Last month I blogged about my top 10 favorite jazz piano tracks, and this time around I’ll be looking at entire albums. Read on for props for Phineas, Cedar, Hampton, Mary Lou and others.

Given my line of work, this is a particularly tough one to narrow down. If you look at my other top 10 lists, you’ll see that there are also lists for piano trio albums and for piano solos. This is for standout individual tracks and takes the whole performance (e.g. not just the piano) into account.

Here is my list of great comping albums, from crisply swinging to dense and aggressive. To the uninitiated, comping is the rhythmic, improvised playing of chords to accompany a melody or solo.

This is for singers (of either gender) who also play an instrument on the cut in question (or vice versa). I just realized as I went to submit that due to a rather glaring oversight there are no Chet Baker recordings here; I don’t really want to “bump” any of these individual tracks, so let’s…

“Vocal only” means that those who are also play an instrument on the recording belong in another category. Apologies, as always, to the great singers (including Mark Murphy, Eddie Jefferson, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and Jon Hendricks just to name a few) who didn’t make the list.

There is no shortage of great female jazz vocal performances on record so it was a hard one to narrow down! “Vocal only” distinguishes from those who also play an instrument on the recording; they get their own category.

With the recent induction of the 2010 class of NEA Jazz Masters, some of the most glaring omissions in my eyes have been rectified, namely Yusef Lateef, Bobby Hutcherson and Cedar Walton. This led me to reflect on who now tops the list of most deserving musicians not yet honored.

This was a tough one to narrow down, especially without having a list devoted to each type of saxophone. Just remember that this is a “favorites” list and not “best” or “most important” necessarily.