It’s that time again. We gather best-of-2019 lists from around the web and provide links here. All of these lists focus on the kind of music featured on these pages. Our AMN Best of 2019 is coming in early January.

Top contemporary classical albums of 2019 from I Care If You Listen
PopMatters best jazz of 2019

And a few from the Jazz Journalists Association:
Howard Mandel
John Pietaro
Steve Feeney
John Szwed

It’s that time again. We gather best-of-2019 lists from around the web and provide links here. All of these lists focus on the kind of music featured on these pages. Our AMN Best of 2019 is coming in early January.

Stereogum’s best jazz of 2019

The year’s best winter music from A Closer Listen.

The best reissues of the year from The Quietus.

Jazz in 2019 also from The Quietus.

Top ten dark ambient releases of 2019 from The Dungeon in Deep Space.

It’s that time again. We gather best-of-2019 lists from around the web and provide links here. All of these lists focus on the kind of music featured on these pages. Our AMN Best of 2019 is coming in early January.

The Denver Post’s best jazz of 2019

The Quietus’ best of 2019

The New York Times’ best jazz of 2019

Music and More jazz releases of the year

Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) provides his favorites of 2019

Here is where I post, at a frequency of about once a week, a list of the new music that has caught my attention that week. All of the releases listed below I’ve heard for the first time this week and come recommended.

Juan Vinuesa Jazz Quartet – Blue Shots from Chicago (2019)
Satoko Fujii / Tatsuya Yoshida – Baikamo (2019)
Forrest Fang – Ancient Machines (2019)
Kevin Sun – The Sustain of Memory (2019)

Source: Fromm Music Foundation.

The Board of Directors of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University is pleased to announce the names of fifteen composers selected to receive 2019 Fromm commissions. These commissions represent one of the principal ways that the Fromm Music Foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to bring contemporary concert music closer to the public. In addition to the commissioning fee, a subsidy is available for the ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work.

The composers who received commissions Ashkan Behzadi (Chicago, IL), Derek Bermel (Brooklyn, NY), Natacha Diels (San Diego, CA), Alec Hall (New York, NY), Sungji Hong (Denton, TX), Louis Karchin (Short Hills, NJ), Roscoe Mitchell (Fitchburg, WI), Mika Pelo (Berkeley, CA), Katharina Rosenberger (Los Angeles, CA), Mathew Rosenblum (Pittsburgh, PA), Peter Shin (Kansas City, MO), Christopher Trapani (Austin, TX), Lu Wang (Chicago, IL), Eric Wubbels (Astoria, NY), Wang Xi (Dallas, TX)

Source: CageConcert.org.

The project’s outputs and activities include a major book publication, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Oxford University Press, May 2020), performances and a CD recording, and an international conference, in addition to numerous conference presentations and several associated publications. Finally, a significant core output is this website, which, in addition to providing a record of the project as a whole, presents a series of documentary films made with musicians from Apartment House about performing the Concert, and two apps: the Solo for Piano app, which allows users to interact with notations from the piano part to create their own notated realisations; and the Concert Player app, with which users can combine sound recordings of the individual solos in various ways to produce variable aural versions of the piece. The website is thus intended to be a rich resource that enables users to better understand the techniques and processes explored by Cage in this remarkable work.

Here is where I post, at a frequency of about once a week, a list of the new music that has caught my attention that week. All of the releases listed below I’ve heard for the first time this week and come recommended.

Evan Parker / Barry Guy / Paul Lytton – Concert in Vilnius (2019)
Sam Rivers Quintet – Zenith (1977)
Sadon & Treha Sektori – Symphony of Dying (2019)
Anne Chris Bakker – Stof&Geest (2019)
Masahiko Satoh / Sabu Toyozumi – The Aiki (2019)