid of Kamaal Williams, and the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. (F. Del Prete, M. Sgrignoli)

Makaya McCraven – Where We Come From (Chicago × London Mixtape) (International Anthem Recording Company, 2018)

With a line-up that's almost a mirror image of the Toshio Matsuura Group (Kamaal Williams in and Yussef Dayes out, Theon Cross's tuba instead of Yazz Ahmed's trumpet, Nubya Garcia in common, and of course McCraven on drums in place of Skinner), one of the most celebrated names on the US scene links the two shores of the ocean for an original jazz/hop project. In London in 2017 to record the LP "Universal Beings", McCraven shares two nights on the Total Refreshment Center stage with the local scene's young crème de la crème. As part of "Fresh Roasted", a series promoted by the venue, three days later five producers are called on to remix McCraven and co.'s recordings live, here and there overdubbing their own MCing. Thrilled by the spectacularly nu sound of the result, he has the material sent to him — initially conceived at most as a "bonus" to be tacked onto "Universal Beings" — and, adding two linking remixes, turns it into two contiguous suites at his Chicago studio.

McCraven's enthusiasm is easy to understand. The eclectic process described above has produced material that's alive and pulsing, with all the improvisational fire of a live take but with the structure and direction afforded by selecting, looping, cutting and splicing. It's truly a meeting of worlds: not just (obviously) jazz improvisation and remix culture, but above all the landscape of London's new musical blackness, in the midst of a funk and afrobeat rediscovery, and the crooked, unquantized rhythmic universes of J Dilla and FlyLo, McCraven's guiding spirits. Galvanizing and unmissable. (M. Sgrignoli)

Ten more

Dawn Of Midi – Dysnomia (Thirsty Ear, 2013)

In a video of "Atlas" available on YouTube, Amino Belyamani plays a chord on the piano with his right hand, while with his left he directly manipulates the instrument's strings. After 17 seconds, Aakaash Israni comes in playing the same note on double bass. Finally it's Qasim Naqvi's drums that lock into the rhythmic line, which grows in complexity until it reveals itself for what it is: a treatise on experimental music that, among many other things, is also a pleasure to listen to. At times it sounds like a kind of gamelan disguised as jazz, with polyrhythmic modules that start, proceed and interlock after a certain number of bars only to drift out of phase again, like astronomical events. On "Nix" you can even dance to a bona fide techno track, even though it's played with analogue instruments. Only they know exactly what kind of music this is, because it's clear that jazz is simply a tool for scrambling references and coordinates. (F. Del Prete)

Satelliti – Transister (Cuckundoo Records, 2013)

They pop up out of nowhere, release two spectacular records, and then vanish. Meanwhile, though, the South Tyrolean Satelliti have added another piece to the puzzle of what this variegated genre can mean. Because it's now clear that nu jazz isn't just odd time signatures and Einaudi-style super polished piano, but also a drum kit flirting with keyboards in soft/loud surges with a kraut flavour ("Voltage"), moments of serene calm ("Brother Green" and "Espirit de Corps"), and sudden bursts of pure energy, as on "Bright Tunnel", which launches the listener into hyperspace like some runaway hyperdrive. In 2016 they release a new single titled "Techna", before slipping back into obscurity. Clearly their whole existence will unfold this way, at the edges of reality, amid mysterious fade-outs and unpredictable reappearances. But, while we wait for the next astral conjunction, they've already given us one masterpiece. Much appreciated. (F. Del Prete)

Ambiq – Ambiq 2 (Arjunamusic, 2015)

Max Loderbauer, Samuel Rohrer, Claudio Puntin (one German and two Swiss) each have a certain individual reputation in the border territories between electroacoustic, jazz, ambient and improvised music. Between 2014 and 2018, their experiences converge in the Ambiq project, under whose name they tour European festivals and release two albums. It's a chance for the two Swiss musicians to put their jazz pedigree to good use (Rohrer is a drummer, Puntin a clarinettist — both have released records on ECM), and for Loderbauer to pick back up the manipulations he explored with the resampling of "Re:ECM" (2011). Of the two LPs, the second is the more successful: its tracks are abstract games of construction and deconstruction, always intriguing rhythmically and masterfully floating between acoustic tangibility and electronic fluidity. (M. Sgrignoli)

Jaga Jazzist – Starfire (Ninja Tune, 2015)

