The 1990s were supposed to belong to jazz’s young lions. Instead, some of the decade’s biggest records came from a 55-year-old tenor saxophonist playing Billy Strayhorn, a Norwegian saxophonist improvising over medieval chant and a group of elderly Cuban musicians recorded in Havana in just six days.
Joe Henderson’s Lush Life became the biggest commercial success of his career. Jan Garbarek’s Officium, recorded with the Hilliard Ensemble, sold more than a million copies.
Buena Vista Social Club became an international phenomenon. None fitted particularly neatly into the story usually told about jazz in the 1990s.
That story tends to revolve around Wynton Marsalis, sharply dressed young musicians playing acoustic jazz and major labels searching for the next star. There is plenty of truth in it. But look through the decade’s best albums and something much less predictable emerges.
Cassandra Wilson was reworking Robert Johnson and Joni Mitchell. Guru brought Donald Byrd and Roy Ayers into hip-hop. John Zorn was combining the instrumentation of Ornette Coleman’s quartet with Jewish musical traditions.
Joshua Redman assembled a band with Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade. Meanwhile, veterans including Henderson and Keith Jarrett made some of the most successful and enduring records of their careers.
The result was a decade that stretched from straight-ahead jazz and the continuing fusion of jazz and rock to hip-hop, world music and experiments that barely fitted any existing category.
Here are our picks for the best jazz albums of the 1990s, arranged by release year from 1990 to 1999 rather than ranked.
Pat Metheny – Question and Answer (1990)
Recorded in a single December day in 1989 with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes, and released as a straight-ahead trio record by a guitarist who had spent the eighties making large, layered group albums.
Haynes was sixty-four and had played with Charlie Parker; Holland had come through Miles Davis’s electric bands. The repertoire mixes Metheny originals with “All the Things You Are” and Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years”. For anyone who thinks of Metheny only through the Pat Metheny Group, this is the record that shows what he could do without the architecture.
John Scofield – Time on My Hands (1990)
Scofield’s first album for Blue Note, with Joe Lovano on tenor, Charlie Haden on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. After a decade of funk-heavy electric records, the shift to this band changed the way people heard him — the compositions are looser, the harmony more exposed, and Lovano turned out to be the front-line partner Scofield had been missing.
The two of them worked together for most of the following decade off the back of it.
Marcus Roberts – Deep in the Shed (1990)
Roberts had lost his sight at five and joined Wynton Marsalis’s band at twenty-two. His second album as a leader reached the top of the Billboard jazz chart, which almost no acoustic jazz record by a young musician was doing at the time.
The writing looks back past bebop to blues forms and stride, and the band includes Wessell Anderson, Herb Harris and Todd Williams. It is the clearest statement of what the neo-traditionalist project actually sounded like when it worked.
Gonzalo Rubalcaba – Discovery: Live at Montreux (1991)
Rubalcaba was twenty-seven, based in Havana, and effectively barred from performing in the United States because of his Cuban residency. Dizzy Gillespie had heard him in Cuba and told Charlie Haden about him; Haden and Paul Motian make up the trio here, recorded live at Montreux in July 1990.
The technique is startling and the tempo control more so. American audiences did not get to see him properly for years afterwards, which makes this recording the way most people first heard him.
Geri Allen – The Nurturer (1991)
Allen’s Blue Note debut features her mentor Marcus Belgrave on trumpet alongside Kenny Garrett, Robert Hurst and Jeff “Tain” Watts. Allen had come out of Detroit and through the M-Base circle in Brooklyn, and the writing here sits between the two: rhythmically knotty, harmonically open, but with a warmth that the downtown records tended not to have.
She spent the rest of the decade as one of the few pianists equally welcome in avant-garde and mainstream company.
Charlie Haden Quartet West – Haunted Heart (1992)
Haden built this band around a fascination with 1940s Los Angeles — film noir, Central Avenue, the recording studios of the period. What makes Haunted Heart unusual is that he spliced original vocal recordings by Jo Stafford, Billie Holiday and Jeri Southern into the arrangements, so that the quartet plays around a voice from fifty years earlier.
Ernie Watts on tenor, Alan Broadbent on piano and Larance Marable on drums complete it. The effect is closer to a radio play than a standard quartet record.
Joe Henderson – Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (1992)
Henderson had been recording for thirty years without much commercial reward when Verve signed him and gave him a Strayhorn programme. He plays it in shifting formats — solo tenor, duo, trio, quintet — with Wynton Marsalis, Stephen Scott, Christian McBride and Gregory Hutchinson, and the unaccompanied reading of “Lush Life” itself is the track that sold the record.
