The best recording of 2006, for me, came from trumpeter and arranger Steve Bernstein. Bernstein loves jazz and plays squarely from that tradition, but his music often challenges the tradition in fundamental ways. If you haven't heard Millennial Territory Orchestra, Volume One yet, then stop reading this now and order it.

But I did not have to order Fight the Big Bull from guitarist Matt White, the only arranging student of Mr. Bernstein. The band, actually, is called Fight the Big Bull, and it features a five-horn front line, guitar, bass, and two rhythm players, all amassed to make music that is beyond jazz and, as Ellington said, beyond category. All the Fight the Big Bull press is in Spanish first and English second, and the sound certainly approximates something like gospel-flamenco or Mingus-Meets-Machito-on-the-Pampas. There can be little doubt that Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is a big influence, but there is so much else as well.

White and his various bands (too many to mention, except to say that there is also a three-piece called, simply, Fight the Bull) are based in Richmond, Virginia—a fact that accounts (at least in part) for the relative obscurity of the outfit. In today's world, recording can be done inexpensively at high quality, and Fight the Big Bull is the best argument out there for small-market jazz innovation. Though it is a record of only four White compositions, it is also much-much music. The enterprise seems sonically gigantic, in fact, with the various moving parts both independent and coordinated. The textures are not glossy as is typical with jazz—they grind and shout more, with the example of Latin and flamenco music suggesting voicings and contrapuntal arrangements that populate the music raggedly.

Fight the Bull gets, simply put, a rapturously chaotic sound. White's guitar is alternately guttural and flowing, tying knots in the music that make it catch on your ear. The rhythm feeling avoids easy swing in favor of marches and grooves and syncopated snap-crackle-pop. The horns play in massed choruses but the also play free and contrapuntal. The melodies grow out of the mass of sound. The music is always alive.

It makes you want to dance and it makes you want to film a crazy movie that this could be the soundtrack for. It makes you want to rush down to Richmond to take in the sleight-of-hand in person. It makes you wish for a more records like Fight the Big Bull that disregard questions of economics and questions of location and declare—through a loudspeaker—that great, messy, generous music can come from anywhere.