When the world economy entered into a tailspin this year, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner dubbed the event the "Jazz Effect" given that it emanated from the United States (she was drawing a parallel, for example, to the 1994 "Tequila Effect" that followed a botched currency devaluation in Mexico). I was so happy that a foreign leader would use "jazz" as a shorthand for "made in America," that I wrote a little editorial in El Clarin, a Buenos Aires daily. I also noted, for reasons I won't go into here, that the causes of the current crisis, though certainly American-born and bred, are most un-jazz-like.

I might also have added that jazz, though still ineluctably tied to the United States and its history, has never looked more international. My personal picks for the year feature musicians from Fernández de Kirchner's own country, as well as France, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Mali, Norway, Senegal, Scotland and South India. And, for good measure, Memphis, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago's South Side.

As always, I cannot claim these are the best records of the year, given the haphazard process by which I hear new releases. I'm not even sure they're the best records I heard this year. But these are nevertheless records I would enthusiastically share with you if you were to drop by my place. In that spirit, then, here are my picks for 2008 (in alphabetical order).

Arild Andersen
Live at Belleville
ECM Records

The highlight is a forty-minute suite celebrating the centenary of Norway's independence from the yolk of Swedish subjugation—seriously. That the music is so consistently intelligent and passionate is a tribute to all three members of the trio, but particularly saxophonist Tommy Smith.

Anthony Braxton
The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton
Mosaic Records

Culled from no fewer than nine LPs recorded in the mid- to late-1970s, including two double albums and one three-record set, most never before available on compact disc—this would be the cornerstone of any other artist's career. For the dizzyingly productive Braxton, even an achievement on this scale is dwarfed but the totality of his oeuvre—so far. Breathtakingly varied, this music is astonishing in the consistently high degree of its imagination and innovation.

Pierre Briançon
San Quentin Jazz Band
Grasset

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a California prison housed alto saxophonists Art Pepper and Frank Morgan, as well as lesser-known jazz musicians. French journalist Pierre Briançon uses this historical fact as the jumping-off point for an informative rumination on American mid-century jazz, but also race, drugs and drug laws, changing ideas about rehabilitation of criminals (a forward-looking warden promoted concerts, musical composition contests), much of it gleaned from the archives of the prison's remarkable in-house newspaper. Provides another chapter in the history of the jazz musician as the emblematic twentieth-century version of what Rimbaud called the poète maudit.

Guillaume de Chassy
Faraway So Close
Bee Jazz

This record by the gifted de Chassy, a pianist who might loosely be affiliated with the Paul Bley school of playing, would be included in this list on the merits of its opening track alone: a pathos- laden cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." But there is much more besides.

Al Green
Lay It Down
Blue Note Records

Long after his 1970s heyday, the greatest soul singer of all time sounds better than ever, accompanied by a crack neo-Memphian band convened by ?uestlove of the Roots. And there are even hints of his eccentricity: "Smokestacks on your love/ Outside my window pane," he sings on one of the cuts. Enough said.

Guillermo Klein y los Guachos
Filtros
Sunnyside Records

Truly marvelous large-ensemble jazz in the vein of Maria Schneider—which is to say, in the vein of Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, thoroughly updated for the new millennium. The Argentine Klein's all-star guachos ("bastards") disprove decisively his president's exclusive association of jazz with the United States, though many of the bastards herein are American. Includes especially fine turns by guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonists Miguel Zenon and Chris Cheek.

Rudresh Mahanthappa with Kadri Gopalnath
Kinsmen
Pi Recordings

Saxophone wunderkind Mahanthappa guilelessly fuses his intelligent post-bop jazz with the South Indian classical Karnatic tradition, in the person of Gopalnath, the "king of the Indian saxophone." The empathy and sympathy among the players in the Indo-American band ably symbolize the degree of fusion and collaboration: it's jazz, and it's Karnatic, all the time. The solos—from the leaders, but also guitarist Rez Abassi and violinist A. Kanyakumari, are thrilling.