The title track won Henderson a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo, and the album made him, at fifty-five, a name outside the jazz press for the first time.
Joe Lovano – From the Soul (1992)
A quartet of Lovano, Michel Petrucciani, Dave Holland and Ed Blackwell, recorded while Blackwell was seriously ill; he died later that year. Blackwell had played with Ornette Coleman and brought a New Orleans feel to free playing that nobody has quite replicated, and his presence pushes Lovano away from the post-bop mainstream.
Petrucciani, meanwhile, plays with a lightness that keeps the record from ever settling into a groove for long.
Branford Marsalis – I Heard You Twice the First Time (1992)
A blues record made by a saxophonist best known at that point for the Tonight Show band, with B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Linda Hopkins and Joe Louis Walker as guests.
It works because Marsalis treats the blues as repertoire rather than as a gesture — the arrangements go back to Chicago and the Delta rather than reaching for jazz-blues fusion. It is also a useful corrective to the idea that his generation only played post-bop.
Miles Davis – Doo-Bop (1992)
Davis died in September 1991 with this record unfinished. He had been working with the Brooklyn producer Easy Mo Bee, playing over hip-hop beats built from samples, and Easy Mo Bee completed the album afterwards using trumpet parts Davis had recorded for other purposes. It won a posthumous Grammy.
Opinions on it remain split — some hear a genuine last step, others an unfinished sketch — but it is the closing entry in a career that had spent forty years moving toward whatever was happening next.
Cassandra Wilson – Blue Light ‘Til Dawn (1993)
Wilson had come up through M-Base singing over Steve Coleman’s rhythmic structures. For this album she worked with the producer Craig Street, who came from outside jazz entirely, and recorded Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on My Trail”, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” and Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow” over acoustic guitars, percussion and very little piano. It reset what a jazz vocal album could be and it is still the record most often copied by singers thirty years later.
Bill Frisell – Have a Little Faith (1993)
Frisell recorded Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid complete, then followed it with John Philip Sousa, Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, John Hiatt, Sonny Rollins and Madonna’s “Live to Tell”.
The band has Don Byron on clarinet and Guy Klucevsek on accordion, which tells you most of what you need to know about the sound. Played straight, without irony, it argues that all of that music comes from the same place — an argument Frisell has been making ever since.
Keith Jarrett Trio – Bye Bye Blackbird (1993)
Recorded on 12 October 1991, two weeks after Miles Davis died, as a tribute from a pianist who had played in Davis’s band at the start of the seventies and rarely spoken warmly about the experience.
Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette complete the trio, DeJohnette having also been in that band. Two of the pieces are group improvisations rather than standards. It is the most emotionally direct record the Standards Trio made.
Steve Coleman and Five Elements – The Tao of Mad Phat (1993)
Coleman recorded much of this live in the studio with an audience present, wanting the rhythmic material to be played rather than assembled. By this point the M-Base approach had been worked out over nearly a decade — interlocking cycles, displaced accents, a rhythmic language borrowed as much from West African and Cuban music as from swing — and this is the album where it is easiest to hear as music rather than as theory. Its influence on the following generation of players is difficult to overstate.
Guru – Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 (1993)
The Gang Starr rapper brought Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, Branford Marsalis and the British saxophonist Courtney Pine into a studio to play live over hip-hop production rather than be sampled.
Byrd and Ayers had both spent the seventies being told they had sold out; here they were being treated as elders. Whether it counts as a jazz album is arguable. What is not arguable is how many people first heard those musicians through it.
John Zorn – Masada: Alef (1994)
Zorn assembled a quartet of trumpet, alto, bass and drums — the exact instrumentation of Ornette Coleman’s classic band — and wrote several hundred short pieces using Jewish scales and modes. Dave Douglas, Greg Cohen and Joey Baron play them with the freedom the format demands.
Alef is the first of ten albums the group recorded in quick succession, and the project turned out to be the most durable thing to come out of the downtown New York scene.
Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble – Officium (1994)
Recorded in the monastery of St Gerold in Austria, with Garbarek improvising a saxophone line over an early-music vocal quartet singing plainchant and Renaissance polyphony.
On paper it should not have worked. It sold well over a million copies, spent months on classical charts across Europe, and became one of the two or three best-selling albums ECM has ever released. It also created a small industry of imitations, none of which found the same balance.
