Jazz starter CD?

A single CD intro as a starter?

BAG'S GROOVE

 

The Blues and the Abstract Truth, by Oliver Nelson

Listen to samples here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blues-Abstrac...=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1254674602&sr=8-3

 

3 great choices.

 

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue, Walkin', 1958 Miles
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out, Time Further Out
John Coltrane - Blue Train, Soultrane, Giant Steps, Ballads
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um, Blues & Roots
Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West
Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto - Getz/Gilberto
Bill Evans Trio - Waltz for Debby, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, Portrait in Jazz
Grant Green - Matador, Idle Moments
Dexter Gordon - Go!
Hank Mobley - Soul Station

 

How about a sampler, like the venerable Best of Blue Note.

 

Not the best place to start, IMO, and that would go for Mingus' Black Saint album as well.

Soul jazz and hard bop seems to me easy to like, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Johnnie Griffin, Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson, even Horace Silver. Then maybe some Be bop, Charlie Parker I would then branch out into Sonny Rollins and Oscar Peterson, maybe try some cool school stuff like Brubeck, Mulligan and Baker. Then maybe modal jazz like Kind of Blue, or something from Miles Second Quintet, maybe Nefertiti.

Then explore Trane, Mingus, Monk.
Then maybe try some Ornette Coleman.

Or you could just start with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and go from there.

 

Kind of Blue is by far the most overrated jazz record of all time. Great record but certainly not the best ever or necessarily the best starter record, even for Miles (and I have hundreds of Miles records and live recordings). There are much better suggestions on this thread. The 50's records of Rollins, Mingus. Evans and Mobley are all winners - get those that are suggested by Phallumontis. BTW, Getz/Gilberto isn't really jazz per se, but then again, neither is Peter Brotzmann.

 

Disagree. Nothing wrong with KOB as a starter. You can make the argument that there are plenty of records as good ('59 was a banner year for jazz recordings that included 'Ah Um', 'Straight, No Chaser', and 'Shape of Jazz to Come'.)

I've also said that KOB is overrated, but only because its popularity and the attention paid to it dwarfs the attention paid to equally excellent records.

Your avatar really takes me back. I knew Fred Hopkins for years. What a great musician and congenial person he was.

 

I agree that 50s era modern jazz is a good starting point, richer and more representative of jazz as a whole than either Kind of Blue of Getz/Gilberto. The problem with Kind of Blue isn't in the quality of the music; it is a great record and should be heard by just about everyone eventually, but rather that it kind of stands alone in its approach. Buy a cd by any of the players on KOB, Trane, Wynton Kelly, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, even Miles himself, and the music fan is somewhat perplexed. None of these guys other records sound much like kind of blue. Kind of Blue led the way forward, but few hung around long enough to explore that particular sound.

Getz/Gilberto is the same thing, but more so. Though samba was a fad in the early 60s, most of the samba records, outside of Getz/Gilberto have not stood the test of time, which leaves the fan of this style with only a handful of recordings by Getz, Gilberto, Jobim and Charlie Byrd to explore before running out of options.

In contrast, get a 50s era Sonny Rollins record, say Saxophone Colossus or Newk's Time and, assuming you like it, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of great recordings in that style to explore.

 

My advice would be not to jump into the middle of it and get a 'jazz' CD - rather, start from where you are and move towards it. I liked ATR's James Blood Ulmer suggestion (altho' his work can get quite heavy) and think that CDs by jazz guitarists are the way to go. Other names to look out for include: John McLaughlin, Bill Frisell, John Scofield (especially his collaborations with Medeski Martin & Wood), Larry Coryell, Sonny Sharrock and Pat Metheny.

 

Outside of his rec of James Blood Ulmer, I am not sure that ATR was saying what you are saying, Nothing wrong with seeking out some jazz guitar, but why not try something different, like piano, sax or trumpet jazz and see if you like it.

