As we navigate through 2025, it is clear that while the world may be facing its challenges, music is shining brightly, with exceptional artists delivering incredible work. This year, jazz has already offered us some truly remarkable albums, each bringing something fresh to the table. In this post, we will highlight the standout releases that have made an impact so far, celebrating the power of music to captivate and inspire. Here are the Best Jazz Albums of 2025 (so far).

Best Jazz Albums 2025, So Far

If you also found Origami Harvest exceptional, you will be delighted with this new album, as Ambrose Akinmusire returns to a similar place where jazz, hip-hop, and classical merge to bring depth and resonance, weight and beauty.

“This album is about the fears and struggles I personally face, as well as those many Black men endure: colorism, erasure, and the question of who gets to speak for my community, and why. There’s also the constant negotiation of what happens when I don’t conform to certain expectations or when I choose to reject those imposed on me. These are the complexities I navigate daily. When I made this album, I was thinking about others who face these same struggles. I’m always considering who I represent—on all levels, in all the roles I play within my various communities. It’s about understanding the weight of those roles and the responsibility that comes with them. Some of these ideas didn’t require direct conversation. The experience is so universally understood that words become unnecessary.”
–Ambrose Akinmusire

Ambrose Akinmusire: trumpet; Kokayi: vocals; Sam Harris: piano; Chiquitamagic: synths; Dustin Brown: drums | Mivos Quartet Olivia De Prato, Maya Bennardo: violin; Victor Lowrie Tafoya: viola; Nathan Watts: cello
Released January 31, 2025

---

Same, if WEBO moved you last year, you’ll love this new release featuring William Parker, William Hooker, and Isaiah Collier.

The title, The Ancients, marks an intriguing shift in perspective. With a lineup blending historical and new key figures, the music embodies the spirit of spiritual jazz and energy music, the intense free jazz, deeply tied to black cultural expression and freedom. Yet, the name suggests something more: a transition from being the “new thing” to carrying forward a powerful, living tradition.

Isaiah Collier: tenor saxophone, Aztec death whistle, siren, little instruments; William Hooker: drums, vocals; William Parker: bass, hojǒk, singing
Released January 31, 2025

---

Splash marks Myra Melford’s first release with this trio and her latest exploration of music as a multi-dimensional art form. Inspired by Cy Twombly’s expressive, gestural paintings, Melford channels that same sense of movement and energy into her compositions, creating a sound that is fluid and dynamic.

The result is outstanding: structure and abstraction, improvisation and composition blur into a constant state of transformation, where every moment feels both spontaneous and intentional, perhaps, much like a splash itself.

Myra Melford: piano; Michael Formanek: bass; Ches Smith: drums, vibraphone
Released March 28, 2025

---

Bone Bells is a stunning dialogue between two of the most inventive voices in contemporary music. Their third duo album and second release on Pyroclastic Records finds Courvoisier and Halvorson deepening their already telepathic connection, blending contemporary chamber music with avant-garde jazz.

Splitting the compositions evenly, the two create a constantly shifting soundscape from the eerie melancholy of Halvorson’s title track to the explosive energy of Courvoisier’s “Esmeralda”. Prepared piano and looping guitar lines morph into intricate, elastic structures, while moments of delicate lyricism dissolve into dizzying improvisation. There’s an organic, instinctive quality to their interplay, as each piece is reshaped in real time, blurring the lines between composition and spontaneous creation.

Taking its title from Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust, Bone Bells evokes an enigmatic sonic world where structure and abstraction, beauty and discord, all exist in perfect tension.

Sylvie Courvoisier: piano; Mary Halvorson: guitar
Released March 14, 2025

---

Dave Rempis, through his label Aerophonic Records, founded in 2013 to document his own projects and maintain artistic control, doesn’t just seem to release outstanding albums, he does. Just look at the last three annual results of the Francis Davis Jazz Poll, where three out of four Aerophonic releases made the list each year. That is a remarkable 75% success rate for a fully independent label, no hesitation needed.

And we are betting that Sudden Dusk will join the 2025 list. It’s raw yet entertaining, bold yet accessible, simply a joy to listen to. Featuring Rempis on saxophone, Terrie Ex on guitar, Jon Rune Strøm on bass, and Tollef Østvang on drums, the album captures the energy and inhibition of live performances, recorded during their 2024 U.S. tour.

