It's the end of the year, the time for best-of lists. Here's my top-10 CDs of 2006 for the Boston Globe. The full spread with all my colleagues' picks is here.
1. Ali Farka Touré, "Savane." Knowing he was terminally ill, the undisputed master of Malian guitar blues came out of Niafunké, his remote village on the Niger river, to record one last album. Even without the poignant context, this may be his finest.
2. Patricia Barber, "Mythologies." Tales from Ovid liberally reimagined by the Chicago pianist and singer, who infuses both music and lyrics with a contemporary edge that's at once witty and empathetic. A work of deep intelligence and no small beauty.
3. Kekele, "Kinavana." The Congolese supergroup Kekele curates a remembrance of the 1950s, when rumba crossed back from Cuba to Congo, birthing one of the richest traditions in world music today. Brimming with joy and seemingly effortless.
4. Mina Agossi, "Well You Needn't." Backed by just drums and bass, the Paris-based, French-African singer distills standards and her own quirky compositions to a rhythmic rare essence. A powerful stage presence, she makes deconstruction funky.
5. Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra, "Boulevard de l'Indépendance." The kora, West Africa's 21-string lute, in all its glory: performed by its finest living master, fronting a phenomenal and unusually large band of Malian string, percussion, and horn aces. A landmark, and a party.
6. Heather Headley, "In My Mind." A striver's ethic pervades in Headley's songs of love, loss, and spirituality; this is grown-folks R&B the way it should be, impeccably produced, unapologetically mainstream, and delivered in a voice to fall in love with.
7. Cassandra Wilson, "Thunderbird." Working with T-Bone Burnett, Wilson traverses the artificial boundaries of jazz and blues to take on big-sky, open-road Americana. The wind and the prairie suit her well; the album has real drive but each song leaves a trace.
8. Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri, "Simpático." Latin jazz shorn of gimmicks or stereotypes. Trumpeter Lynch has one foot in the Latin school and one in the post-bop tradition; he lends this generally smoking set angularity, melancholy, and the thrill of the unexpected.
9. Kudu, "Death of the Party." Organically grown in the East Village underground, Kudu represents the best of the global wave of joyously bitchy electro-pop, in which wildly divergent musical references are incorporated into a restless collage.
10. Sean Jones, "Roots." As consummate an exploration of the gospel side of jazz as we've heard in years, and a strong statement of intent from a young New Orleans-raised trumpeter who's been anointed by no less an authority than Wynton Marsalis.
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