Entertainment For Lively Minds
Jazz, more than niiiiiccce...?
I really enjoyed the Mark Ellen article on Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" a few issues back and took the plunge, bought the CD and have probably listened to it every day for a month. I love it. For many years I'd taken the Fast Show route of mockery and disdain for the genre, crushingly drawing out the word "niiiicccce" whenever the sociable sound was in earshot. However, looking at a wall of CD's that were all essentially the same brew of indie style britpop I've recently felt a yearning for something different in the ears. I have dabbled with classical and folk but the sheer joy of discovering Kind of Blue is inspiring me to hurl myself headlong into jazz.
Where do you go after Kind of Blue? I fear that its so good that any further jazz investigation can only disappoint. I’ve put my classical phase on the back burner to invest in this so I need help from the massive. What next for a man who wants to enjoy but doesn’t know where to look? Anybody else going through or been through a phase?
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Such a broad church
To start with I'd recommend almost everything on the Blue Note label, almost everything by the musicians who play on Kind Of Blue and anything else by Mile himself.
The joy of Blue Note is that you can almost pick albums by the covers and end up with a treat.
Personal favourites? Wayne Shorter "Speak No Evil", Horace Silver "Song For My Father".
Always check out who plays on the albums you like, because it's likely you can follow the trail through their own records and get some gems.
Jazz
Start here. Or here. Or here. Or here.
oops
sorry, pay attention at the back..
Maybe we need a sort of "The Massive's beginners guide to..."
...somewhere on the sidebar of the blog to answer the regularly asked questions?
How do I get into Jazz/Classical/Avant Garde/Progressive Rock/etc etc?
Or some kind of index for popular past blogs...
that have covered key topics such as "Were ELP shite?"
Index
The search engine does that. Search for Jazz, which is a pretty inexact search term, and all the threads I list above come up on the first page of results, two of them in the first three.
But
There's no harm in doing it again is there? I mean that's what we all come here for, to whitter on about music, is it not? To be honest there's no real limit to the amount of times I can chat about favourite jazz albums.
Absolutely
There's no harm in it in instances like this, but in general I'd rather avoid double-posting. Quite often exactly the same story will be posted by three or four different readers within a few hours of each other, in which case I'll delete the later entries and let the author know why. It's nothing sinister, we're just trying to keep the conversation focussed. In the case, deletion never crossed my mind.
Sketches of Spain
is another great Miles album but more classical in styling. Also later in his career Tutu is also very good. There are also great compilations as starters for exploring artists - these can usually be picked up very reasonably priced - Charlie Mingus is a favourite of mine. If you are looking for something romantic to appeal to the lady friend suggest Chet Baker - guaranteed to get a result!!
Sketches Of Spain
I second that
This is a personal choice
but I like most things by Andy Sheppard, Esbjorn Svensson Trio, and for a kind of rocky jazz blues mix, Bill Frisell, especially the album Floratone (it's on Spotify). Or John Coltrane. Or even Alice Coltrane.
I've previously recommended
Oliver Nelson's Blues And The Abstract Truth.
It really is one of the great jazz albums. It was made by someone whose impact on the genre was reduced by his choice to go for the paying gig of writing TV themes (The 6 Million Dollar Man was probably his most famous piece) rather than trying to make a living touring the clubs.
It ain't cool but ...
"Sinatra-Basie" is my all-time favourite feel-good album.
Count Basie (you'll have seen him in Blazing Saddles, if nowhere else) plays spaces like no-one else, and some of his orchestrations are so playful they can make me laugh out loud. I'm no fan of "My Way" style Sinatra, but here he swings and sings the blues like you've never heard him before.
Bit of a contrast to everything else on this thread, but eclecticism is no bad thing.
Definitely...
These days, the big jazz/swing orchestras are all but forgotten in favour of jazz shoegazers but Basie and Ellington produced some of the most joyous music ever played
For Sunday mornings...
You cant go wrong with "If Summer Had Its Ghosts" by Bill Bruford, Eddie Gomez & Ralph Towner. And as it's now Sunday afternoon, you've got all week to prepare yourself. Unless you're in California.
After 'A Kind Of Blue'
perhaps Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme'?
http://open.spotify.com/album/5DXmUb5WnwvBeNJDgXx3sL
or Blue Train
My favourite Coltrane album and, in my mind, a better one than A Kind of Blue.
http://open.spotify.com/album/50FMzSN3HV4PI7ryK3lLQn
Or you really can't go wrong with a bit of Chet Baker. aside from being one of the most photogenic men in musical history and being an amazingly intuitive trumpeter he was also a great singer. And a raging smack addict - but no-one's perfect, eh?
http://open.spotify.com/album/5JJ779nrbHx0KB2lBrMMa4
Definitely not
Love Supreme is a completely different thing altogether and far more challenging, I would leave a couple of years until you are further along the journey. Try the following: Something else - Cannonaball Aderley (miles plays on it), Blue train - John Coltrane, Duke Ellington - Live at Newport, Charles Mingus - Ah Um, Bill Evans - Everybody Digs and Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Collosus.
or on spotify here
http://open.spotify.com/user/hubejr/playlist/6naqKpuKQyQLNUTeN6HYxQ
Playlist
Great playlist. 'Scuse me if I beef it up with, uh, my kind of jazz.
