20 Essential Artists from the 21st Century Jazz Renaissance

Many writers have already written a lot of words exploring the reasons behind the resurgence of jazz in the 21st century. Like a great reggae tune or a detailed hip-hop track, I believe the reason is both simple and complex. I apologize if that sounds like a sellout answer. The straightforward aspect of this is that jazz in the 21st century is directly connected to culture. For example, look at the young British artists referencing sound system culture and various electronic music genres. In the United States, you can hear the influences of hip-hop, punk, metal, rock, disco, and dub—these genres all blend into the interpretations of jazz by new artists.

The more difficult thing to decipher is why jazz has become such a popular melting pot for younger musicians, particularly—but not exclusively—Black and Brown musicians. This could be attributed to cultural uprisings, a return to playing live instruments, or a shift towards a more human expression through music.

As I mentioned, I don’t have all the answers, but I am genuinely excited to see jazz energetically marching into the future. It’s thrilling to witness the many inspiring ideas, combinations, and artistic statements being made by a new generation. I truly mean this wholeheartedly; it gives me hope at a time when many might feel quite the opposite.

The next time you hear someone mention the new generation of players who are shaping the future of jazz, you’ll have at least 20 artists to reference—presented here in alphabetical order. Keep in mind that this list isn’t all seeing, but it serves as a great introduction to what’s happening in jazz right now. Enjoy.

Joe Armon-Jones

In sports terms, he’s a glue guy. His keyboard arrangements are the backbone of the current British jazz scene. That 2018 debut, Starting Today, showcased his talents as a pianist and soulful modern arranger, earning praise not just from the UK underground jazz community but also attracting global attention. Besides solo projects that blend dub, hip-hop, R&B, funk, and bass-heavy UK club culture, Jones also plays key roles in Ezra Collective and in groups led by Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd. All are essential figures in this new musical landscape. Look no further than his mood hymnal “Almost Went Too Far,” and immediately, you get a glimpse into his vast musical world, and it’s glorious.

Read More: Turn to Clear View (2019)

Lakecia Benjamin

The alto saxophonist and composer from New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood makes a smoldering pot of arrangements/charts that touch on jazz, hip-hop, and soul uniquely, thanks to Benjamin’s explosive saxophone work and voltaic approach. A 2023 Monterey Jazz Festival artist-in-residence, Benjamin is a force on the stage and also in her numerous roles mentoring young musicians at various summer jazz camps.

Binker and Moses

As saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd presented their own tag team of thunder-jazz, creating a wall of sound, recording albums in front of young fans who, instead of hitting the club for grime, hip-hop, or drum and bass would rather hear these musicians—who are not that much older than them—reference the music of the times through live instrumentation. It’s still the dirty damned blues as Chuck D would say, but here, captured in a non-traditional jazz space, it’s moving with new swag and chopping new game, while the story remains identical. Racism. Sexism. Fascism. With a little Brexit on the side. Binker and Moses connected with a new generation of jazz fans at the landmark Total Refreshment Centre in north-east London, delivering the UK jazz renaissance live and in real-time.

jaimie branch

She passed away on the night of Monday, August 22, 2022, at her home in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released her music. The statement, made in consultation with her family, did not provide a cause of death. She was 39 years old.

The Brooklyn-based composer, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and vocalist (who intentionally kept her name in lowercase) brought new colors and a unique energy to the jazz genre, sometimes infusing it with a punk-rock dynamism. We’re adding her to the Chicago section because her label was International Anthem, and her legacy continues to resonate beyond her passing. You can check out her work with the Anteloper electronic music project, which she did with her longtime friend and drummer Jason Nazary. Alternatively, explore the full-hearted, take-no-prisoners album FLY or DIE II: Bird Dogs of Paradise from 2019. Her presence is still felt and her voice—particularly the social commentary in her music—continues to echo. branch packed Sun Ra, Mouse on Mars, Moor Mother, Harriet Tubman, and Autechre energy into arrangements, and that trumpet, that went from modal to psychedelic space music. She’s still with us; all you have to do is listen.

Read More: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) (2024)

Anna Butterss

The Adelaide, Australia-born musician Anna Butterss, who now resides in Los Angeles, has propelled themselves to explore and travel innovative pathways within and outside the jazz idiom. Having played bass and worked with an impressive roster of artists, from Phoebe Bridgers to Makaya McCraven, Jenny Lewis to Jeff Parker—these are long stretches in style but all within Butterss’ wheelhouse.

Their most recent solo release, Mighty Vertebrate, sees this in-demand bassist and musician leaning in on ideas that run, as always, in and out—fluid—of the jazz idiom. Flexing their expertise for more subdued arrangements to round out the multi-talented artist’s CV, proving once again that range is where Butterss thrives, quite healthily. A presence throughout Jeff Parker’s 2022 Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and then the post-rock, Afrobeats, ambient smasher of a project, Small Medium Large by SML, which includes Butterss on bass, sees them laying on the slick, thick ooze of gravitational shit.

