Any artist has a love-hate relationship with the past, the "modern" descendant necessarily engaged in an Oedipal struggle with the formidable progenitor. Yet without acknowledging the continuing presence of the past, there can be no tradition. And without tradition—which prizes the "inventive" above the "creative"— there can be no genuine art. Attempts to create beauty without reference to the predecessor are little more than random particles of consciousness in the spatial-temporal universe, fragile frissons in a vast energy field, forgotten files in an 80 gigabyte iPod.

Fortunately, the tradition is still with us, helping assure that the music of the new millennium is on track, as evidenced by the uncommonly rich treasure trove of reissues and releases of undeniable historical significance in 2007. Here are two lists each comprising a dozen dazzling recordings roughly arranged in anticlimactic order (though Glass Bead Games and The Oslo Concerts are the decisive stand-outs in their respective categories):

Best Reissues

Clifford Jordan
Glass Bead Games
Harvest Song
2006

Clifford Jordan was a soulful, powerful, deeply thoughtful Chicago tenor player who, though sought after by pianist Horace Silver and praised by fellow saxophonist Sonny Rollins, was fated to be the Lester Young of his era, misunderstood and often overlooked by general followers of the music. He had little interest in hard bop, funk or fusion, and his muse did not tempt him, like John Coltrane's, to scale Olympian heights...Continue

Curtis Counce/Jack Sheldon/Harold Land/Carl Perkins/Frank Butler Quintet
Complete Studio Recordings
Gambit Records
2007

The beauty of this music is so much greater than the sum of its parts that a listener hardly knows where to begin. The two-disc package comprises the main recordings on the Contemporary label 1956-1958 by the short-lived Curtis Counce Group, whose expressed purpose was to develop a West Coast answer to the soulful, hard-boppish East Coast sound. Each of the musicians, though no Down Beat poll winner, was among the most gifted on his instrument, yet the focus was always on a collaborative result that would reflect heretofore undiscovered possibilities within a familiar post-bop idiom. The individual solo voices, ensemble work and superior audio compare favorably with trumpeter Miles Davis' contemporaneous quintets recorded on Columbia. In short, the Counce recordings represent a high-water mark in jazz on either coast during the mid to late 1950s, a golden moment deserving inclusion in the most selective proverbial time capsule. Continue

Bill Evans Trio
Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Riverside
2007

This Keepnews Collection remaster/reissue of a 1958 recording is welcome if only as a reminder of Bill Evans' trio playing before the period of the celebrated Village Vanguard Sessions (Riverside, 1961). Instead of near-equal interaction by all three trio members, a supportive team of drummer Philly Joe Jones and bassist Sam Jones provides a non-intrusive backdrop for the featured performer, whose inventions are cast into bolder relief than ever. The silent spaces in the ballads are stark, inviting the listener to supply the missing thought or feeling evoked by the pianist's pure conceptions; the accompaniment on the up-tempo tunes is a non-obtrusive temporal flow, leaving the floor wide open to the graceful moves of the featured performer...Continue

Sonny Stitt
Tune Up! + Constellation
Gambit
2007

For the better part of the new milennium these two 1972 dates have been the most sought-after Stitt recordings, bringing premium collectors' prices for the out-of-print single-CD compilation of both sessions, Endgame Brilliance. Though still not available domestically, this latest compilation can be ordered directly from the Spanish distributor, with liner notes (in English) written for this new 2007 edition. These were the recordings that opened the eyes of many critics and jazz followers who didn't know what some of us apparently did: that Stitt had been Bird and more in the mid to late '40s—the complete saxophonist, formidable pyrotechnician, master of the vocabulary of bebop on all three horns—and that he was still capable of playing that way if not better. Continue

Monty Alexander Trio
We\'ve Only Just Begun
Universal
2006

Pure and simple, the hardest swinging session on record. Of course, what Duke Ellington meant by his famous criterion concerning swing is as debatable as Louis Armstrong\'s evasive definition of jazz. But if the listener's idea of "swing" goes beyond time-keeping, or a synchronized pulse, or an empathetic "vibe," or even a forceful drive, and insists rather on the presence of a deep and unshakeable "groove," this Monty Alexander on-location trio session, captured at a Buffalo, New York motel on December 1, 1971, must stand at the head of the class....Continue

Gene Ammons
Boss Tenor
Prestige Records
2006