Alongside Flat Earth Society and Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, Norway's Jaga Jazzist are the most significant progressive big band of recent decades. Of the three they're not only the longest-running but also the most prone to cross-pollination and stylistic about-turns. Over more than twenty years of activity, their music has folded in post-rock, IDM, and Zappa-schooled jazz-rock, arriving with the masterpiece "Starfire" at a formula that, for lack of any better label, can only be called nu jazz sui generis. Energetic and gripping, the album's five tracks graft neon-lit electronics onto the timbral and dynamic richness offered by the expanded line-up, fuelling a space-jazz-rock machine that chews through the minutes and enchants the listener without ever indulging in psychedelic excess. (M. Sgrignoli)

Pink Freud – Pink Freud Plays Autechre (Mystic Production, 2016)

Leading lights, alongside fellow countrymen Skalpel and Jazzpospolita, of Poland's thriving nu jazz scene, Pink Freud have been forging a wholly personal path since the earliest years of the 2000s, one that marries the legacy of the "yass" scene (crooked, dissonant avant-jazz with a broad, popular, brass-band-tinged flair, which developed in Poland in the Nineties) with growing doses of post-rock and a wide range of electronic styles. Their constant musical evolution goes hand in hand with frequent line-up changes, the sole constant being bassist Wojtek Mazolewski. Their key phase in nu jazz terms begins in 2010 with the kaleidoscopic "Monsters Of Jazz" and continues with this successful reinterpretation experiment, which serves both as a tribute to the scene's IDM roots and as an effective showcase for the band's own personality. (M. Sgrignoli)

STUFF. – Old Dreams New Planets (Sdban, 2016)

With their debut album in 2015, Belgium's STUFF. came out of nowhere. Five millennial conservatory graduates who, after cutting their teeth as soloists on the Antwerp jazz circuit, debuted on the fledgling label Buteo Buteo with a blend never heard before of wonky, crooked funk and elephantine fusion. A year later they were back, this time on Sdban: as its title suggests, "Old Dreams New Planets" is the centrifugal expansion of the same stylistic core that had made their debut so thrilling and so hard to pin down. Shattered slap bass, zigzagging EWI electronic clarinet, synth flourishes chasing each other in perpetual balance between easy listening and brain-twisting stop'n'go, in an abstract mindfuck that will delight the (few but discerning) admirers of Tortoise's "Standards". (M. Sgrignoli)

Yussef Kamaal – Black Focus (Brownswood Recordings, 2016)

Although it had a very short life as a duo, the Kamaal Williams + Yussef Dayes combo was the most iconic outfit on the "black" side of London's nu jazz scene. Their first and only album, steeped in funk and urban jazz, is as retro in its overall aura (produced, after all, by Malcolm Catto of Heliocentrics, standard-bearers of the psych-jazz-funk revival) as it is contemporary in its details. Dayes's drumming builds its expressiveness on broken beat segmentation, while Williams — though highly skilled on the Rhodes — is at his best with ambient textures firmly in the post-dnb style. And when the bass locks in, it's like witnessing a posh evolution of Jamiroquai. As if the debut weren't enough, both of their solo careers have gone on to produce brilliant results along similar lines. (M. Sgrignoli)

Tangents – New Bodies (Temporary Residence, 2018)

Strange things happen in Australia. Like finding a quintet of musicians with the most disparate backgrounds playing music that's a direct continuation of Tortoise's jazz/post-rock oddities. Well, actually, it's not that strange. And it sounds even less strange once you consider that Casey Rice, already a producer for Tortoise, stepped in to give it all some coherence. "New Bodies" marks a shift toward more accessible sounds, but without losing the taste for improvisation already on show in the previous "Stateless". Take, for example, the 17 minutes of "Gone To Ground", where a prepared piano and the vivid percussion of a marimba pave the way for a minimal electronic folk sound à la Floex. The track evolves into an anxious crescendo of electronic sounds that flows into a finale dominated by interlocking strings, a hyper-pumped bass, and Evan Dorrian's drumming, which recalls Jaki Liebezeit's work on "Bel Air". (F. Del Prete)

Anton Eger – Æ [Edition Records, 2019]

Æ is Anton Eger's debut solo album. Distinguishing features: abstract, layered, crooked. As if his rhythmic exploits with Phronesis weren't enough, the Norwegian drummer assembles a group of musicians from Scandinavia and the UK already orbiting the fringes of the nu jazz galaxy, including Petter Eldh, a Swedish bassist raised on hip-hop and Charlie Parker, and Matt Calvert, the man behind the angular, distorted guitars of Three Trapped Tigers. No surprise, then, that listening to it evokes both the geometric, glitchy chaos of TTT and the icy deconstructionism of Tortoise.

