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When I was putting together my best jazz albums of 2012 article, Ivo Perelman's productive year had him dominating the list, so I made him artist of the year and then compiled a separate top ten of new recordings and a top five of older recordings mostly given their first releases this year. There were still plenty of excellent jazz albums to choose from. Jazz isn't dead, it just has to live on a fixed income.

Artist of the Year: Ivo Perelman

Brazilian tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman's album The Hour of the Star was #18 on my Best New Jazz of 2011 list. He was just warming up for an amazing 2012 in which Leo Records released six -- Six!!! -- Perelman CDs. All of them are excellent (and none of them, alas, are on iTunes yet).

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Gerald Cleaver The Foreign Legion Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/Whit Dickey The Clairvoyant...

Gil Evans, perhaps the second-greatest arranger in jazz after Duke Ellington, was born Ian Ernest Gilmore Green on May 13, 1912 in Toronto, Canada (Evans was his stepfather's name). Though best known for his collaborations with Miles Davis, Evans released many great albums as a bandleader and created a highly influential style that changed the course of jazz history.

Though self-taught, by age 21 Evans was leading a big band that became the house group at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach. Eventually it was fronted and then led by singer Skinnay Ennis, and Claude Thornhill joined Evans in providing arrangements for them. Thornhill then moved to New York to start his own band, and in 1941 invited Evans to New York to write arrangements. Soon Evans's arrangements with their lush, hazy, floating textures defined the Thornhill style.

Though theoretically a swing band, the Thornhill ensemble was one of the most progressive big bands of its time,...

"Just learned, Robin Wood has died," Jaime posted at Dave Kehr's site yesterday evening. "I can't think of anything else to say, except that the loss hurts, a lot. What a wonderful mind."

Anecdotes and appreciations have followed in the ensuing hours. "He and Andrew Sarris were my role models when I started writing film criticism," posts Joseph McBride, "and they remain my two idols in the field. Robin wrote brilliantly and in great intellectual depth and with a brave candor and passion. He showed us all the way to write about films seriously and with the kind of scholarly involvement that characterized the work of the great literary critics who paved his way before film criticism became a true scholarly field. Robin was one of the few auteurists who weathered the structuralist storm by accomodating its insights while not succumbing to its jargon or conformism. His work was actually strengthened by that challenge.