I thought rather than just give you a list of my 100 favourite albums like I did last year, I’d just talk you through a much more manageable list of my top 30 — and I’ll do it in instalments: Monday to Friday, this week and next, at the rate of 3 a day.

These are not The Best Albums of 2006 — just the ones I liked enough to listen to more than half a dozen times and still enjoy enough to recommend to like-minded, discerning music lovers with eclectic tastes. Most importantly, these are in no particular order.

Now, it has to be said that although a fair number of CDs crossed my desk in the past year (I estimate about 300 or so), I certainly haven’t listened to every great record that was released in 2006. I haven’t even heard the Tom Waits album yet. Surely that’s an oversight on my part. But in my defence, I don’t tend to limit myself to a single genre either — so it’s much harder to be comprehensive.

So this is my top 10% of the music I heard this year, not counting the many albums that had been made in other years, but which I heard for the first time in the past 12 months.

As usual, I’m doing the ‘no compilations, no reissues’ rule — but there’s an important exception to that. Let’s get it out of the way right up front.

The Beatles – Love
I approached this album as a cynic. It’s clearly designed to be a massive earner for EMI at Christmas. It could not have existed without the Beatles Mashup albums that EMI did its level legal best to destroy. It’s a rehash of 40-year old material. It was put together for the circus.

And it is simply superb. It is cleverly crafted, cleaned and reassembled by someone who not only loves the music, but isn’t afraid to play with it. I’m sure you’ve read many an article about it, seen the billboards and caught the hype. But it’s not just a cheap stocking stuffer or a trainspotter’s dream — it’s also a genuinely good album and a reintroduction to music you know so well in a way that’s just unfamiliar enough and pristine enough to approach as new. What a great gift to be able to discover the Beatles for the first time over again.

Kenny Garrett – Beyond the Wall
Kenny Garrett is my favourite living sax player. He’s not ‘the best’ living sax player. I defer to smarter minds than mine and concur that that title probably belongs to David Murray. But I enjoy Kenny Garrett far more. He plays alto and is both inventive and approachable.

This is not his best album (I’m going with Pursuance for that title) — but any album by Kenny Garrett is a great record in my book, and this one was made in 2006. Buy anything with his name on it. This also comes with the added bonus of the magnificent Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax, who is still spirited, adventurous and surprising a good 40 years after he started defining those terms.

Fink – Biscuits for Breakfast
Guy with an acoustic guitar, some sparse but tasteful electronic production, some nice songs and a great vibe for an after meal sit down with a glass of wine and some friends. Play this one, and they’ll all go and buy a copy the next day too.

I suppose you could damn this with faint praise with the use of the hideous ‘chillout’ adjective, but that would diminish the polished songwriting, the minimalist production and the sheer playability of this record. Doesn’t outstay its welcome, it’s nicely understated and it’s polite without being obsequious.

To be continued…