They come across as STUFF. 2.0: a multifaceted, crooked and unpredictable wonky-jazz, one that would clearly inspire what saxophonist Otis Sandsjö, featured here, would release in 2020. (F. Del Prete, M. Sgrignoli)

Mark Guiliana – Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! (Motéma, 2019)

Drummer Mark Guiliana is a titan of the contemporary jazz scene. Known to rock audiences for his presence on David Bowie's final album, over the years he's played alongside Avishai Cohen, Donny McCaslin, Dhafer Youssef, and Brad Mehldau. Versatile, energetic and a master of subtle push-and-pull timing, he was among the first to experiment with transposing drum'n'bass rhythmic patterns into a jazz context. His most recent work as a bandleader is his undisputed nu jazz masterpiece: a timbral palette dominated by synthetic textures, driving and disjointed jazz-rock rhythms, wonky detours, and constant forays into video game music territory. A magmatic bubbling of styles, with compositions that swerve within minutes from fusion to techno, from dub to sci-fi math rock. (M. Sgrignoli)

Fifteen more

Igor Boxx – Breslau (Ninja Tune, 2010)

Just like the first two Skalpel LPs (the duo of DJs Igor Pudło and Marcin Cichy), Pudło's solo debut also appeared on the renowned London label Ninja Tune. A kind of concept album about the Soviet siege of his hometown (Breslau, today's Wrocław, part of Germany until 1945), the record applies cut&paste techniques to jazz material somewhat as Amon Tobin did in the late Nineties. Rather than shape-shifting, three-dimensional entities, Igor Boxx's focus is on constructing soundscapes that are evocative and illusorily "live" — only rarely are the seams between samples left exposed. In 2014 Skalpel reunited, and confirming this inclination, released a live acoustic EP in 2018. Then in 2020 came "Highlight", arguably their high point. (M. Sgrignoli)

Floex – Zorya (Minority Records, 2011)

When the boundaries of nu jazz were still undefined, Floex was already there, busy terraforming that still-virgin territory. The soundtracks for the video games "Samarost" 1 and 2, and later "Machinarium" – all credited to Tomáš Dvořák, his given name – shaped a humus teeming with microsound and electronic beats. Then came "Zorya", his second album released under the Floex moniker, which gave the genre a more defined morphology. Here minimalist iterations blend with a classicist Idm that reverberates with a fairy-tale atmosphere, as in the crepuscular "Veronika's Dream", or in "Casanova", where a soft-hued jazz flows into a coda of Reichian pulses and culminates in a noise-drenched finale that swallows up every other sound. Also worth noting, again on the subject of boundaries yet to be drawn, is his collaboration with Hidden Orchestra on the albums "Archipelago" and "Dawn Chorus". (F. Del Prete)

Jizue – Novel (bud music, 2012)

This shape-shifting style, piano-centric but heavily indebted to the soft/loud dynamics of Mono, Explosions in the Sky and the like, has defined this Kyoto quartet since their debut EP in 2009. Hyperkinetic and hypermelodic, over the years the band has gradually toned down the math-rock edges of their early work to embrace a wide range of influences that nonetheless remain unmistakably Japanese: the fusion muscle of Casiopea, the technical tightrope-walking of Hiromi, and the devotion to elevator music shared by so many strands of Japanese music. Their second studio album, “Novel” is perhaps their most balanced record, striking a midpoint between the dynamism of their early work and the versatility of their later releases: almost prog, one could say, with the added surprise of the glitchy “c-loud”. (M. Sgrignoli)

Floating Points – Elaenia (Pluto, 2015)

How could we leave out the record that did more than any other to bring nu jazz to indie audiences? Much of the debut album by Mancunian neuroscientist and epigeneticist Sam Shepherd is actually IDM, far removed from the genre's usual canon, but a bit of e-piano here and there — and above all the sprawling suite “Silhouettes” — turned the album into the totemic symbol of the new jazz/electronic wave sweeping through Britain (the other totem is Bonobo's “Black Sands”, though that one has arguably even less to do with jazz, so let's leave it aside). Back to “Silhouettes”: a little over ten minutes long, a gorgeous swell of strings and liquid keyboards, with Tom Skinner on drums, who never hurts. It might not make a career on its own, but it's undeniably a beautiful listen. (M. Sgrignoli)

