The Best Jazz Albums of 2006Time and tide wait for no man, except maybe jazz musicians.

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Bill Frisell/Ron Carter/Paul Motian (Nonesuch)
Guitarist Bill Frisell, 55, strums his customary mix of jazz, Twin Peaks, and wah-wah bluegrass, joined by bassist Ron Carter (69) and drummer Paul Motian (75—could it be?!) in an unexpectedly convivial trio. The disc begins with a very spacey rundown of "Eighty-One," a blues that Carter wrote with Miles Davis when they played together in the mid-'60s; follows up with the oddest-ball version of "You Are My Sunshine" that you're likely to hear; and segues into a bluesy, twangy Frisell original called "Worse and Worse," with Carter plucking the bass more imaginatively than I've heard from him in years. Motian swirls his brushes and keeps pushing the beat off-center like nobody. A wiggy delight.

Mario Pavone, Deez to Blues (Playscape)
Mario Pavone, 66, a veteran staple of New York's downtown jazz scene, may be the most unjustly obscure bassist-bandleader-composer. There's some Mingus here, too—and not just in the way Pavone slaps the bass strings and lets their overtones mingle with the stacked harmonies. His aptly peculiar sextet (a trumpet, tuba, and violin, meshed in with the piano, bass, and drums) navigates the shoals with airtight verve. They do the knotty and the noir-ishly lyrical with equal aplomb and weird beauty.

Jason Moran, Artist in Residence (Blue Note)
Jason Moran, at 31 the most inventive and versatile jazz pianist around, wrote most of these tracks as commissions for art centers, and the album comes off as a sonic Chelsea art-gallery tour: alternately quirky, adventurous, maddening, wondrous, sometimes all at once. "Cradle Song," in which Moran expertly recites a Carl Maria von Weber tune over the sound of pencil-scribbling (in memory of his mother's furious note-taking while he practiced as a child) is pure Dada. "Artists Ought to Be Writing," in which he mimics an artist's monologue, highlighting the music of natural speech, is like a wittier-than-usual mixed-media installation. But there's also the brisk melody of "Arizona Landscape," which evokes a crisp dawn photo of, well, an Arizona landscape.

Fred Anderson, Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark)
Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, 77, is a fixture on the Chicago music scene, which may be why he's less known than he should be in the Manhattan-centric jazzosphere. Imagine mid-'60s Coltrane with a few squirts of R&B, and you'll be in the ballpark: incantations with a downbeat. His drummer, Hamid Drake, familiar to New York denizens for his work with William Parker and David Murray, spins rhythms within rhythms. Bassist Harrison Bankhead, who seems to play only with Anderson, is astonishing: soaring and diving through octaves and hitting notes as right as they are unexpected. This was recorded live at the Velvet Lounge, a South Side club that Anderson has owned for decades and where he plays routinely. It's worth a trip, or at least a purchase.

Hank Jones/Christian McBride/Jimmy Cobb, West of 5^th (Chesky)
Here's the contest-winner: Hank Jones, 88 (!), who played piano with Charlie Parker and just about every great jazz musician since, still prowling the keyboard, maybe not quite as forcefully as he once did, but hardly less briskly or lyrically. His harmonies sing, and he's still got that touch. No mind-benders; just a fresh, breezy set of standards, masterfully laid out, backed by Jimmy Cobb brushing the trapset as crisply as he did 47 years ago on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and young Christian McBride plucking the bass more energetically than he has lately.

Finally, respeck to Mosaic Records, the mail-order record company in Stamford, Conn., for continuing to produce the liveliest, loveliest jazz reissue boxes. Highlights this year: the 7-CD Verve/Philips Dizzy Gillespie Small Group Sessions from the mid-'50s to mid-'60s (which, despite uneven material, confirms Diz's standing as the greatest jazz trumpeter ever); the 3-CD Andrew Hill—Solo (long out-of-print, always hard-to-find ruminations from 1978 by one of the most imaginative pianist-composers); and a single-disc Duke Ellington, The Cosmic Scene, an obscure 1958 session featuring a handpicked few from Duke's big band, ripping through classics in a muscular, streamlined sound (and, with this reissue, in stereo for the first time).

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Audio excerpts from The Carnegie Hall Concert © 2006 ECM; West of 5^th © 2006 Chesky Records; Artist in Residence © 2006 Blue Note Records; Deez to Blues © 2006 Playscape Recordings; Bill Frissell/Ron Carter/Paul Motian © 2006 Nonesuch; Asking No Permission © 2006 Smalls Records; Sonny, Please © 2006 Doxy; In Amsterdam: Lice at the Bimhui © 2006 Palmetto; Timeless © 2006 Delmark. All rights reserved.

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