2025 has been a rich year for jazz recordings of every shape and size. At Syos, we sifted through an enormous wave of new releases and gathered the projects that resonated with us most, a mix of veteran innovators and fresh new voices that stood out for their imagination, craft and sense of direction. The list below spans spiritual jazz, post bop, Ethio-jazz, Afrobeat, piano-trio explorations and borderless hybrids that pull from soul, hip hop and global traditions. Saxophonists, pianists, bassists and bandleaders all appear here, but each project remains undeniably rooted in the jazz imagination. Although outlined as a Top 10, these albums are presented in no particular order, and together they form a snapshot of the many ways jazz continues to push outward while staying connected to its lineage.
1. Memories, Dreams, Reflections – Nicole Glover (Post bop – June 27, 2025): Memories, Dreams, Reflections establishes a world where Glover’s tenor serves as both compass and anchor. The no-chords setup gives her total harmonic freedom, which she uses to move between swinging phrases, blues-tinged ideas, and pockets of dissonance that add pressure to the music. One of the most striking moments arrives on “II for Richard Davis + Henry Grimes” where St. Louis’s cello wraps Glover’s tenor in a paranoid, haunting atmosphere. Her playing becomes a kind of lifeline, a steady thread guiding the listener through the darker corners of the record. Glover is also a central member of Artemis, voted “Best Jazz Group” again in DownBeat’s Critics Poll, and she performs in Christian McBride’s group Ursa Major. Widely regarded as one of the strongest tenor voices of her generation, she brings a depth that makes the album’s Jung-inspired title feel earned. You have to wonder what Jung would have thought listening to this album.
2. The Prophet and The Madman – Ami Taf Ra (Jazz – August 22, 2025): Ami Taf Ra’s debut blends North African Gnawa rhythms with a modern spiritual jazz sensibility. Produced and arranged by Kamasi Washington, the album features soaring saxophone passages, especially on “How I Became a Madman” that ride over hypnotic grooves and gospel-tinged harmonies. The project draws from Gnawa traditions that have shaped spiritual jazz for decades. Artists such as Pharoah Sanders and Ornette Coleman collaborated with Gnawa musicians in the past, and Taf Ra continues that lineage in a contemporary way.
3. Heavier Yet (Deluxe Edition) – Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 (Afrobeat / Funk – May 28, 2025): Afrobeat scion and Syos artist Seun Kuti reasserted his fiery saxophone led sound with Heavier Yet, whose 2025 Deluxe Edition broadened both its musical scope and cultural impact. Backed by the legendary Egypt 80 band, Seun’s robust tenor sax powers irresistibly funky and politically charged tracks that honor the legacy of his father while speaking directly to contemporary social struggles. Rather than radically departing from the foundations created by Fela Kuti, Seun has chosen to preserve, deepen and extend the Afrobeat tradition, in much the same way Damian Marley has carried the reggae torch into a new era. The album’s cross genre appeal, where Afrobeat intersects with jazz, hip hop and dub, combined with Seun’s electrifying live presence, including a widely discussed Coachella 2025 set, helped establish Heavier Yet as a significant cultural marker in 2025. For more context on Seun’s artistic lineage, his work with Egypt 80 and his performance on KEXP, you can explore the Syos article here: From Fela to the Future: Seun Kuti Keeps Afrobeat Alive
4. Apple Cores – James Brandon Lewis (Jazz – February 7, 2025): James Brandon Lewis, one of today’s most vital saxophonists, delivered a powerhouse trio statement with Apple Cores, an album critics praised for its natural, primal energy and its sharp shifts between meditative calm and explosive intensity. The record opens with punctuated bursts from Lewis that feel almost like the cadence of an elite rapper, setting the tone for a project that is both angular and fiercely expressive. Its title nods to a series of columns that poet and jazz theorist Amiri Baraka wrote for DownBeat in the 1960s, and the album also gestures toward Don Cherry’s global, exploratory spirit with tracks like “Remember Brooklyn & Moki” and “Five Spots To Caravan”, the latter a sizzling, anxious piece built on an unusually gripping drum pattern that Lewis navigates with complete authority. Supported by Chad Taylor on drums and Josh Werner on electric bass and guitar, the trio excels at weaving disparate ideas together, shaping a tight, skit-scat, joyfully abstract record whose cover art, bursting with color and asymmetry, mirrors the music’s restless motion. Lewis’s own philosophy, described in his essay “Molecular Synthetic Music” informs the album’s fragmented coherence, where he approaches music like reassembling a broken glass bottle. The “Apple Cores” tracks themselves feel like stream-of-consciousness rap pieces by André 3000 or Kendrick Lamar, brimming with spontaneity and rhythmic attack. Altogether, Apple Cores bridges tradition and avant-garde, reinforcing Lewis’s place as a torchbearer for jazz’s present and future.
5. Strange Heavens – Linda May Han Oh (Jazz – October 3, 2025): Linda May Han Oh’s Strange Heavens joins this year’s trio-heavy standouts with a chord-less lineup of Oh on bass, Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. It is a mostly straight-ahead jazz record built from ten new compositions, alongside thoughtful nods to Geri Allen and Melba Liston, and it flexes in tempo and tone, moving between uptempo pieces and ballads. With Oh’s direction and bass providing the foundation, Akinmusire is free to explore the liminal spaces between each piece, colouring them with confusion, anxiety, yearning and flashes of joy or acceptance. The trio finds a sharper sense of swagger on “Noise Machinery” where a newfound confidence starts to break through. Conceptually, the album reflects on why humans choose a familiar hell over a strange heaven, and the trio channels that tension into restrained but emotionally complex playing. What emerges is a record shaped by confusion, anxiety, yearning and brief flashes of acceptance, held together by Oh’s direction and the trio’s ability to move as one through the liminal spaces of each tune.