Kneebody + Daedelus – Kneedelus (Brainfeeder, 2015)

Less cohesive than its British counterpart, the American scene is spearheaded by a handful of outfits built around leading figures of the jazz world. Among them, Kneebody — led by drummer and sound engineer Nate Wood (Tigran Hamasyan, Donny McCaslin) — stand out for longevity and consistency of output. Their style, always balanced between rhythmic invention and jazz tradition, gains extra dimension here from teaming up with the versatile producer Daedelus, known for work straddling glitch, folktronica and instrumental hip-hop. The result is the most colorful and recognizably "nu" record Wood's band has made: without abandoning the poise that's part of their pedigree, they open up to effective electronic contamination, elsewhere felt only as a rhythmic influence. (M. Sgrignoli)

Mammal Hands – Floa (Gondwana Records, 2016)

A fully acoustic trio from Norwich signed to Gondwana, Mammal Hands might seem (label aside) an odd inclusion on this list. But the points of contact between the trio's airy style and the rest of the scene are obvious enough to dispel any doubt within the first minute of any track. Over a rhythmic base as graceful as it is visibly indebted to IDM, the piano traces cyclical, minimalist-leaning patterns, recalling both fellow countrymen GoGo Penguin and the bold minimal-jazz spirituality of Switzerland's Nik Bärtsch. The sax, meanwhile, takes on the role of melodic guide, often over soft/loud dynamics. The resulting flow of suspension, urgency and luminosity reveals new details with every listen. (M. Sgrignoli)

Mouse On The Keys – Live At Red Bull Studios Tokyo (n.a./self-released, 2016)

Initially almost a louder, more thunderous version of fellow countrymen Jizue, this Tokyo trio (two keyboardists and a drummer) has drifted over the years toward increasingly ambient, downtempo territory. This live album catches them right before that transition was complete (fully realized on 2017's “Tres”), at the point where roughness, torrential energy and atmospheric care combine at their best. Assembling tracks from previously released LPs, EPs and splits, and stripping away, almost incidentally, some of the production sheen present on the studio recordings, the album stands as the most effective distillation of the band's approach: a meeting of soft/loud dynamics, jazz-fusion phrasing, electronic inserts and rhythms somewhere between IDM and post-hardcore, always challenging yet effectively in service of catchiness and grandeur. (M. Sgrignoli)

Niechęć – Niechęć (Wytwórnia Krajowa, 2016)

A decidedly borderline inclusion — stylistically, not in terms of quality — the Warsaw-based Niechęć ("disgust") are among the most internationally visible acts on the Polish scene. Theirs is tense, knotty music, with a dark-hued sonic palette often dominated by the saxophone of Maciek Zwierzchowski (who also composes most of the tracks). Far more than electronics or minimalism, jazz-rock forms the sonic bedrock of their second album, which, like its predecessor, is built mainly around atmosphere, combined here with passages of great rhythmic and timbral intensity. The result is a strongly cinematic post-rock/jazz, in which echoes of King Crimson even seem to surface here and there! (M. Sgrignoli)

Nonkeen – The Gamble (R & S Records, 2016)

Berlin's Nils Frahm is well known in ambient and modern-classical circles, but he's not usually associated with nu jazz. Yet when, in 2012, he revisits some youthful tapes with his old bandmates of the time (Fredric Gmeiner and Sepp Singwald), the coordinates he chooses to move within are decidedly close to the genre: cyclical patterns, rhythms with jazz accents but akin to techno, kraut and post-rock in their emptying-out and regularity, a palette with generous electronic concessions, ambient stretches, a hazy, drizzly mood. It's hard to pin down the exact performance credits on the record, since everything is credited indistinctly to the whole trio; what is known, though, is that the recording period spans from 2009 to 2015, and that Andrea Belfi appears on drums in five of the nine tracks. (M. Sgrignoli)

Richard Spaven – The Self (Soul Has No Tempo, 2017)

A seasoned drummer of the future jazz/broken beat scene, London's Richard Spaven has worked with the likes of 4Hero, Gang Starr, Guru, Flying Lotus and Mark de Clive-Lowe. His solo path would lead him, in 2018, to record an album for Real World with Mullarkey and McCallum of Cinematic Orchestra. Here we're featuring the previous release, with Mullarkey producing: a surprisingly cohesive showcase of the artist's varied stylistic range. Across tracks spanning refined urban soul (featuring Jordan Rakei on vocals) to the most aristocratic drum'n'bass (complete with a superb Photek cover), Spaven proves not only his impeccable rhythmic class but also a great skill for building a futuristic, distinctive mood, at once aloof and brimming with emotion. (M. Sgrignoli)

