MY RECORD of the year is the reissue of the marvellous Joe Harriott Swings High (Cadillac Records), originally released in 1967 and created in a session held at, according to Harriott’s longtime Jamaican bass confrere Coleridge Goode, “a pokey little independent studio somewhere in East London.”

Goode continued: “Joe plays so fiercely that at times it seems as though he’s about to blow his alto apart.”

Hear his searing choruses on The Rake or Blues in C, but he plays with a beautiful lyricism too — alongside trumpeter Stu Hamer on A Time for Love, or as the lone horn on Polka Dots and Moonbeams.

This was an era of rampant street racism, perhaps a motivation for Harriott’s sonic ferocity. Burton-on-Trent’s master drummer Phil Seamen and pianist Pat Smythe are fully attuned too and play with a powerful empathy. It’s a very moving revival: sounds of its time and for our times too.

Take 15 endangered species and 11 powerful jazz virtuosi and create a record which campaigns for the species’ survival.

“My hope is that Red List (Palmetto Records) will help to facilitate critical yet uncomfortable conversations about changing our global habit of destroying nature for our own gain,” writes project instigator, composer and baritone saxophonist Brian Landrus.

From African Elephant to Mariana Dove, Javan Rhino to Vaquita, the notes pound, lyricise, create melody and improvise for the very future of Earth’s life.

Hearken to ex-Jazz Messenger Geoffrey Keezer’s urgent piano message on Canopy of Trees, Landrus’s committed horn and Rudy Royston’s urgent drums on the title track, altoist Jaleel Shaw’s worrisome testimony on Tigris or bassist Lonnie Plaxico’s tortured solo on Only Eight.

“Before we’d track the music we’d have a conversation about each animal,” asserts Landrus. A potent album this, with music and earthly survival locked together in beauty and defiance.

Boyhood memories of my first African hero came tumbling back as I listened to the evocative title track of the album Lumumba (Intakt Records). Led by the Swiss drummer Clemens Kuratle, his band consists of Irish guitarist Chris Guilfoyle, two English musicians — saxophonist Dee Byrne and pianist Elliot Galvin — and fellow Swiss bassist Lukas Traxel.

The heart of Europe is here, expressing the 1961 tragedy of Africa, when Congo’s Lumumba was murdered with full European connivance. “I realised what eurocentrism meant then,” says composer Kuratle, and the band plays with new European unity and hope, all through tracks like Marvelling, with some reflectively inventive Galvin and Byrne, and Guilfoyle’s awakening solo on They Haven’t Learned Anything.

Collin Sekajugo’s affectingly beautiful sleeve art, pictured, empathises with the music and the entire record is both a tribute to African heroism and a condemnation of imperial atrocity. Get hold of it for it is as much now as it is then.

In his sleeve notes to the first release of their 1989 duo performance The Art is in the Rhythm (Jazz in Britain Records), the great Yorkshire-born alto saxophonist Trevor Watts remembers his first encounters with the Irish drummer Liam Genockey and how they were “both into the rhythmic side of the music in a big way,” but with different rhythmic perspectives.

Watts has always responded to powerful drummers, whether it was his early partner in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, John Stevens, or the brilliant Ghanaian percussionists of Moire Music, but his ripostes to Genockey’s thumping Irish rhythms are startlingly innovative, as in the maze of hornsound of Rhythmic Variants.

In the other tracks, Echoes of Bird and Dedicated to Eric D, the duo salute Parker and Dolphy respectively with inspired rhythmic union. As Genockey scuttles, crackles, rumbles and booms, Watts’s alto sings, trills, swirls and peals in a uniquely cogent recording.