Ex’s irreverent, unpredictable guitar collides beautifully with Rempis’s expansive range, while Strøm and Østvang push the music forward with both muscle and nuance. A thrilling release that thrives on tension and delicious curiosity.

Dave Rempis: soprano, tenor, baritone saxophone; Terrie Ex: guitar; Jon Rune Strøm: bass; Tollef Østvang: drums
Releases April 18, 2025

In this superb album, experimentation, improvisation, and free jazz are experienced as if in a dream, half-asleep. The rough is transformed into something soft, the raw into something gentle, and brutality is dulled into a world of delicacy.

Read the full review: Christer Bothén 3 – L’Invisible

Christer Bothén: bass clarinet, inside piano; Kansan Zetterberg: bass; Kjell Nordeson: vibraphone, drums
Released April 4, 2025

---

Yikes Too is a major moment, not just because it is the latest Tim Berne release, but because it marks the long-overdue debut of his new trio with Tom Rainey and Gregg Belisle-Chi. This double album, split between a studio session at Firehouse 12 and a raging live set from Seattle, delivers everything you would hope for from a Berne-led project: intricate compositions, fearless improvisation, and that unmistakable sense of urgency. This is Berne at 70: restless, inventive, and as essential as ever.

Tim Berne: alto saxophone; Tom Rainey: drums; Gregg Belisle-Chi: guitar
Released January 17, 2025

Steve Lehman’s The Music of Anthony Braxton is more than a tribute; it’s a bold, high-energy celebration of one of jazz’s most visionary composers. With his long-running trio with Matt Brewer (bass) and Damion Reid (drums), joined by Mark Turner (tenor saxophone), Lehman reinterprets Braxton’s small-group compositions with sharp precision and raw expressiveness.

Lehman contributes two original compositions, “LA Genes” and “Unbroken & Unspoken,” which show how Braxton’s ideas continue to shape his own evolving voice. And with a closing take on Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle, Tinkle,” he highlights the deep connection between radical jazz innovation across generations.

Lehman’s relationship with Braxton runs deep as he spent nearly a decade performing in the saxophonist’s ensembles, and here, he makes a compelling case for Braxton’s small-group music as an essential part of the jazz canon. Hard-swinging, fearless, and electrifying.

Steve Lehman: alto saxophone; Mark Turner: tenor saxophone; Matt Brewer: bass; Damion Reid: drums
Released February 28, 2025

---

Apple Cores finds the James Brandon Lewis Trio in full stride, rooted in tradition yet always pushing forward. There is a clear reverence for Don Cherry, not through direct musical or instrumental references, but through a more diffuse, essential allusion. Yet, the energy is unmistakably Lewis’s own.

“The record itself is a nod to Amiri but mainly a nod to Don Cherry, using Amiri as a branch to really get the conversation going. It’s not a tribute in the sense that we’re playing Don Cherry compositions, but that the music is commenting on his musical curiosity. […] This album also picks up the conversation where my 2015 album Days of FreeMan left off. I covered a Don Cherry piece “Bamako Love” from his 1985 album Home Boy (Sister Out). That album exposed me to Don’s risk-taking with his attempts to rap.”
–James Brandon Lewis

James Brandon Lewis: saxophone; Chad Taylor: drums, mbira; Josh Werner: bass, guitar
Released February 7, 2025

---

Best Jazz 2025

• Ambrose Akinmusire – Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch Records)
• Isaiah Collier, William Hooker, William Parker – The Ancients (Eremite Records)
• Myra Melford, Michael Formanek, Ches Smith – Splash (Intakt Records)
• Sylvie Courvoisier, Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells (Pyroclastic Records)
• Archer – Sudden Dusk (Aerophonic Records)
• Christer Bothén 3 – L’Invisible (Thanatosis)
• Tim Berne – Yikes Too (Out Of Your Head Records)
• Steve Lehman – The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi Recordings)
• James Brandon Lewis Trio – Apple Cores (Anti- Records)

Discover our monthly selections: January, February, March 2025 / April 2025 / May 2025 / June 2025

…and the Playlist:
Listen to our “Best Jazz 2025” playlist (link to Spotify) with all the monthly new-release selections and excerpts of the above albums (when available) for a total of (soon) 120 breathtaking tracks.