Read More: Mighty Vertebrate (2024)

Theon Cross

The tuba is a 21st-century jazz utility knife, and Theon Cross is its wielder. From punching through the instrument to create gripping bass lines you’d hear in drum and bass, hip-hop, and all the diverse strains of UK electronic music, or to evoke the sound of crossing marshland at dawn, this unique Young Black Brit, who shares stages with Makaya McCraven, Ben LaMar Gay, and has recorded with Nubya Garcia, exemplifies a versatile artist. Cross, a member of the Mercury-nominated and award-winning quartet Sons of Kemet, is more than just a fierce performer—he’s brought a distinctive instrument into the spotlight amid this new awakening of the jazz genre. That’s what new ideas do: they shake things up to fit the times we’re living in.

Read More: Fyah (2019)

Ezra Collective

This London-based quintet is a powerhouse of the UK jazz scene. They made history as the first jazz act to win the Mercury Music Prize for their 2022 album, Where I’m Meant to Be. Their unique sound combines jazz improvisation with West African rhythms, Afrobeat horns, and a lively, energetic atmosphere that moves dancefloors. Their performances are about embracing the moment; they want you to be fully present as you experience the music. While you can always revisit their sound as a passive listener later, the true magic happens live. This trademark energy makes their shows truly unforgettable. Yes, jazz can indeed be a party.

Nubya Garcia

Pronounced Nuh-bi-ya, the London-based tenor saxophonist, phenomenon, composer, and bandleader is instantly recognizable by that distinctive tone of clarity—a global trademark on record. When you hear it, you know it is truly a real thing. It makes no difference which solo album of hers you reference. She tends to like one-word titles. Whether the recent cinematic, classical, and orchestral epic Odyssey, or the Caribbean influence while touching on soul, dub, and cumbia on her debut solo album, Source, from 2020. Both provide novel ideas for a younger demographic, from bass music to Soundsystem culture; these ideas speak to the 21st century.

Read More: Source (2020); Odyssey (2024)

Shabaka Hutchings

For about a solid decade, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings released at least one album a year, rotating between his three primary projects: the Afro-Caribbean jazz funk quartet Sons of Kemet, South African spiritual jazz ensemble Shabaka and the Ancestors and his electronics-bolstered space-groove outfit The Comet Is Coming. But just as it seemed the London artist had pushed jazz’s boundaries into three simultaneous directions, he took up a new and entirely different direction into meditative ambient jazz guided by his flute playing, rather than the sax. But before he retired the instrument (at least for now), he performed the entirety of 2021’s Promises with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra, in tribute to the late Pharoah Sanders. – Jeff Terich

Irreversible Entanglements

The free jazz quintet, known for its experimental punk mentality, includes poet-vocalist Camae Ayewa (commonly referred to as Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. The group first met at a Musicians Against Police Brutality concert in 2015, where they gathered to protest the murder of Akai Gurley by an NYPD officer. In 2017, the New Jersey punk platform Don Giovanni and the International Anthem label jointly released the band’s self-titled debut album.

Which is appropriate. This vessel unleashes the energies of out John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders meeting Bad Brains at their most fierce. In performance they are combustable; part rocket launcher high on the blues pushed to its most futuristic version with Moor Mother switching on the mic between commanding reveals and garbled Deceptacon mandates, feeding off a band that just deals out weighted blankets of rhythm, while trumpets and saxophones wail in chaos, a sonic representation of the micro-aggressions Black and Brown folks experience every day in America. Never has a band so well represented the time they/we are taking up space within.

Read More: Who Sent You? (2020); Open the Gate (2021); Protect Your Light (2023)

Yazmin Lacey

Yazmin Lacey, who was born and raised in London, is a talented singer and songwriter who seamlessly blends jazz, R&B, and pop. She takes listeners on a journey through the great voices of the past, such as Lauryn Hill and Jill Scott, without mimicry. Her lyrical readings, part Badu attitudinal but all candid and quotable, carry an inescapable unruffled UK “sort it” swag. Lacey has become the quintessential vocalist for the UK’s New Jazz movement.

James Brandon Lewis

The abstract, combustive forces emanating from this CalArts graduate’s tenor sax can captivate the ears and minds of gray-haired patrons, dreadlocked fans, and skinny, tattooed punk enthusiasts. James Brandon Lewis, whether performing with his trio that includes Andy Niven on drums and Josh Werner on electric bass, or with the post-hardcore band The Messthetics, remains front and center, delivering something fiercely conceptual and wonderfully staggering.

Makaya McCraven

Drummer, producer, bandleader, “cultural synthesizer” or “beat scientist” for his method of digitally chopping up recordings of his bands’ jam sessions into hip-hop breakbeats; he’s moving the needle forward into posterity. The Paris-born, Western Massachusetts-raised artist can lean on the efforts that modernity has presented to jazz, making it sample-ready or, as in his career-defining last project In These Times, McCraven can lean in on the arrangements and melodies rather than solely the kinetic rhythmic blitzkrieg attack he’s known for behind the kit. He’s a drummer with Art Blakey powderkeg bombast who writes like Ellington and Mingus, lunching with Debussy and Tchaikovsky.

