Something miraculous is happening in jazz, and almost nobody seems aware of it.
I came to jazz on my own. My parents loved music, but it was the great popular tradition they cherished — Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Sarah Vaughan, the American songbook, show tunes, the music of polish and romance. Jazz reached me differently, almost like a visitation. When I was a boy, around ten, I saw Keith Jarrett on television and was transfixed. He did not seem merely to be playing the piano. He seemed to rise above it, like some strange exotic bird overtaken by flight, bending and arching as though the music were lifting him clear of the instrument itself. I had never seen anything like it. It was not performance in the ordinary sense. It was possession, transport, transcendence. From that moment on, I loved jazz.
I have never understood why this highest form of music has remained so marginal in the broader culture, because to me jazz has always seemed the summit of musical expression. It demands individuality. It asks each musician not merely to execute, but to bring his own soul, tone, intelligence, daring, and inward weather to the music. Jazz is where personality becomes sound. One can hear the human being thinking, feeling, risking, inventing in real time. Perhaps that is why it has always meant so much to me. It is the most personal of musics, and yet the most communal. Each player contributes his gift, and the whole becomes larger than any one of them.
What is happening now makes that early astonishment feel newly justified. At a moment when so much of the wider culture feels exhausted, imitative, vulgar, and spiritually threadbare, jazz is undergoing a quiet renaissance. A remarkable generation of artists has emerged, not preserving the form as curators of a museum, but carrying it forward through brilliance, discipline, and imagination. These are not caretakers of a dying idiom. They are artists of the highest order, taking the music to its next stage and elevating it through sheer artistic force.
Take Samara Joy. She is fabulous, and that word is not enough. She reminds me of Sarah Vaughan in the best sense, not as imitation, but in that rich, poised, musically intelligent inhabiting of a song from within. Too many singers perform at the material. Samara Joy enters it. Her voice is mellifluous, warm, and uncannily mature, yet there is nothing studied or museum-like about her. She does not sound like an exercise in revival. She sounds alive. In an age of vocal inflation, melisma for its own sake, and emotional fraudulence, her singing feels almost ambrosial.
Immanuel Wilkins belongs among the most serious younger alto players now working. There is no gimmick about him, no cheap attempt to peacockize the tradition while adding nothing of his own. He comes out of the deeper modern jazz lineage, and one hears immediately that the sound matters to him, the composition matters to him, the inward shape of a solo matters to him. There is thought in his playing, and there is gravity. He reminds you that jazz can still be probing, exacting, and morally serious.
The vibraphone, that supposedly niche and half-forgotten instrument, is flourishing in two very different but equally exemplary hands. Joel Ross has a searching, inward, modern voice, contemplative and luminous, carrying forward something of the post-bop and Bobby Hutcherson tradition while remaining entirely his own. Simon Moullier, by contrast, brings lucid brilliance and astonishing refinement. If Ross makes the instrument brood and glow, Moullier makes it flash and sing. Both are proof that the vibraphone is not merely alive again but thriving, the old Lionel Hampton exuberance and Hutcherson exquisiteness now giving rise to new permutations.
Joey Alexander is further evidence that the old pessimists are wrong. Jazz piano did not peak decades ago and simply trail off into memory. He came to the instrument as a prodigy, yes, but prodigy is not enough. The real miracle is that the gift ripened. There is seriousness in him now, not merely facility. The line from the great pianists has not been broken. It has simply found a new bearer.
Anat Cohen and Avishai Cohen, in very different ways, show how broad this renewal really is. Anat Cohen’s clarinet playing is full of warmth, wit, worldliness, and joy. She brings that instrument alive with the kind of generosity that makes you think of the word “musician” in the highest sense. Avishai Cohen, on trumpet, is darker, more brooding, more severe, yet deeply lyrical. His sound carries austerity and beauty together. These are not minor players decorating the margins. They are major voices.
The same is true of Thomas Dutronc, who brings a continental elegance into the field that is impossible not to admire. He is no dilettante in a nice suit. He earned his place through gypsy jazz itself, refining his craft in the Saint-Ouen flea market and alongside masters like Biréli Lagrène and Stochelo Rosenberg. Comme un manouche sans guitare did not manufacture his identity; it revealed it. “Les p’tits bonheurs” is just miraculous. There is charm in him, yes, but charm without shallowness, grace without affectation. He feels, in his way, like the Jacques Brel of our time, or at least one of the few musicians left who understands that elegance is not weakness.
Then there is Tigran Hamasyan, one of the most original musicians anywhere in the field. He is, in a sense, the Khachaturian of jazz, rooted in Armenian inheritance yet explosively modern. His music draws on folk memory, rhythmic daring, classical structure, and jazz imagination without collapsing into crossover legerdemain. He does not paste styles together. He transforms them into a language of his own. That is what true innovation sounds like.
Itamar Borochov belongs in this company as well. Hearing Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis led him to trumpet, then local gigs in Tel Aviv, his own band, Funk Hapoalim, and studio work sharpened that gift into vocation. Arba is phenomenal. It has spiritual gravitas, atmosphere, depth. Borochov has forged a trumpet voice of rare seriousness, shaped by jazz but also by the modal and sacred sounds of Jaffa and the wider Middle East. There is something numinous in that music, something that reminds you jazz can still open onto the sacred without becoming pretentious.
Australia, too, is contributing meaningfully to this renaissance. Evan Harris, a saxophonist based in New York by way of Sydney, announced himself early by winning the 2018 Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year and has already performed with Wynton Marsalis — no small credential for a young player. Harry Mitchell, the Perth-based pianist and composer named Young Australian Jazz Musician of the Year in 2017, has become a highly in-demand presence at the keyboard, combining compositional seriousness with real fluency and drive. Sam Anning, the Melbourne-based bassist and composer, adds yet another dimension to the picture, bringing depth and structural intelligence to the music, his stature confirmed when he won Best Australian Instrumental Jazz Album at the 2019 Bell Awards. Taken together, they show that this renewal is not narrowly American, nor confined to one scene, but part of a wider flowering across the jazz world.
What unites these musicians is not style. Their styles differ enormously. Their origins differ. Their temperaments differ. The point is not that they all sound alike or belong to one school. The point is that all of them are bringing extraordinary gifts to bear on a living art. Their work is not dutiful. It is not academic. It is not cultural nostalgia. It is assiduous, yes, because mastery always is, but it is also fresh, surprising, and alive with personality.
In a more serious culture, this would be front-page news. People would know that something rare is taking place, that jazz has not merely survived but is approaching a new perigee of invention and beauty. Instead, much of the public drifts along in the illusion that the age of greatness is always behind us, that the best has already happened, that real artistry belongs to the dead. It is simply not true. The evidence is there for anyone willing to listen.
Do not miss this. Do not let a distracted, coarsened culture persuade you that nothing magnificent is happening. It is happening. It is happening all around you. A genuine renaissance is underway in jazz, carried by musicians of astonishing ability and artistic character. They are extending the line, enlarging the tradition, and proving once again that great music still has the power to astonish, elevate, and transfigure.
People often complain that our age produces too much noise and too little beauty. Here, at least, is beauty. Here is brilliance. Here is individuality. Here is the old miracle made new. Here is élan transformed into wonder through sonorous music.
Listen now, while it is unfolding. Don’t miss this extraordinary culmination: a century of jazz reaching its zenith.
Aaron J. Shuster is an award-winning cinematist, writer, philosopher, and essayist. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where his work received the Norma Epstein Creative Writing Award and the Canon Typstar Writing Award. He is the founder of Fountainhead Pictures.