Wynton Marsalis – In This House, On This Morning (1994)
A long-form work commissioned by Lincoln Center, structured as a church service from the call to worship through to the benediction. Marsalis’s septet — Wessell Anderson, Todd Williams, Wycliffe Gordon, Eric Reed, Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley — had been working together for years and plays it as an ensemble rather than a solo vehicle.
Whatever position you take on Marsalis, this is the most ambitious writing he did in the nineties and the album that best answers the charge that he only looked backwards.
Joshua Redman – MoodSwing (1994)
Redman had won the Thelonious Monk competition in 1991 after being accepted to Harvard Law School, and for the next few years he was the most heavily promoted young musician in jazz. What matters about MoodSwing is the band he assembled: Brad Mehldau on piano, Christian McBride on bass, Brian Blade on drums.
All three became defining players on their instruments, and the interplay here — particularly Blade’s, which was unlike any other drummer’s at the time — is the reason the record has outlasted the hype around it.
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones – Steal Away (1995)
Spirituals, hymns and folk songs played as duets by a bassist in his late fifties and a pianist in his late seventies. Jones had recorded with Charlie Parker; Haden had grown up singing on his family’s country radio show in Missouri before joining Ornette Coleman.
Neither of them decorates the material. It is the quietest record on this list and the one people tend to return to most.
Abbey Lincoln – A Turtle’s Dream (1995)
Lincoln was in her mid-sixties and in the middle of a late-career run for Verve that produced the best singing of her life. Roy Hargrove, Kenny Barron, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden all appear, and Lincoln wrote most of the material herself.
Her voice by this point had lost range and gained something else entirely — she phrases like a storyteller rather than a singer, leaving gaps where a younger vocalist would fill.
Dave Holland – Dream of the Elders (1995)
Holland’s quartet with Steve Nelson on vibraphone, Eric Person on saxophones and Gene Jackson on drums, with Cassandra Wilson appearing on two tracks.
The vibraphone in place of piano gives the harmony a transparency that suits Holland’s writing, and it is the record where the sound of his later, better-known quintets starts to take shape. Nelson stayed with him for the next fifteen years.
Wayne Shorter – High Life (1995)
Shorter’s first album under his own name in seven years, co-produced with Marcus Miller, and the most heavily arranged record he ever made — layered synthesisers, percussion and orchestral writing, with his soprano moving through it.
It won a Grammy and divided everyone. Listeners who wanted the acoustic quartet Shorter would eventually form five years later found it airless; those who take it as a composer’s record hear the through-line from Atlantis and the Weather Report years.
Herbie Hancock – The New Standard (1996)
Hancock’s argument was that the standards repertoire had stopped being replenished, so he recorded Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple”, Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” and Sade’s “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” as jazz vehicles.
The band is Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and Don Alias, which is close to a supergroup. The idea has been repeated so often since that it is easy to forget how contentious it was at the time.
Diana Krall – All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio (1996)
Krall’s third album and the one that made her career, recorded as a piano-guitar-bass trio with Russell Malone and Paul Keller in direct homage to Cole’s own trio format.
She sings less than you might expect and plays more, and the restraint is what makes it work. Within five years she was the biggest-selling jazz vocalist in the world; this is the record where the approach came together.
Brad Mehldau – Introducing Brad Mehldau (1996)
Half the album is a trio with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, the other half with Christian McBride and Brian Blade, and the first of those pairings lasted more than a decade.
Mehldau was twenty-five and already playing with the independence of hands and the odd-metre comfort that made him the most imitated pianist of the following twenty years. It is a more conventional record than what came after, which makes it a good place to hear what was new about him.
Buena Vista Social Club (1997)
Recorded in Havana in six days in 1996, after a planned session with African musicians fell through and Ry Cooder and Juan de Marcos González assembled a group of veteran Cuban players instead. Compay Segundo was eighty-nine.
Ibrahim Ferrer had retired from music and was shining shoes. Rubén González had not owned a piano for years. The album sold in the millions, Wim Wenders made a film about it in 1999, and it did more to put Cuban music in front of a general audience than anything before or since.
Whether it belongs on a jazz list is a fair question — the answer is that half the jazz world spent the following decade absorbing it.
Pat Metheny & Charlie Haden – Beyond the Missouri Sky (1997)
Two Missourians, one on acoustic guitar and one on bass, playing quietly for an hour. The repertoire runs from Ennio Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso theme to Roy Acuff and Johnny Mandel, and Haden’s playing is so exposed that you can hear the strings move.
