Tim Mah's Recommended Canadian Jazz Albums of 2025

Four on the Floor jazz correspondent Tim Mah is back once again to offer his extensive annual year-end list of music released by Canadian jazz artists over the course of the past year 2025.

As previous years, there continues to be lots of great music coming out of Canada these days and, unfortunately, a lot of it goes under the radar. Tim is an informed advocate for new Canadian jazz music and he has a taken a great deal of time and effort to give us a perspective on the current state of jazz music happening today across our country.

Check out Tim's weekly radio program Jazz Today which can be heard on CJSW Radio 90.9 fm (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) on Thursday mornings from 530-7am MST. It is also streamed on the CJSW website and available through Apple and Google podcasts and the CJSW mobile streaming app. 

Hopefully you'll see and listen to some new Canadian jazz music you weren't familiar with. 

Thanks again Tim!

Tim Mah's Recommended Canadian Jazz Albums of 2025:

Recently, the Globe and Mail newspaper published an article which reported that Canadians streamed three billion songs for the week of December 15, 2025. Nearly 15 million Canadians subscribe to music streaming platforms.

After reading this article, I recalled Liz Pelly’s book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” that was published in January. The book “takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed, as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.”

It was fascinating to learn about how the system is geared towards generating anonymous background music, that immense amounts of personal data are harvested and sold to advertisers, and how mood-based playlists and the algorithmic music recommendation systems are designed to “reduce the cognitive work that the user has to do when they open the platform.” Furthermore, “ghost artists” and artificial intelligence generated music are populating many of these playlists.

I trust that the readers of this blog are active music listeners, who are not interested in “ghost artists” and artificial intelligence generated music. Rather, the readers are people who attend live performances and are curious about new music and artists.

Some of my live music highlights over the last year in Calgary were: 

• The Falling Bullets Jazz Band- a group of New Orleans musicians, led by trumpeter and vocalist Marla Dixon, who performed in the Decidedly Jazz Danceworks production “Call and Response”

• Makaya McCraven - during the Sled Island Music & Arts Festival

• Eric Chenaux Trio - part of the New Works Calgary season

• The Atlantic Jazz Collective - part of the BuckingJam Palace season

• Artemis - during the JazzYYC Summer Jazz Festival

Another significant book published this year was “Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (as told to Ethan Iverson).” Billy Hart defines swing as “a musical system that causes joy, euphoria, and optimism.” May you find music that brings you “joy, euphoria and optimism.”

There was an abundance of new releases this year. Below is a list (in no particular order) of favourite albums from Canadians (or co-released by Canadians), released between December 1, 2024 to November 30, 2025.

Nicola Miller “Living Things”

Renee Rosnes “Crossing Paths”

Laura Anglade “Get Out of Town”

Webber Morris Big Band “Unseparate”

Kate Wyatt “Murmurations”

Andrew Rathbun “Lost in the Shadows”

Nancy Walker “Deeper Down”

Mary Ancheta “Rituals”

Sarah Belle Reid (and Vinny Golia) “Accidental Ornithology”

Josh Cole “quartet + strings”

Dun-Dun Band “Pita Parka, Pt. II: Nim Edguf”

Eucalyptus “Topology of Time and Up Express Etc.”

Lina Allemano Four “The Diptychs”

Karen Ng “Backwards Blue”

Steph Richards (and Qasim Naqvi) “Miss America”

Ambre Ciel “still, there is the sea”

Jacob Chung “Live at Frankie’s Jazz Club”

David Occhipinti “Camera Lucida”

Atlantic Jazz Collective “Seascape”

Zack Lober “So We Could Live”

Ostara Project “Roots”

Aretha Tillotson “Kinda Out West”

Tommy Crane (and David Binney) “The Isle”

Curtis Nowosad “I Am Doing My Best”

Caity Gyorgy and Mark Limacher “Asking For Trouble” and “Caity Gyorgy With Strings”

Sanah Kadoura “The Ancestors”

Noah Franche-Nolan “Rose-Anna”

CODE Quartet “Code Red”

Devin Patten “The Afton Project, Vol. 1: between fading photographs”

JABFUNG (Julian Anderson-Bowes & Anthony Fung) “EPOCH”

stef.in (Stefan Hegerat) “Icterus II”

Nicolas Ferron “Multiverse”

Julie Hamelin “Chapitres”

Yoon Sun Choi (and Jacob Sacks) “Memory Ghosts”

Rich Brown “NYAEBA”

L’Oumigmag “Ce qui tourne dans l’air”

Michael Sarian “Esquina”

Rachel Therrien “Mi Hogar II”

Carlos Jimenez Quintet “Deja Vu”

Salin “Rammana”

Erin Rogers (and Kelsey Mines) “Scratching at the Surface”

Kneejerk “The Speed of Dark”

H ii Regions “II”

Kelly Jefferson (with Jon Cowherd) “Reunion”

Alexis Baro Y La Big Band “Afrokando”

Misc “Beat Bouquet”

Aaron Shragge “Cosmic Cliffs”

Alex Goodman “Good Morning Heartache”

Justin Gray “Immersed”