Items from 40 people Clay Burell follows

If anything, today's jazz boasts a surfeit of excellent stylists who can speak to that splintering pop audience: pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn are both brilliant, though in nearly opposite ways. Iyer is a sometimes cerebral, always impressive player of tunes, whether they be those of Stevie Wonder and M.I.A., or his own compositions (all are featured on the new album Historicity). Taborn is an enthusiastic free-form player, both on his own extended-jam albums like Junk Magic and when playing as part of the exciting, electric-based Chris Potter Underground. Two highlights from 2009—Steve Lehman's Travail, Transformation, and Flow and Stefon Harris's Urbanus—each kicked up a big ol' time by embracing avant-classical sounds and hip-hop sensibilities. Along with Urbanus, John Hollenbeck's bold album for his big band, Eternal Interlude, recently notched a progressive-minded nomination from Grammy voters.

real time is how jazz is best experienced. Like baseball—another great American invention—part of jazz's appeal is in how it unspools without deference to the clock. Just as drama asks for suspension of our disbelief, jazz asks us for the suspension of our need to program our every moment. Meantime, our contemporary mania for abbreviated text updates—think Twitter, Facebook, and BlackBerrys—feels as if it stands in direct opposition to jazz's deliberate, instrumental abstractions. Enjoying the music—really swinging with it—is a glorious sacrifice of the need to micro-manage the moment.

We've lost 7.2 million jobs, and unemployment in November was 10 percent. For African-Americans, the rate was 15.6 percent, and more than one in four teens are out of work. Economists believe the unemployment rate will persist at 10 percent through 2010. After the previous recession ended in November 2001, companies slashed payrolls for 17 of the next 21 months.