I originally wrote these notes as part of the piece on the Rara Avis (Reissues/Archival) totals.
Scanning down the list, I'd like to make several points (numbers in parentheses usually refer to position in the final standings):
Cecil Taylor (1, 12, 63): Long ago I had an epiphany that there were four major artists in the mid-to-late 1950s that broke the mold of bebop and paved the way for the 1960s avant-garde: George Russell, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor. Russell is way underappreciated, so for this discussion let's swap John Coltrane in. (His avant-garde period came later, and was built on the others, especially Russell.) There was something about those four that was amenable to more mainstream critics — e.g., Martin Williams included them in his The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, and all four sailed easily into the DownBeat Hall of Fame (again, Coltrane not Russell, for shame). Taylor always struck me as the most radical of the four, but he had that magic touch of making the unexpected seem right. (Coleman was the master at that, as was Monk within the bebop framework.)
Taylor previously won Rara Avis in 2022, for a 1973 concert tape similar to this year's winner. He hasn't placed often because his loose tapes usually turn up on very obscure labels. (Although his 1988 duo with Tony Oxley on Burning Ambulance did place 9 in 2025.) The only previous winner you would likely think of as avant is Anthony Braxton, whose big Mosaic box won in 2008. (Braxton's second best Rara Avis showing was 4 in 2025, also on Burning Ambulance.)
As I noted above, Taylor also placed 12 this mid-year, on a Polish label. I thought both albums were terrific, and actually favored the latter, but not by much. He also got one top vote, placing 63, for Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane: At Iridium 2004. Very likely this set will get more votes by year end: it only came out on July 3, and with 14 full hour-plus sets it's going to take a long time to sort through.
Joe Henderson (2): He won in 2024, sharing the credit with McCoy Tyner for a live set released on Blue Note. I thought this set was even more powerful, the best of this year's crop of Resonance/Elemental sets. Henderson also got 2 votes for Craft's reissue of Tetragon.
Roy Hargrove (3): This is his fourth posthumous tape since 2018, the previous ones placing 9-15-14. The two on Resonance got the most attention, but the others were more interesting, especially The Love Suite, recorded by Wynton Marsalis in 1993 and closeted until 2023, I suspect out of jealousy.
Julius Hemphill (5) + Marty Ehrlich (6): These records were my biggest surprises. Dogon A.D. was reissued in 2011 with an extra 20:07 track and came in at 2, so it wasn't clear why another reissue was needed (the new one also has the extra track, but reverts to the original album cover). The previously unreleased tape with Ehrlich was a rare archival venture on a label that seems marginal but got small votes for 12 albums (2 rara avis + 10 new) this Mid-Year. Also note that while Ehrlich got 2 votes for his new Cartographies of Flight, he has another album coming out in August called Open Air: The Complete Saxophone Quartet Compositions of Julius Hemphill (on Out of Your Head, which in 2025 released The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill, a surprise at 25, and which has 3 of the top 11 New Jazz Albums this Mid-Year).
Charles Tyler (6): Aside from Miles Davis and his protégés (including Keith Jarrett), jazz nearly died in the early 1970s, as labels chased fusion and bankruptcy, and musicians retreated to the lofts and Europe. One result is that there is a fair amount of early 1970s free and/or fringe jazz awaiting discovery. This is an example, as is Marion Brown at 9, and 2025's excitement over the Strata-East reissues.
Marion Brown (9): More famous than Tyler, even after the 1970s swept nearly everyone under. Notable here because the Lithuanian label NoBusiness has been trawling through Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea archives and coming up with much of interest. About half of what the label puts out is the rarest of Rara Avis, including notable free jazz from Japan. Their Sunny Murray & Sabu Toyozumi drum duo (38) hits all of those bases.
Art Pepper (10): Thanks to Laurie Pepper, he has dozens of posthumous live sets, some huge, nearly all extraordinary, but he hasn't figured in our top tens before. One difference here is that this dates from 1959, whereas most are from 1978-82. At 4-CD, it's the biggest box down to 30 (The Bottle Tapes and Mosaic's Classic V-Disc Big Band Jazz Sessions; Miles '56, at 19, is 4-LP). Big used to rise to the top in Rara Avis, but not this year.
Woody Shaw (13) - Buster Williams (25) - Joe Chambers (49): Time Traveler got some attention last year by announcing they'd be reissuing the Muse catalog, but they've been slow-walking the releases, possibly just going with vinyl. These three finished 13, 25, and 49. Given that Muse released over 500 albums from 1972-95, they have a lot of work to do.
Miles Davis (19): While Blue Note, Verve, and ECM continue to release more (and more obscure) albums on vinyl, Craft has been doing a bit more with the former Fantasy (now owned by Concord) catalog: they put their remasters out on digital, through streaming services, and often on CD, and sometimes they even repackage them, as they've done here: this follows Miles '55 with a lavish 4-LP box and a 3-CD option. I haven't bothered with this, because I have all the albums in older form, but: (1) they are all quick throwaways, recorded by his first Great Quintet to get out of their Prestige contract; and (2) they are some of the most magnificent hard bop recorded in the 1950s.
Mick Goodrick & Fred Hersch (20): After Keith Jarrett's stroke, ECM started scouring their old tape archives for unreleased material, initially by their best-selling artist, then they found albums by Ron Miles and Tomasz Stanko after their deaths. Goodrick (1945-2022) had only recorded one album for ECM — In Pas(s)ing, which got 1 vote for its vinyl this year — but this duo had been filed under the pianist, and found new purpose this year.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (23, 35): Two sets released by Resonance in 2025 got more votes. They were released on Nov. 28, but enough voters got a chance to hear them to place them 6 and 8. Add in their Mid-Year votes and they would have picked up a slot each, placing 5 and 7. The only other 2025 release to get multiple votes in both years is The Bottle Tapes, which tied for 30 this Mid-Year, on votes that in 2025 would have raised it from 14 to 12.
Thelonious Monk (27, 33): Every year a bunch of famous albums, steadily in print for decades, get a vote or a few (but never many) due to some new vinyl reissue. The highest-rated such album — I'm excluding long out-of-print labels like Muse and other rarities like the Hemphill and Tyler albums above, or Pierre Favre's Bird Food (20) — this year is Thelonious Alone in San Francisco. The runner-up is probably Motherland, by the Visitors (40). I quibble because while that album comes from the same major catalog, and is reissued by Craft, the Grubbs brothers are several orders of magnitude less famous than Monk. You can find another dozen or more albums like these toward the bottom of the list. You can be assured that when Coltrane's A Love Supreme and Ascension wind up tied at 113, most voters are more concerned with marginal utility than with absolute value.
The second Monk album on the list is a reclaimed bootleg, a 1967 concert that appeared in France in 1988 — I don't know about any specific legal arrangements, but that sort of thing happens a lot — and was reissued on the Monk Estate's Thelonious label in 2002, but now has been split into two volumes to press LPs.