Francis Davis organized a Jazz Critics Poll in 2006, in The Village Voice, supplementing his own end-of-year list with top-tens from 29 other journalists. Davis kept the Poll going through the 16th Annual Jazz Critics Poll in 2021, with input from 156 distinguished journalists and critics.
Since 2022, the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll has been managed by Tom Hull, who wrote The Village Voice's Jazz Consumer Guide from 2005-2011, and continues to review jazz-and-more albums on his blog. Hull has hosted the critic ballots and complete results since 2009, and has helped Davis manage the Poll for many years.
The Poll has had various sponsors over the years. The sponsor for this year, and since 2021, is Arts Fuse. Results and essays will be published the first week of January, 2024. (Last year's Poll appeared on January, 6, 2023.) As always, complete results and ballots are available below. Invites will go out the week of November 15, with a deadline of December 15.
One change to the website as of 2023 is that album titles in the complete results and ballots files have a link (look for →) which will print out a list of everyone who voted for the album. From there, you can get to the ballots for each voter.
The following pieces were published in Arts Fuse:
Some pieces are also archived locally:
The 159 voter ballots are presented in batches of 20 ballots:
The complete list of voting critics, with links to individual ballots, is here.
Methodology
Voters were asked to submit choices for their top 10 new releases in descending order. Points were weighted by preference: 10 for 1st place, 9 for 2nd place, etc., down to 1 for 10th place. Albums on unranked lists were awarded 5.5 points each.
Voters also submitted their top three reissues/historical recordings -- scored 3-2-1, or 2 each for unranked lists -- and their choices for the year's best vocal, debut and Latin jazz albums. To be eligible for reissues/historical, an album had to either have reissued music or previously unreleased music that had been recorded ten years or more ago. Every year some critics get confused on this and vote for a few records in the wrong category.
Critics were asked to refrain from voting for any CD in which they were directly involved as performer, producer, annotator, or in any capacity whatsoever.
Additional Notes
Notes for Voters: We've written up some additional notes to help voters, especially where questions may arise on definitions, including album eligibility. This information is not classified "top secret," but is probably uninteresting unless you have been invited to vote.
There is also a FAQ, which like all such is a work in perpetual progress.
We should establish a contact link here. Until then, you may use this one, which will reach Tom Hull.