Hobby Horse – Helm (Auand Records, 2018)

Italy's road to nu jazz runs through a bassist from Chicago, a saxophonist/clarinetist from Wisconsin and a drummer from Florence: Joe Rehmer, Dan Kinzelman and Stefano Tamborrino. The three men's paths cross in 2010, the year their first, raw record, “Trevi”, comes out. Over the following albums, the formula is refined, moving away from its initial avant/jazzcore leanings toward increasingly electronic coordinates, reaching an ideal synthesis with “Helm”. The ingredients are few — Tamborrino's jagged rhythms, often steeped in drum'n'bass patterns; Kinzelman's sinuous horn lines; Rehmer's basses, now soft and acoustic, now roughly electronic — but the result is vivid and effective. (M. Sgrignoli)

Slowly Rolling Camera – Juniper (Edition Records, 2018)

A band that loses its singer has three choices: find another, split up, or do what Slowly Rolling Camera did and carry on without one. The real challenge, though, is rebalancing your musical formula when the main melodic line is gone. The Cardiff jazzers solved the problem by widening their sonic palette, recruiting new members — including former Cinematic Orchestra guitarist Stuart McCallum, bassist Aidan Thorne and saxophonist Nicolas Kummert – and steering firmly into nu jazz territory. The result is “Juniper”, an engaging, lively album that manages to combine irresistible melodies with the Cinematic Orchestra's hieratic soundscapes, without ever losing its love of good old-fashioned groove. If that's not enough to win you over, just listen to “Hyperloop”, where McCallum's virtuosity finally lets loose over Elliot Bennett's wild breakbeat drumming. (F. Del Prete)

Tweeedo – We All Think We’re Good People (Callista Records, 2018)

Take two loop and audio editing obsessives (incidentally, both guitarists in post-hardcore band Fuh), add a jazz drummer, shake well: that's Tweeedo, from Turin, whose sole release ranks at the top of the field in Italy. Granted, the competition isn't exactly fierce — but the record really is remarkable: a glitchy tech-house with a steadily building momentum, defined by an original construction that turns the electronic canon “upside down”. Instead of synthetic rhythms serving as a base for melodic developments, here it's Nicholas Remondino's drumming that carries most of the warmth and vitality of the tracks, a constantly shifting terrain for the enveloping electronic forest built by Edoardo Vogrig and Andrea Pisano. Port-Royal fans, step right up. (M. Sgrignoli)

Moses Boyd – Black Matter (Exodus, 2020)

Believe it or not, in 2020 even nu jazz is hype. This unexpected surge of interest in the genre centers mainly on two names: Jeff Parker, the Tortoise guitarist who's been in cahoots with Makaya McCraven for a few years now, and Moses Boyd, who's already been on critics' radar for a while as the drummer of duo Binker & Moses. While the sudden enthusiasm for Parker's — deeply tedious — record can only be explained by decades of neglect for the genre, Boyd's album has far more notable qualities. Flanked by solid names from the London scene (Theon Cross on tuba, for instance), on “Dark Matter” Boyd combines the soul/afrobeat inflections of his previous “Displaced Diaspora” with more urban, nocturnal sounds carrying clear dubstep echoes. The result is dynamic, original and hugely promising. (M. Sgrignoli)

Glass Museum – Reykjavik [Sdban, 2020]

"If it exists, there's prog of it": every genre that lasts long enough will eventually develop omnivorous, baroque tendencies in some corner of its scene. The greatest potential for overblown excess clearly lay on the GoGo Penguin side of the stylistic spectrum: it's precisely on a “Ludovico Einaudi on steroids” vibe that this Belgian duo builds its versatile jazz/electro/modern-classical synthesis. Bombastic enough for a Muse fan, just easy listening enough for a relaxing Spotify playlist, the music on this debut LP is the perfect counterpoint to the black/radical-chic orthodoxy that will dominate in the years to come. It's up to the listener to take it or leave it. If the kitsch factor proves too much, try the far more restrained, Tortoise-indebted John Ghost, who released an album on the same label last year. (M. Sgrignoli)

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03/03/2026