Is end-of-year best-of list itis even curable?

A best-of list won’t change your life unless you have measured out your life with coffee spoons

There ain’t any headline prize anyway, tsssk, T. S., in this jazz Wasteland.

It’s just kudos for postmodernists. But you know what the best of all feeling is: an album that moves you, a gig that changes your life. They don’t come along every day. And they look nothing like lists.

But if you lived in your own bubble and didn’t look around on the Internet – and who reads print magazines as much or at all any more – you’d know that there isn’t a single best-of-2024 or any year for that matter in existence.

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List making mania

Loads of websites including this one make regular lists. They usually say as much about the choosers’ preferences as they do about the object.

Consensus lists are like committee decisions – frustrating. And bland.

But do the maths and you can come up with some sort of average best-of list.

Like a ship – listing badly?

But does it mean that this unicorn is your own inspiration, the sort of list of recordings you will with pleasure and hand on heart go back to time and time again?

Probably not. I often think it’s funny when you look at say 30 lists of top critics in the same genre coming up with very little in common in their thinking. Their pronouncements are not set in stone, but are as throwaway as a single use vape.

Lemming like rush for a sticker marked winner

Also look beyond jazz and say to this year’s Mercury which once had a jazz winner – will you be spending time with the band English Teacher this autumn because it won? Nope. It’s very average. Turn to the Booker will you be rushing to buy Orbital by Samantha Harvey because it won a prize? Nope. There are other better books out there that will never win a prize and that doesn’t diminish them at all.

But a lot of people do like to hoover up things with ”winner” written on a sticky label on the cover. And a lot of people can be very disappointed, like a basking in refracted glory hangover version of buyer’s remorse. Because something that impresses a panel of judges isn’t something that would necessarily impress a random selection of the public. Imagine randomly picking a dozen people on the street and asking them to tell you their favourite albums this year. Also, and a lot of people forget this, is the cohort this year any good? Is the winner, the best-of whatever, best of a bunch of albums that are only a bit meh because the cohort de nos jours can’t really be arsed or they got derailed by covid and haven’t quite got their mojo back yet?

Today’s playlist: bass desires from Afric Pepperbird legend Arild Andersen, new from the Gonz and kind of Billy Joel

Critics – like lawyers – can’t agree on much

CUSTOMER: No it can’t. An argument’s a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition.
MR. BARNARD: No it isn’t.
CUSTOMER: Yes it is! It isn’t just contradiction.
MR. BARNARD: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
CUSTOMER: But it isn’t just saying, “no it isn’t.”

From The Argument Clinic – Monty Python

A wariness of blindspots

You might argue that critics have better knowledge than somebody who is ignorant. But knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean insight. And then there are the blind spots, stuff that doesn’t really get reckoned with at all. Do you allow trad jazz in? Like the oft neglected heavy metal genre in mainstream pop best-ofs most jazz critics cruelly don’t allow these schrödinger’s cats to litter the place.

Is end-of-year best-of itis curable, doctor?

If you only like free-jazz and some critics do as it flatters their inner desire to be the next Slavoj Žižek nothing else will get a look-in. The same applies for jazz-vocals. Don’t like anything else, again a cold house for instrumentals. And on and on. But picking a list of best albums because it ticks boxes isn’t a good idea either – oh, we’ll have 2 chamber jazz releases, 3 spirituals, 2 straightaheads and 3 with Fender Rhodes, garçon if you please.

Fancy-that factor

Marketing folk though know the value of saying something like Jonty Frigett’s Paradigmatic 5 (Paradiddle Records) is album of the year in the Redditch Bugle.

Fancy that. Poppy, be a pet. Email the triumphant news to anyone you think would like to swing by the Preposterous Clarkson for the Paradigmatics’ next appearance. But it’s a morale boost to be named album of the year.

Enough. Back to the far more serious business of Charades.