 

The recording that got me into jazz was Thelonious Monk - Monk's Music. I didn't "get it" the first time i heard it, but when I went back to it later, it really clicked for me. Now I have over 20 different recordings by him. Try listening to some samples online. Another Monk title to try would be Brilliant Corners.

Jazz is like rock; there are so many styles and artists continually evolve. Don't let one piece of music allow you to determine if you like a certain style or artist.

 

Monk is an interesting choice because he manages to be iconoclastic and central to jazz at the same time. His approach to songwriting and piano playing are really different from anyone else, but it would be hard to imagine jazz without him.

He is also strangely compelling. One would think that as much as he repeated himself over the course of his career, one would think that the only Monk you would need would be a compilation or two, but the fact that he played with so many of the greats of jazz, from Sonny Rollins to Trane to Griffin to Rouse, and all are equally compelling visions of his music.

 

If you don't mind my saying so, he's saying pretty much what I said. Listen to some jazz artists who incorporate a lot of the music you find familiar into jazz. His other recommendations are also solid, IMO. And for less than $2 he can look into Blood who IMO is much closer to blues than the other guitarists he mentioned, good as they are.

My original point is that jazz is so diverse, it's like the old story about the ten blind men examining and describing the elephant by touching different parts of its body.

 

Thanks - I thought we were roughly on the same page and, agreed, Ulmer is the bluesiest jazz-guitarist ever.

 

I agree. Picking one jazz recording, or even any one or two disc compilation that perfectly encapsulates jazz is really impossible. A couple of years ago, I read the Playboy guide to jazz. Instead of comprehensibly listing all the jazz recordings currently available, like AMG or Penguin guide, it listed just a small number and suggested to the reader to buy just one or two cds a week and listen to them all week until the reader absorbs it, then move on to the next recommended selection. The idea is that the introducton to jazz would take about a year, but at the end of the year, the complete newbie would have a basic knowledge of most of the major styles of jazz.

 

Well, the first thing that needs saying is that, of course you're capable of enjoying jazz. Anyone with ears and any feel for music at all is capable of it. The issue is listening with an open mind and a willingness to be surprised into new ways of listening.

I have no idea what the right album will be for you--the one that will give you a chance to hear and get some pleasure from what this sort of music can do. I imagine that many of the disks recommended so far will offer you that opportunity--and that's in the end what they all are.

For what it's worth, here's my own story: when I was in your boat back in the late '70's, my opportunity came to me in the form of an old LP my parents happened to have by accident. It was an old Columbia LP called "Miles and Monk at Newport," which a friend had recommended to THEM back in the early '60's as a good jazz album to start with. The LP had a live recording of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" era band, on one side, and two long cuts by Thelonius Monk's early '60's quartet with Pee Wee Russell sitting in on clarinet, on the other (these sets had been recorded in different years, both at the Newport Jazz Festival). It didn't work for my folks. They took one listen to the opener on the Miles Davis side (a blisteringly fast take on a Charlie Parker tune called "Ah-Leu-Cha"), and that was it. My dad said they gave each other a classic "WTF" look, and never even finished listening to the record. I think it sat there unplayed for 10 or 15 years until I picked up myself and gave it a spin out of curiosity. I didn't know what to make of that version of "Ah-Leu-Cha" at first either, but the next cut, a wonderful version of Monk's "Straight, No Chaser," was another thing altogether, and the two Monk tunes on side two were also just immediately compelling to me. Serious groove, playful and surprising at every turn. The piano playing on the Monk tunes actually made me laugh out loud, the syncopations and interval leaps were so strange and yet also so exactly right. And there was something so yearning and quizzical in Pee Wee Russell's clarinet solos. At least that's how it felt, and feel was all I had to go on. So I did the reasonable thing and bought the first Thelonius Monk album I happened to find in my local used record store. $2 for another Columbia LP, a Monk studio date from around the same time as the Newport concert: "Criss Cross." Much to my amazement, it was even better than the other album to my ears, even if it had no yearning Pee Wee Russell.