It won a Grammy and became one of the best-selling records either man made. Metheny has described it as the album he gets asked about most by people who do not otherwise listen to jazz.
Roy Hargrove’s Crisol – Habana (1997)
Hargrove took a band to Havana, worked with Cuban musicians including Chucho Valdés, and came back with a record that won the Grammy for Latin jazz. David Sánchez, Gary Bartz, Frank Lacy and Russell Malone are among the Americans; the percussion section is where the album lives.
It arrived the same year as Buena Vista and pointed at the same thing from the opposite direction — American jazz musicians going to Cuba rather than Cuban musicians being brought out.
Kenny Garrett – Songbook (1997)
Garrett had played in Miles Davis’s last band and with Art Blakey before that, and this is the album where his own writing caught up with his playing. Kenny Kirkland, Nat Reeves and Brian Blade make up the rhythm section, and Kirkland — who died in 1998 — is extraordinary throughout.
The Coltrane influence in Garrett’s alto playing is obvious, but the compositions go somewhere else, with melodies simple enough to sing over harmony that is anything but.
Brad Mehldau – The Art of the Trio, Vol. 2: Live at the Village Vanguard (1998)
The second in a five-volume series, recorded over a week at the Vanguard with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy. The trio interplay is the point: Rossy plays around the beat rather than on it, Grenadier moves between roles, and Mehldau treats “It’s All Right with Me” and Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” with the same seriousness. This is where the piano trio format got its late-nineties reset.
Medeski Martin & Wood – Combustication (1998)
The trio’s first album for Blue Note, with DJ Logic on turntables and the poet Steve Cannon reading on one track. They had built an audience by touring the same rooms as jam bands rather than jazz clubs, which meant a young, non-jazz crowd was turning up to hear Hammond organ, upright bass and a drummer playing something close to hip-hop. Purists were unimpressed. The audience it brought in was real and a lot of it stayed.
John Scofield – A Go Go (1998)
Scofield made this with Medeski Martin & Wood as his band, and the combination worked far better than the label pairing suggests. John Medeski’s organ and clavinet give the tunes a bottom end Scofield’s own groups never had, and Scofield writes to it — short heads, long grooves, room to move.
It became his best-selling album and pulled a jam-band audience toward a guitarist who had played with Miles Davis twenty years earlier.
Keith Jarrett – The Melody at Night, With You (1999)
Jarrett had been unable to play for two years through chronic fatigue syndrome. He recorded this alone in his home studio in New Jersey, on standards and folk songs, as a gift for his wife, with no intention of releasing it.
ECM put it out as it was. There is no virtuosity on display and the touch is noticeably frail in places, which is exactly why it lands. Of everything Jarrett recorded, this is the album people describe in personal terms.
Cassandra Wilson – Traveling Miles (1999)
Wilson wrote lyrics to Miles Davis compositions and built an album around them, with guests including Olu Dara, Regina Carter and Dave Holland. Setting words to instrumental music that famous is a risk, and she avoids reverence — the arrangements take the tunes somewhere folk and blues-inflected rather than treating them as monuments. It is the strongest of the many Miles tributes that appeared in the decade after his death.
Jason Moran – Soundtrack to Human Motion (1999)
Moran was twenty-four and had been playing in Greg Osby’s band; Osby produced this debut and plays on it, alongside Stefon Harris, Reginald Veal and Eric Harland.
The writing draws on Jaki Byard, who had taught Moran, and on rhythmic ideas from the M-Base circle, and the result sounds like almost nothing else released that year. It marks the point where the generation after the young lions started setting its own terms.
Esbjörn Svensson Trio – From Gagarin’s Point of View (1999)
The Swedish trio’s first internationally released album, and the beginning of a run that made them the biggest-selling European jazz group of the following decade. Svensson, Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström played piano-trio jazz with rock dynamics and studio effects, and marketed themselves to audiences who went to rock venues.
The influence on European jazz through the 2000s was enormous, and it starts here.
Albums that just missed
A decade this crowded leaves plenty out. Michel Petrucciani, Betty Carter, Danilo Pérez, Regina Carter, Greg Osby, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Chris Potter and Courtney Pine all made records in the nineties that would sit comfortably on a longer version of this list.
Us3’s Hand on the Torch, built almost entirely on Blue Note samples, sold more copies than most albums here and is a decent argument for the reissue economy shaping the decade as much as any musician did. Narrow the criteria differently and the list changes considerably.