Read More: Universal Beings (2018); We’re New Again (2020); In These Times (2022)

Carlos Niño and Nate Mercereau

Influential and prominent figures at the forefront of the contemporary ambient jazz movement. Pivotal musicians who played a major role in André 3000’s delivery of an album, the atmospheric flute-driven New Blue Sun, that saw Three Stacks approach breath control from a uniquely new position. That project, solely on name recognition, put this ambient jazz movement farther in the mainstream of culture than anything else previous. Outkast and hip-hop fans in general attended these concerts and had different opinions about it. But the idea got broached and discussed in a much larger context due to Carlos Niño and Bay Area guitarist Nate Mercereau. That’s weight.

Jeff Parker

Parker, who’s been playing guitar with Tortoise for years, blew up my spot with his 2020 dedication to his mother, Suite For Max Brown. Droney, breezy, with elements of Sonic Youth and Madlib digital cut-ups, Parker tweaked pre-recorded improv jam sessions into the future, highlighting the past 50 years of progressive Black music. Over the past couple of years, he’s been releasing heat rocks of this repetitive, meditative, improvisatory jazz with a rotating circle of acolytes—he calls them peers. They are actually former students of his who identify with this burgeoning wing of meditative arrangements that involves collective sharing among some of the most in-demand new age jazz warriors gigging on the planet. To quote Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers directly about this rising emergence of loose fusiony jazz: It’s fucking funky as fuck, dude.

Read More: A Beginner’s Guide to Jeff Parker; Suite for Max Brown (2020); The Way Out of Easy (2024)

SML

An offshoot band of Jeff Parker thinkers—which includes bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann—twisted up Afrobeat on the impressive Small Medium Large from 2024 in repetitive form and made Fela-esque terrain ready for Theo Parrish’s all-encompassing DJ sets. Look for more of that Fela on Acid technique on the upcoming How You Been, dropping on November 7.

Read More: Small Medium Large (2024)

Thundercat

Stephen Lee Bruner, who was raised in Compton and various parts of Los Angeles, was once the bass player for the thrash metal band Suicidal Tendencies. He embodies a contemporary version of the late great George Duke. His music seamlessly blends funk, soul, progressive R&B, psychedelia, jazz fusion and hip-hop. Bruner has earned a Grammy for his contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly, and he also won the award for Best Progressive R&B Album for his 2020 studio album It Is What It Is. While his recordings showcase a diverse range of styles, his live performances strongly emphasize jazz fusion with math-rock tendencies on his trademark Ibanez six-string bass guitar. He is well-regarded for his adaptability as a performer, able to share the stage with bands like the punk group Mannequin Pussy at large music festivals, while the audience remains captivated throughout the set. He’s brought jazz to a new generation and a younger ear, making the genre grow exponentially in the early part of the 21st Century.

Read More: The Golden Age of Apocalypse (2011); Apocalypse (2013); Drunk (2017); It Is What It Is (2020)

Kamasi Washington

An ethnomusicology major from UCLA and anime enthusiast, Kamasi Washington is beyond being just a well-known musician and bandleader. He’s a generational figure (some mention him and Cotrane in the same breath), importing modernity to America’s classical music. Updating the jazz canon with ideas from the outlook of Black America in the 21st Century, he’s pushing the art form, with his tenor sax, further into the now.

Funny enough I caught him in Menlo Park a couple years ago and just like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane used to elongate, riff, and write new compositions based on standards or show tunes—things in their cultural zeitgeist—Kamasi unleashed the Kraken of his own touch points. One moment, it was a chorus from Parliament’s “Flash Light.” I pointed my finger up to the sky immediately, just on impulse—he was referencing Bernie Worrell’s one-man-band creation of a classic. Next, we get the latter part of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” updated, recontextualized, aggressive, in an eager sort of way.

Read More: Harmony of Difference (2017); Heaven and Earth (2018); Fearless Movement (2024)

West Coast Get Down

This Los Angeles-based collective formed in 2006. Its members include saxophonist Kamasi Washington, bassists Miles Mosley and Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, drummers Ronald Bruner Jr. and Tony Austin, pianists Cameron Graves and Brandon Coleman, trombonist Ryan Porter, and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin. Their contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed album To Pimp a Butterfly put them on a national level, but Ryan “Papa” Porter’s 2018 album The Optimist is a testament to the bond generated by LA’s most acclaimed contemporary jazz group. In the autumn of 2008, Porter packed 11 fellow Los Angeles jazz musicians, largely from the WCGD, into Kamasi Washington’s parents’ garage, affectionately known as “The Shack.”

Brandee Younger

On the historic Impulse label, Brandee Younger is a harpist, composer, and bandleader. Her craft blends spiritual jazz and classical training with the rhythmic soulfulness of R&B and hip-hop. In terms of her spiritual connection to music, she has been compared to Alice Coltrane. While this might feel like a heavy burden for some, Younger embraces the legacy of the musicians who came before her and those who will follow. She has brought on tour landmark hip-hop producer Pete Rock, while managing to stay connected, doing features with the likes of artists such as Makaya McCraven. She’s won a 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album and also earned Grammy nominations as well. That visibility, on all platforms and stages, represents a special aura that surrounds Younger.

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