Jazz Mags
A few of my favourites:
1) The Atomic Mr Basie-Count Basie (Classic Big Band Jazz)
2) For The Guv- Ben Webster (lovely restrained tenor sax pleyer)
3) Porgy And Bess-Miles Davis, if you like A Kind Of Blue, this should appeal too.
4) Flamingo-Stephane Grappelli, Michel Petrucuani- great violin and piano jazz, sadly now both deceased. This album transports me
to Paris on every listen
5) White Blues-Chet Baker, this is my favourite trumpet player after Davis. Some memorable and at times drum free arrangements)
Jacques Loussier
After seeing them live a few years back I have been hooked on the Jacques Loussier trio. Without hitting too many cliches, they have been playing together for years so look out for some exceptional piano work and tight rhythms. What's more if you've tried the classical route and want an alternative take of J.S.'s finest they've done a series of "Play Bach" jazz interpretations of ... Bach. Some of the (very few) musicians I've bothered to hang around after a gig for and get autographs.
Failing that try Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli and the Hot Club de Paris are always uplifting and an utter joy at any time of the day. The recordings I have are very crackly 1930s but that all adds to the atmosphere - toes are tapping from the first bar.
A really good starting point...
...in my opinion, is the select discography at the back of Geoff Dyer's book about jazz, "But Beautiful" .
Personally, I'd highly recommend :
Charles Mingus - Ah Um
Keith Jarrett - My Song
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way
Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Dewey Redman - Old and New Dreams.
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
Jack Dejohnette's New Directions - Live in Europe
Good on you, Mr Whitney. You won't regret it.
Try 'Clifford Brown With Strings'...
melodic, accessible, beautiful.
A suggestion
Have you a record library in your town? Go there. Join. librarians always love jazz and it strikes me that there are proportionately more filed under "jazz" than other genres, apart, perhaps, from "musicals". Borrow anything on Blue Note or, if feeeling more adventurous, ECM. You will enjoy it against expectation. Rid yourself of goatee stroking images and imagine you are in a pokey dive in Bleeker Street, circa 1956, bopping to the bebop. Sod this idea that jazz is cerebral: it's dance music!
Doesn't Spotify do the same...
...but without having to get off your arse
Yeeeeeeeees
but you can't pick up the box and open it up, taking out the insert, reading it, putting it back etc etc. The equivalent of all the associated stuff around inhaling nicotine that make it, I gather, a hard act to kick, if you follow me...
Hm.
Maybe. As has been discussed to death here, some people like 'the artifact' and some just want the music.
Me? I'll stick with Spotify + Wikipedia for now
Milestones and Jazz Library
One possibility, which I heard again on R3 the other day, is his earlier album Milestones-just downloaded title track from iTunes.
Additionally, always worth listening to Radio 3's Jazz Library in either radio or podcast form. Even though I haven't yet bought that much based on it, it is always a very pleasant hour.
Other great 1959 Jazz LPs
There are 3 more great LPs from 1959, the year Kind of Blue was made, all of them high water marks for Jazz. One has come up already - Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um - but Ornette Coleman's The Shape Of Jazz to Come and Dave Brubeck's Time Out are also an amazing listen.
Funnily enough BBC4 have a programme about these 4 albums on 27th March (Friday week) at 10pm: 1959, The Year Jazz Changed Forever. Sounds good...
Throw in some jazz funk as well
Herbie Hancock - Headhunters
In fact, check out Herbie's early stuff as well, like Maiden Voyage.
Then look up a recent photo of him and think to yourself "this man is 68 years old". A good advert for the anti-ageism properties of buddhism...
Definitely better than nice
Jazz has been part of my life for the last 25 years. I like quite a lot of the 'classics', but it's a broad church with so many different styles.
Here's a few of my suggestions (and some are barely jazz in the traditional sense - it's a broad church, jazz...):
Esbjorn Svensson Trio - try these albums - 'EST Plays Monk', "Goodbye Susie Soho', Seven years of Falling'
Keith Jarrett - where do you start? Some fantastic solo improvisations - "Koln Concert' for example, sterling work with his 'Standards' Trio, with the 'Belonging' quartet and so much more.
Pat Metheny - New Chautauqua, 80/81, Offramp, As Falls Witchita... etc
Jan Garbarek - for some cool Scandanavian stuff
Then, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon....
Rather than go on about it too much, here's link to a Spotify playlist I've put together. Hope you like it.
http://open.spotify.com/user/mikehull2u/playlist/3BMi4rI3HKKUN3vjIKC6jE