The best jazz of 2018: new heights scaled and legends revisited

The experts … Myra Melford, John Coltrane, Laura Jurd and Binker and Moses Photograph: PR Company Handout

In almost any year of its century-and-counting existence, the coolly cliffhanging art of jazz stays fascinating to its hardcore devotees, and in some years reaches an intrigued new crowd beyond. That happened in 2018, as a diverse and mostly young UK new wave accelerated their adventurous hitching of jazz ideas to urban dance grooves, R&B, grime, sampling, contemporary art-music and beyond. They brought a fresh frisson to the fascinating end-of-year game of weighing up of the legacies of departed giants, against the ways ingenious newcomers pull them out of shape.

June saw the PR-savvy unveiling of previously unreleased 1963 recordings by saxophone visionary John Coltrane, released in both boiled-down and full 14-track versions. The latter was a listening marathon, but its multiple takes of the same tunes revealed more tellingly how inspirational the early 60s Coltrane quartet was, for its attitude to ensemble musicmaking as much as for its revolutionary techniques.

From the tradition’s perspective, Ornette Coleman’s vivacious bluesiness was brilliantly celebrated by the sax/trumpet pairings of Joshua Redman and Ron Miles, with Still Dreaming, and by Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas with Scandal, which also drew on Miles Davis and the still-active Wayne Shorter’s more enigmatic lyricism. The 85-year-old Shorter’s Emanon spliced jazz/classical mergers, live jazz-quartet tracks, and a rickety dystopia-to-utopia graphic novel, but the live takes made this somewhat bolted-together package soar. And the California pianist/composer Myra Melford added a delightful personal appraisal of postbop, free-jazz, avantist composition, and the keyboard influence of Cecil Taylor (the wayward legend who died in April) with The Other Side of Air.

In the UK, Coltranesque saxophonist Binker Golding and young style-colliding drummer Moses Boyd led a wonderful street-grooves-meets-freeblasting live band including improv sax master Evan Parker on Alive in the East? Trumpeter/composer Laura Jurd stirred 70s Miles into synth-pop on Wonder Trail, her keyboard partner Elliot Galvin steered his own virtuosic, vintage-synth-powered course through themes of 18th-century paranoia and 21st-century AI with The Influencing Machine, and Led Bib’s Liran Donin unveiled the songlike, world-jazzy 8 Songs – a folk-jazz approach reminiscent of Donin’s fellow Israeli bassist and composer, Avishai Cohen, but taken to enchanting locations of his own.