6. Mulatu Plays Mulatu – Mulatu Astatke (Jazz / Ethio-jazz – September 26, 2025): At 81, Mulatu Astatke returns with Mulatu Plays Mulatu, his first major album in ten years and a fitting reminder of why he remains the pioneer of Ethio-jazz. The record revisits pieces from across his career with new arrangements, extended improvisations and the blend of Ethiopian scales, European jazz, American funk and Latin colors that defined his groundbreaking work of the 1960s and 1970s. Astatke, on trumpet and sometimes vibraphone, is backed by an acoustic band steeped in driving 6/8 grooves, and the inclusion of traditional Ethiopian instruments gives the music a hypnotic, film-noir quality, as if a spy plot were unfolding across the album. Produced by Dexter Story and featuring contemporary players such as Carlos Niño and Kibrom Birhane, the project feels like an extension of Astatke’s instinctive live shows, where pieces stretch as long as needed. With a career that has included performances with Duke Ellington for Haile Selassie, heavy presence in the Éthiopiques series and sampling by artists like Nas, Damian Marley, Kanye West and Madlib, Astatke had every reason to settle into his legacy, phone it and release a greatest hits, but Mulatu Plays Mulatu shows he remains ambitious, inventive and fully connected to the tradition he helped create.
7. Hopium - Dayna Stephens (Jazz - Feb 6 2025): On Hopium, Syos artist Dayna Stephens reunites with the quartet from 2021’s Right Now! Live at the Village Vanguard with Aaron Parks on piano, Ben Street on bass and Greg Hutchinson on drums, for a modern jazz exploration that reaches far beyond its stated themes of hope, cynicism and future uncertainty. The title, blending “hope” and “opium,” hints at hope’s dual nature as both fuel and distraction, and across seven mostly original compositions, with one written by Parks, Stephens invites listeners into moments of confusion, clarity and quiet truth. The music carries a subtle anxiety and dissonance that occasionally surfaces, especially in “Jump Start” yet the playing remains thrilling, dynamic and deeply conversational. Rather than leaning into catharsis, the quartet keeps the tension alive, creating a set that feels alert, human and emotionally honest, a testament to four musicians operating at their peak.
8. Dream Manifest – Theo Croker (Jazz – November 14, 2025): Theo Croker’s Dream Manifest blurs jazz, soul, hip hop and R&B into a lively, contemporary mix that brings jazz back to the dance floor while still feeling lush and atmospheric. Recorded at The Bunker in Brooklyn with a rotating cast that includes Mike King, Eric Wheeler, Michael Shekwoaga Ode, Gary Bartz, Estelle, Kassa Overall and others, the album feels loose, alive and full of details that reveal themselves with each listen. Croker, whose musical lineage includes Doc Cheatham, Donald Byrd and Dee Dee Bridgewater, drew inspiration from years spent performing in Shanghai, where jazz was understood simply as Black music, a perspective that helped shape the album’s borderless feel. Built from ideas pulled from his own dream journal, Dream Manifest treats genre as something to explore rather than obey, yet remains unmistakably jazz in spirit.
9. You’re Exaggerating - Paul Cornish (Jazz - August 22, 2025): Paul Cornish’s debut shows a pianist who understands how jazz, soul and blues feed into one another. The 27-year-old Houston native, trained at the Herbie Hancock Institute, has the chops you would expect, but also a melodic sense that hints at Stevie Wonder as much as Robert Glasper. His trio with Joshua Crumbly and Jonathan Pinson is locked in from the first track, and the music constantly shifts in energy. Just when you think you can predict where a piece is headed, Cornish takes a sharp turn. Released on Blue Note, the album balances seriousness with playfulness. Tracks like “Slow Song” and “DB Song” state their intent plainly, while “Queen Geri” offers a tribute to Geri Allen. Guitarist Jeff Parker appears on “Palindrome” and Cornish’s range is on full display. Robert Glasper summed it up simply: “Paul is the now, and I am not exaggerating.”
10. Snapshots - Daniel Zimmermann (Jazz, October 17): French trombonist Daniel Zimmermann delivers a clever and sharply observed album, filled with humor and quiet unrest. He takes aim at escapist fantasies (“My Little Sweet NZ Bunker”), economic dogma (“Les Maximiseurs de Π”), and institutional failures (“Come Home”). There’s reflection too, in the fatalism of “C’est comme ça, c’est la vie” and the choice between comfort and risk in “Le Mieux et le Bien”. His take on Mose Allison’s “Stop This World” leans into that same sense of wearied urgency. The closing track, “Papillon”, draws from the final scene of the Schaffner film that haunted him as a child: an image of the ocean, escape, and the hunger to keep going. The result is one of 2025’s most disenchanted, weary but ultimately hopeful French jazz albums.
Honourable Mention
Monk’d – Dayna Stephens (Jazz – October 10, 2025): Another entry this year from Syos artist Dayna Stephens, Monk’d finds the veteran saxophonist switching to double bass for a warmly inventive tribute to Thelonious Monk. Recorded in a single day at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio with Ethan Iverson, Stephen Riley and Eric McPherson, the album rebuilds Monk’s architecture from the foundation up. Stephens’ rounded, gut-string tone and unhurried walking motion highlight the rhythmic weight at the core of Monk’s writing, and the quartet leans into the asymmetry rather than smoothing it out. The band mines lesser-known Monk material, crafting arrangements that shift meter, blend tunes and carry the smoky charm of Monk’s 1950s deliveries. Pieces like the quasi-original suite “Just You and Me, Smoking the Evidence” show Stephens’ playful approach, and the whole record feels slick, sly and relaxed, capturing Monk’s jagged humour in a way that is both refreshing and respectful.
