Loudness Wars Has Found Jazz. Why?

Sounds familiar?

You got some new music. Excited, you settle in and hit play, and....

...something seems...

...off.

There's no better way to put it.

The music is there but it is just not opening up. It doesn't connect.

You turn the volume up, half expecting the room to expand but nothing. It stays exactly where it is. Dense, flat, the same intensity from the first bar to the last.

That is compression doing its work. And if you have been listening to new jazz releases over the past couple of years, you have been hearing it more and more often.

Sadly.

What compression takes from jazz specifically

Jazz is not like other genres when it comes to dynamics. The space between a pianist's left hand and right hand, the decay of a ride cymbal fading into silence, the moment a soloist drops to a whisper before the band comes back in, these are not incidental qualities. They are the music. They are what separates a jazz record from background sound.

A well-engineered jazz recording gives you a physical sense of the room. You hear where the instruments are. You hear air. You hear the difference between a note played softly and one played with intention. You hear the echo it leaves behind, too.

That spatial, dynamic quality is exactly what makes jazz uniquely rewarding on a serious system.

Compression flattens all of it. It raises the floor, lowers the ceiling, and turns a performance with shape and breath into a wall of sound at uniform intensity. On a genre built around space and restraint, that is not just a technical failing. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the music is.

The records making the case

This is not a theoretical concern. It is sitting in my library right now, across multiple recent releases from artists who deserve better.

Pat Metheny — Side-Eye III+. For a record built around an ensemble of guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, harp, accordion, percussion, and voices, the resulting wall of compressed sound leaves very little to enjoy. The instrumental lines blur into a dense mass. Individual parts become difficult to follow. Attacks lose their snap. Percussion and background voices disappear into the mix entirely.

There is one moment, toward the end of "In On It," where the drum kit suddenly cuts through with real clarity. For a few seconds the rhythm section gains definition and the groove tightens into focus. It is the sound of what this record could have been. Then the compression takes it back.

Dave Douglas — Four Freedoms sits at the less severe end of the spectrum, but the compression is still there and still noticeable.

Nils Wulkner — Zuversicht falls in similar territory to Douglas. Not catastrophic, but the dynamics are visibly constrained and the record suffers for it.

Stacey Kent — A Time for Love is where this stops being frustrating and becomes genuinely upsetting. The album is compressed so heavily that it is, for my ears, unlistenable as a sonic experience. This matters because the music on this record is phenomenal. Kent's voice, the writing, the performances, all of it deserved an engineer who treated the recording as something precious. Instead it sounds like someone ran it through a brick wall limiter and called it done. That a vocalist of Kent's calibre ends up buried under this kind of treatment is not just a waste. It is an embarrassment.

What these four records share is not a genre or an aesthetic. It is a set of decisions made somewhere between the studio and the release, decisions that prioritised loudness and density over everything the music was actually trying to do.

Luckily, it's not all records

Before this turns into a verdict on modern jazz production as a whole, it is worth being clear: the problem is a choice, not an inevitability.

The Strangers Jazz Quartet — Ghost Riders, released in the last two months, is to my ears one of the best-sounding jazz records this year. . The difference is not technology or budget. It is a decision about what the music needs.

Dave Adewumi — The Flame Beneath the Silence, also recent, makes the same case. . Same streaming landscape, same 2026 release environment, completely different result.

These two records demolish the excuse that this is just how modern jazz sounds now. It is not. It is how some engineers are choosing to make it sound.

Why anyone would do this to jazz?

I find this genuinely hard to understand. And I have tried.

My best guess is that it comes down to chasing a sound that has nothing to do with jazz: the loud, bright, punchy aesthetic of contemporary pop and rock production. The logic, if you can call it that, is that modern sounds modern, and modern means loud. Someone, somewhere in the chain between the studio and the release, decided that jazz needed to compete on those terms. It does not. It never did.

There is a well-known trap in mastering. Loud and bright always sounds better in the first thirty seconds. It hits harder, it feels more present, it grabs attention. Engineers under label pressure, or simply without enough experience to know better, can fall into it easily. The problem is that loud and bright sounds significantly worse over time. What felt present becomes exhausting. What felt punchy becomes relentless. The fatigue sets in, and the record stops getting played.

That is exactly what is happening here. I am not returning to the worst of these releases, not because the music is poor, but because the sound makes extended listening genuinely unpleasant. Someone made that happen. It did not have to.

What we are losing

Listeners who care about this built their systems and their libraries to hear music at its best. The whole point of a lossless file, a good DAC, a pair of headphones or speakers that can actually resolve detail, is that the recording rewards the investment. Jazz, more than almost any other genre, has the capacity to do that.

When engineers compress new jazz releases into submission, they are not just making a technical error. They are denying listeners access to what the music actually is. The space, the dynamics, the sense of a real performance in a real room, gone before the file even reaches you.

This is becoming more common. That is the problem. And if the trend continues, we are going to find ourselves with a growing catalogue of new jazz releases that sound, on a serious system, like they were mastered for a Bluetooth speaker in a coffee shop.

That is not where this music belongs. And frankly, it is not good enough.