The long-forgotten ‘Both Directions at Once, The Lost Album’ is nonetheless as gratifying as many other John Coltrane albums from the Impulse! era; indeed, it holds its own against the entire, history-making discography.

The all-originals ‘Ours’ and all-covers ‘Theirs’ are both bulls eyes from Thumbscrew and a strong way to persuade the quality label Cuneiform to not give up the fight.

David Ake puts decades of experience behind ‘Humanities,’ creating what will certainly be one of the best mainstream jazz releases of the year.

You won’t gain any academic knowledge about the human heart from listening to ‘Heart Tonic,’ but it’s clear Caroline Davis invested all of hers.

You know that great musicianship and creativity are always in store for Avi Granite 6’s strong return but little else can be anticipated, and that’s the main joy of ‘Orbit.’

It was easy to find jazz records that deserved a year-end salute; maybe ‘too’ easy. The heavy lifting came from figuring out which stood above the rest for this Best of 2017 list.

Varied, inviting, unpredictable but never jarring, the Mark Zaleski Band’s ‘Days, Months, Years’ is anything but boring.

Rez Abbasi and his potent Invocation band have demonstrated with ‘Unfiltered Universe’ that creativity and originality is more than just ideas and knowledge, it’s about vision.

Jason Stein’s ‘Lucille!’ is another fun-filled jazz history lesson on the connection between Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.

DuBois’s desire to blur the lines between creative jazz, chamber music and folk forms is a quest others before him have taken on, but the challenge of putting it all together both coherently and provocatively is where many have fallen short. Not so with ‘Autumn Wind,’ it excels at that.