1. Greg Osby, Symbols of Light (A Solution) (Blue Note). Osby has been coming on for a while as the alto player in the progressive wing of the jazz mainstream, but this album is a benchmark for his writing and arranging. Augmenting the standard jazz quartet (horn, piano, bass, drums) with a standard classical string quartet (two violins, viola, cello), Osby fashioned multi-part, multi-section pieces that refresh themselves with variety and constant narrative development. And, yes, it swings.

2. Joshua Redman, Passage of Time (Warner Bros.). Not even Redman’s 1995 live double CD has done as good a job of capturing his quartet’s ability to generate spontaneous long dramatic arcs of music in concert. Arranged as a suite, with recurring motifs, the album surges and breathes from track to track, with all the players (Redman, playing only tenor here, along with pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Gregory Hutchinson) quickly picking up on one another’s moves, and Redman’s writing providing plenty of rich, spiraling melodies. There’s life yet in the mainstream quartet.

3. Mat Maneri, Trinity and Blessed (ECM). The vanguard’s most promising voice on any instrument, violinist Maneri released the brand-new solo CD Trinity and also Blessed (which had been delayed while ECM worked out its distribution hassles), a series of duets with his father, reed player/pianist/composer/NEC professor Joe Maneri. Matt has absorbed not only jazz but the Middle Eastern folk musics and microtonal scales that are his father’s stock-in-trade and fused them into an integral, personal sound rich in tone and moment-to-moment details, his speech-like phrasing inflected with spidery multi-note runs and rhythmically charged double stops and pluckings. Blessed evinces the kind of simpatía you’d expect from this father-son team, but the solo-violin Trinity is the standout — improvised pieces guided by the Bach-like formality that inspired them.

4. Eventuality: The Charlie Kohlhase Quintet Plays the Music of Roswell Rudd (nada). Earlier in his career, Boston stalwart Kohlhase studied with Rudd, and here he returns the favor, paying tribute to the 66-year-old trombonist/composer and avant-garde progenitor with this album of Rudd originals. Of course, Rudd continues to pay dividends by bringing his big, brawny, joyous horn to the festivities. As for the music: "I wanted to have deep melody with angular intervals on either side of some Dixieland," Rudd writes of one tune, and that pretty much gives you a feel for a project that was deep indeed and resulted in one of the most moving club performances of the year, at the Regattabar, on the evening of September 11.

5. William Parker Quartet, O’Neal’s Porch (Centering Records). Bassist Parker is a light of the downtown New York improvising scene who’s known in part for his work anchoring groups by frequent collaborators David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp. Here he leads a "piano-less" quartet that can’t help recalling the haunting spareness and rootsy swing of the original Ornette Coleman quartet. But Parker’s horns have their own sound: Lewis Barne’s rich, chocolaty trumpet and Rob Brown’s massive alto saxophone create orchestral effects as their lines dance around each other while Parker and drummer Hamid Drake push the grooves.

6. Bill Frisell, Blues Dream and Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones (Nonesuch). Frisell’s blend of folk, country, rock, and jazz, combined with his layered electric sound, has become sui generis — a kind of Frisell Americana, whose expansive landscapes he conjures with his broad harmonies. And it’s an Americana that remains recognizable as his whether he’s working with deep-jazz guys like Holland and Jones or the mixed crew on Blues Dream. The latter may be his strongest album yet — you might think that Bubber Miley had run into the Hank Williams band, or that Gil Evans was arranging for Ry Cooder instead of Miles, what with those cloud-formations of brass and reeds hanging in a flat-prairie sky.

7. Joe Lovano, Flights of Fancy: Trio Fascination Edition Two (Blue Note). At 50, much-lauded multi-reed man Lovano is supposed to be slipping into comfortable middle age, recording all-star "concept" albums geared for the charts. He does have the concepts, and the stars, but he’s still doing whatever he damn well pleases. So on Flights of Fancy he shuffles a deck of four trios — which means he can be whispering sweet nothings with septuagenarian Belgian harmonica sweetie Toots Thielemans and pianist Kenny Werner one minute, then sailing off on reveries of abstraction with trumpeter Dave Douglas and bassist Mark Dresser the next. No jazz album I heard this year offered more variety, invention, or soul.

8. Jim Hall & Basses (Telarc). At 71, Jim Hall, the dean of jazz guitarists, continues to scare the pants off players half his age. Here his 12-string "country" sound outdoes Bill Frisell at his own game ("End the Beguine!"), his chorusing and harmonics go farther "out" than anything by Frisell or Pat Metheny ("Abstract 1"), and he can still wring uncommon detail out of clean, barely amplified notes and straight chord changes on a standard like "All the Things You Are." And the basses on this mostly duets CD — Dave Holland, George Mraz, Charlie Haden, Christian McBride, Scott Colley — give him plenty to chew on.

9. ICP Orchestra, Oh, My Dog! (ICP). What ICP does — under the conjoined leadership of pianist/composer Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink — is now being called "New Dutch Swing." Which means Ellington rubbing shoulders with European oom-pah beer-garden music, 12-tone abstraction running into bebop and Monk. The ICPs, now a nonet with the addition of violinist Mary Oliver, are stronger and more varied than ever. The Boston Creative Music Alliance hosted their Boston visit in November, one replete with theatrical high jinks, high energy, humor, and loving dedication.

10. Henry Threadgill & Make a Move, Everybodys Mouth’s a Book; Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Up Popped the Two Lips (Pi). In the course of his four-decade career, Threadgill has absorbed and mastered one influence after another — bebop, R&B, ragtime, New Orleans parade music, Indian and other "world" influences, the serialism of 20th-century "classical" — even as he’s covered his tracks. What exactly to call his latest ensembles? Make a Move pick up where he left off with his last Columbia recording five years ago: Threadgill’s alto sax and flute, with vibes or marimba, acoustic or electric guitar, bass, and trap drums. Zooid combines Henry with acoustic guitar, oud, tuba, cello, drums. The music on both albums throbs with a firm, dancelike bottom, as Threadgill’s alternating long lines and staccato riffs surge with a mix of joy and melancholy.