At that point, I was curious enough (and really desirous enough--I wanted more of that feeling of pleasure in surprise), and did what ATR mentioned a lot of people who were curious about jazz did back at that time. I went to the library and took out the "Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz" (then a big multi LP box), and started to explore from Dixieland on up to the '70's avant garde. The next things that that set led me to--the things that also made some sense to me for some reason--were the early Louis Armstrong records (the "Hot 5's and 7's"--serious pleasure in playful surprise), Ornette Coleman ("Twins"--this stuff just made immediate sense to me--a similar playfulness, but open-ended in a very exciting way for me. I loved the way you never really knew where exactly it was going next), Charles Mingus ("Ah Um" and the three Impulse albums--this was much more rigorous and driving and dramatic, and there was also a mash-up of styles and juxtapositions that immediately spoke to the prog-rock fan in me), and Coltrane ("Live at Birdland"--it was the version of "Alabama" on the Smithsonian set that got me. It was so meditative and calmly solemn or resolved--and the thunderous drums rolling like the sea. The eastern feel of the melody must also have reminded me of hearing the Cantor chant in synagogue). Miles Davis crept back on me a little later. By then, I was swimming in all of these waters very freely and happily. Still am.

Hope that helps.

L.

 

No question about it. The Smithsonian collection is still out there, and I gave the amazon link to it in my first post on this thread.

 

It looks like you can by the separate disks of the Smithsonian set on the cheap:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?u...thsonian+Collection+of+Classic+Jazz&x=24&y=20

L.

P.S. The Ken Burns box is also, as ATR points out, a good introductory survey, although it stops doing proper justice to its subject after disk 3. The first three disks are great, though, and even the last two are faulty only by way of omission and in light of the set's claim to really survey the last half of its story. Those last two disks are full of great music, track by track. The Smithsonian box more or less stops in the early '60's, with just a cut by the World Saxophone Quartet to indicate later developments. But it does more consistent justice up to that point than the Burns set does from the '50's up its end-point. What we really need is a 10 disk set that covers the music over the course of the whole 20th century! The other option, of course, is just to spend a lifetime listening.....

 

Try Somethin' Else, Cannonball Adderly.

And why not listen to a good Jazz program on the radio.

 

If it helps the op my first jazz lp was Blue train and i found it very easy to listen to. I can't pretend to know anything about jazz but this cd at least is very lyrical and not really a challenging listen (still engagin though !!)

The other cd i bought at the same time was Miles Davis - Birth of the cool, which i personally find much harder to enjoy.

 

In 1949 Miles Davis - Birth of the cool
in 1959 Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
In 1969 Miles Davis - In a Silent Way

He changed the music every ten years, and if you like The Simpsons in one chapter, say that the prefer album of Lisa is "The Birth of the cool".

In Runaway Bride it is the album that Julia Roberts gives to Richard Gere, but in the soundtrack, sounds "IT NEVER ENTERED MY MIND", that it is of another album (Walkin', but I am not sure), but not sounds any song of Kind of Blue.

He (Richard Gere) is surprised that she has the album in LP.

A great film to see "'Round midnight", with Lester Young.

And a film with a good soundtrack (and a film I liked) "Finding Forrester", sounds in A Silent Way, and other pieces of Davis and Bill Frisell and Ornette Coleman.

 

'Blue Train' - John Coltrane
'Kind of Blue' - Miles Davis
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi (w/Miles Davis)

 

Not odd at all. I've used this as an intro to my jazz-inchoate friends and they loved it. I personally started out with Giant Steps, after feeling underwhelmed by KOB upon first listen ( though I obviously dig it now).

Since you're trying to find an engaging introduction to an instrumental section of the genre I would suggest something that has an enchanting melodic quality, while also having lyrical and driving solos, which may serve as analogues to certain types of "classic rock" and bridge the musical transitions of discovering a new genre. As other users have suggested, I think an earlier acclaimed Sonny Rollins album would be the way to go, maybe The Bridge ?

 

Hearing Louis Prima and Art Blakey (particulary Moanin'-era stuff) got me into jazz.

Kind of Blue bored me to death.