Patrick Jarenwattananon

The electric guitarist left college about 40 years ago, and judging from the success of his career, it wasn't a bad decision. Berklee welcomes Scofield back to perform new tunes and old repertoire.

The New Year's Eve party at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola featured two institutions of New York jazz. They count down to midnight with their interpretations of Louis Armstrong.

The legendary trumpeter was in good spirits and excellent form as 1989 became 1990. In this archival Toast of the Nation concert, he leads a band in a program of favorites.

The jazz orchestra, brassy and slick, powers through Goodwin's charts from the main stage of the historic festival. Included is a performance of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

This year, the most popular records made by young jazz musicians reflected hip-hop, R&B and the black community where they came from. When they broke through, they made an ongoing conversation about jazz's place in popular music more visible.

NPR Music has an annual tradition: Invite some of the world's best jazz keyboard players to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, then set them loose on their favorite holiday tunes.

There's a certain intensity of spirit in jazz and improvised music, to the point where it occasionally aligns with religious worship. Of course, sometimes jazz musicians just like playing familiar songs. Here are five records, all from 2012, which run the gamut of Christmas jazz.

In the liner notes to his 2012 trio album Accelerando, the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer wrote: "[T]his album is in the lineage of American creative music based on dance rhythms." Dancing in rhythm and exemplifying creativity, here are 10 records which belong to that great lineage.

Take a group of heavyweight jazz masters — the kind who helped to make the classic records that defined the modern idiom — and put them together on stage: Of course there'll be fireworks. After five years, they've cohered as a band too. The Cookers lift off in loose assembly.

The late pianist and composer never tired of playing his greatest hits. But both before and after his seminal 1959 album Time Out, Brubeck took his craft to college kids, to churches, to musicals, to social-justice concerns and to the imaginations of countless new jazz fans.