There can be no doubt that 2020 was a horrible year for the jazz community. And yet on some levels it was an excellent year for jazz. Not that we were able to experience it in many of our customary ways, as clubs and theaters closed and festivals canceled their programs. But on disc and online, musicians kept on creating and releasing music, and much of it was great. As the year draws to a close (at last), we’d like to know what you thought was best of all. So please vote in the 2020 JazzTimes Readers’ Poll, which is open until Thursday, January 7. Directions are below, and the final results will appear on our website and in our March issue.
If you’ve voted in our year-end poll before, you may notice a couple of changes this time around. The biggest is this: There are no Best Jazz Festival or Best Jazz Club categories. Although festivals and clubs did operate during the first three months of the year, and some valiantly continued on as best they could in subsequent months, the entire field was clearly handicapped and thus it seemed unfair to single anyone out. We did weigh the idea of adding new poll categories to reflect the rapid proliferation of online events this year, both one-offs and series, but in the end we decided to leave those events out and devote a separate poll to them; look for that in the New Year.
This year more than ever, we are grateful to all of our readers for helping to keep JazzTimes, the jazz community, and the music itself going. Let’s all hope for a better 2021.
