E-Mail This Article to a Friend Inside, outside, and all around Here’s the year, summarized in discs I heard and shows I went to, arranged alphabetically by artist. BY JON GARELICK

1) Art Ensemble of Chicago, Tribute to Lester (ECM) and The Meeting (Pi)

The great forebears of the post-bop, pre-Wynton sound of free-jazz formalism came back, by turns ruminative and ferocious. They recorded prolifically for ECM in the ’80s, then went to the Japanese DIW label in the ’90s, then took a break from their relentless touring. Saxophonist Joseph Jarman left the band; in 1999, the great trumpeter Lester Bowie died. The Meeting finds Jarman rejoining the group, and Tribute finds them back on ECM, where Roscoe Mitchell — with just bassist Malachi Favors Moghostut and drummer Famoudou Don Moye — plays a series of continuous-breathing, burning solos that re-establish his authority as a saxophonist and make it clear why this music was so important in the first place.

2) Guaranteed Swahili

This is a "pianoless" quartet that draws from the best of that sort, whether it’s Mulligan with Baker or early Ornette. At times, brainy alto-saxophonist/composer Eric Rasmussen mixes knuckle-busting polymetric compositions (sometimes with a meter change in every bar) that are also harmonically ambiguous, especially when he and tenor-saxophonist Jason Hunter do their Konitz/Marsh thing. When Rasmussen just picks one odd meter and sticks with it, Hunter, bassist Tim Luntzel, and drummer Eric Thompson explode. They did at the Regattabar back in February. All but Hunter now live in New York, but maybe they’ll keep it happening.

3) Charles Lloyd, Lift Every Voice (ECM)

In the ’60s, Lloyd was the first of the post-bop jazz-pop stars, joining the psychedelic-rock circuit a good couple of years ahead of Miles Davis. After a years-long hiatus during which he practiced transcendental meditation, Lloyd returned to recording and touring, joined the ECM roster, and began turning out one album after another that combined his Coltrane-ish fervor with his own brand of folk mysticism and his beautiful flute playing. The double-CD Lift Every Voice shows him in good form (with pianist Geri Allen, guitarist John Abercrombie, bassists Larry Grenadier and Marc Johnson, and drummer Billy Hart). And so did a Scullers show last January. A good bit of his old charisma is also visible in his 1985 performance with pianist Michel Petrucciani in Blue Note’s recent DVD reissue of One Night with Blue Note.

4) Jazz Composers Alliance

After a recording drought of several years, the JCA, which was founded in 1985, celebrated the release of three new CDs: In, Thru & Out (Cadence), featuring work by Darrell Katz, Laura Andel, David Harris, and Warren Senders; Katz’s "jazz cantata" The Death of Simone Weil (Innova); and Andel’s Somnambulist (Red Toucan). There’s an impressive variety of textures, colors, and rhythm in all of the JCA’s collaborations, but it’s never attempted anything like Katz’s Simone Weil. More than an hour long, with a text by Katz’s wife, the poet Paula Tatarunis, this work is eerie and moving, and even swinging. Rebecca Shrimpton sings the lucidly set text.

5) Marsalis, Marsalis, and Marsalis

Yeah, I hate ’em too. Except when I’m listening to them, or for that matter talking with them. In March, patriarch Ellis, then 68, led a quartet at Symphony Hall that included Branford, 42, Wynton, 41, trombonist Delfeayo, 37, and drummer Jason, 26, celebrating the release of The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration (Marsalis Music/Rounder). And you know what? That show was real good. So was the Boston premiere of Wynton’s mixed-genre oratorio, All Rise, with Kurt Masur, the BSO, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, at Symphony Hall on December 5.

6) Kurt Rosenwinkel, Heartcore (Verve)

Guitarist Rosenwinkel’s third CD for major label Verve is a mix of pop accessibility and lyric introspection. The odd, distinctive phrasing is still here, as well as the harmonic reach, but he’s working with hookier melodic themes and grounding them in layers of electronic and acoustic percussion. Although the music itself bears only a scant resemblance, Heartcore at times recalls Weather Report in its blend of pop ideas with jazz density. Rosenwinkel likes to sing along wordlessly to his themes, and he and saxophonist Mark Turner can complicate things quickly while maintaining a beautiful transparency.

7) ScLoHoFo, Oh! (Verve)

It’s easy to take these four masters — John Scofield, Joe Lovano, Dave Holland, and All Foster — for granted and assume that this recording is going to be a look-ma-no-hands blowing session. But each player brings every ounce of himself to the task — these are all original tunes, no standards, and there’s not a toss-off in the bunch. Bop, ballads, bossa, and free jazz are all represented. The convenient group name also allows me to give a couple of cheers for Scofield’s latest überjam outing, Up All Night (Verve), which displays his usual tunesmanship and humor, and for Lovano, whose return to the nonet format yielded On This Day . . . at the Vanguard (Blue Note). One reason Lovano’s playing is so good is that he writes so well. But you knew that.

8) John Tchicai

The Danish-born Tchicai has become something of a paternal guiding spirit to the Either/Orchestra–Charlie Kohlhase–leaning axis of the Boston scene. He hooked up with the E/O’s in 1992, played a concert with them in 1993 at the ICA, then recorded Life Overflowing (Nada) with Kohlhase. A cosmopolitan mix of European, African, and American free-jazz influences (he played, most famously, on John Coltrane’s Ascension), Tchicai was in fine form again when he led the E/O’s in a program of his own pieces at a Boston Creative Music Alliance Concert at the ICA last February. I was sorry I couldn’t make a Kohlhase meeting with Tchicai and guitarist Garrison Fewell later in the year at the Artists-at-Large Gallery in Hyde Park.

9) Doug Wamble, Country Libations (Marsalis Music/Rounder)

The debut of the year came from this 30-year-old Tennessee-born singer/composer/guitarist (who’s married to classical mezzo-soprano Janna Baty — see "Most noble effort" in Lloyd Schwartz’s "Classical" year-end wrap-up), and he sounds thrilled to be here. Raw talent spills over the edges of every track in both his robust vocals and his raw, unamplified, acoustic-guitar sound. It’s a genre-mixing affair that crosses gospel, country, and blues but delivers them with a clear jazz feeling. The improvisations are as surprising as anything on the album, Wamble’s guitar conjuring Ornette Coleman as much as Django Reinhardt.

10) Randy Weston

Maybe the most sublime show I heard this year came from Randy Weston, the great Brooklyn-born pianist whose explorations of African music have provided lessons for a generation. Following a set of his music by the Boston Jazz Reparatory Orchestra last June as part of the Equinox Music Festival, the 77-year-old Weston took to the stage of Dorchester’s Strand Theatre alone, alternating music with commentary — his life story, really. He played tunes from all over his book, his gentle, left-hand ostinatos grounding blues-based melodies, Monkish cramped intervals, dissonant chords, and West African zither treble figures. And Mosaic issued a three-CD set of his ’60s recordings that provided a revealing look at his evolution.