I should have twisted your arm for that one.. just for the art work! Just finished spinning "Hang on Ramsey"on the turntable and replaced it with 'Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster." In mono..no less.
Celebrating what would have been the great man's 100th birthday! . . . 1958/2014 Music Matters Ltd. – MMBST-84003, Blue Note – ST-84003 Blue Note The Definitive Vinyl Reissue Series – KPG&RR@CA
A new arrival. . . . Barney Wilen Quartet "Live in Tokyo '91" Followed by Art Pepper "So In Love" from the new "Complere Artist House Recordings" box set
Driving home this evening to the tune of early Randy Weston on the radio.... nice commute, nice being able to tune to WKCR on the ride home. I'm not sure if I ever heard this '55 trio date with Blakey.
I have had lots of time on my hands since I broke my wrist a couple of weeks ago and have been off of work with my mind drifting in all sorts of thought directions. I have been obsessed with 50's and 60's Jazz (mostly Hard Bop on the Blue Note Label) thinking a lot on that subject. I am a bit of a Top 10 list dork so came up with a couple personal top tens as it relates to Jazz in general and the second being more Hard Bop oriented. Since this thread is called "Listenin' to Jazz and Conversation" I thought I would share my lists. My Top 10 personal favorite Tenor players: (No specific order) Coleman Hawkins Lester Young Ben Webster John Coltrane Sonny Rollins Hank Mobley Wayne Shorter Dexter Gordon Lou Donaldson Stan Getz (I wish I had another spot here for Art Pepper so I will call him an honorable mention) My Top 10 personal favorite Blue Note artists: (No specific order. Including artists who recorded a significant amount for Blue Note, so no John Coltrane) Art Blakey (happy 100th B-day up there in Jazz heaven Mr. Blakey) Hank Mobley Dexter Gordon Lou Donaldson Freddie Hubbard Lee Morgan Donald Byrd Horace Silver Grant Green Kenny Burrell (10 spots is not enough. I have several honorable mentions starting with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock).
I just love that one. I am not sure I could pick out a single Art Blakey album as my favorite but Indestructible would be included with a few others for a tie spot at number one.
I love this and have neglected to spin it for too long. Cassandra Wilson "Coming Forth by Day" Blue Note Japan SHM-CD
I suspect most folks on this thread are much more sophisticated listeners than I am. I am curious how people here approach listening to Jazz and music in general for that matter. I have never been a very intellectual listener but rather one who enjoys the emotional and mood impact of the sound itself without having any understanding of structure, technique, time signature recognition, etc. My thoughts are more along the line of, "I love the rich warm sound of that horn, snap of the drum, interplay exchange with the piano, etc." kind of mental processing. I have no musical training, background, and do not play an instrument. I have been reading the Aaron Copland book "What To Listen For In Music" that @chervokas recommended to me a few weeks ago. Copland describes three separate musical planes of listening: sensuous plane, expressive plane, and sheerly plane. Personally, I listen mostly in the sensuous plane which he describes as "...absent-mindedly bathes in the sound". I also have one foot in what Copland defines as the expressive plane having personal thoughts on what a given piece of music means or expresses from my perspective such as angry, sad, longing, "describing" a quiet late night moment, etc. Now that third category that he defines as the sheerly plane is where I am terribly deficient. This is the plane of having an understanding of structure, technique, being able to recognize time signatures, etc. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to make listening to music some kind of unpleasant home work exercise for myself or trying to achieve some silly elitist listener status. I simply wish to further educate myself in having a better understanding of "how music works" for lack of a better way to express it. I want to be able to listen and pick up on things that I a missing currently and be able to better discuss and articulate with others what I am hearing. I suspect it will further enrich one of my favorite things in life, listening to music. How do folks here approach listening to Jazz and music in general? Thoughts.
I've been listening to jazz since the beginning of the 'seventies, really earlier as my parents listened to jazz a fair amount (mostly swing, but also later Ellington and Brubeck etc.) My listening has gone through many stages. At first I responded very emotionally to jazz--the beat, the interplay between horns, the expressive vocals all roused emotion in me. I'm an emotional person and was most emotional when I started to really listen to jazz--emotional and reclusive, feeling trapped in a world (small town rural Ohio, after living ages 11 to 17 in Africa) I never made. Jazz soothed and stimulated me, and was "my thing" in amidst hard rock, blues and prog that I shared listening to with others. Then in my mid-twenties I began dabbling with instruments: piano, bass, guitar, drums. I concentrated on drums and played those in several bands. I listened to several jazz drummers intently (Kenny Clarke, Tony Williams, Jack De Johnette) because I felt that their sensibility on the kit seemed to mirror one I wanted to have, and that what I could assimilate of their playing would inform the blues-rock and singer-songwriter drumming I was doing. When I stopped playing in bands in my mid-thirties I was still in that sort of "how do they do that?" mode of listening, coupled with a growing interest in the history of jazz and how it was woven into the art of the twentieth century, and I the music and the history became a stew in my mind and listening world. Later when I felt I had a good roadmap of the history of the genre and a grounding in the "classic repertoire" I began to want the music to "hit" harder. I was no longer playing and I wanted the music to fill (futilely) a void I felt. I became more of an audiophile than I ever was, discovering that equipment that was faithful to the tonality of the instruments and didn't compress and compact recordings both helped me in my intellectual listening and my appreciation of form and improvisational interaction, and just plain enjoying what I heard. Then later I poured my heart into a battle my wife had with cancer, and lost my wife to cancer and had both a weary body and spirit and a need for escape and solace. I had more money to throw at recordings and equipment and the sound got better and I spent a lot of, a lot of time healing while lost in the music and the joy of hunting and collating recordings. I ended up totally changing my life with a return to family and intense care of family, and then a new marriage and I'm still in a stage of listening where I just want the music to sweep over me or fill the room as I do other tasks. I find I am now free to listen simply to what I want to, I'm not studying, or trying to keep up with the listening of the few jazz friends I had in person, and I mostly listen to jazz from the 'forties to the end of the 'sixties, and I don't feel compelled to try to enjoy avant garden jazz or jazz with many fusions of other forms. I find myself often enough trapped in sprees of listening to Ellington, or Basie, or Monk, or Blue Note titles, and just letting the sound carry me. And I enjoy listening to different masterings and playing about with tubes and other audiophile tinkering. You asked! Hope it was helpful. I'm glad you are listening to more and more jazz. It's a great way to pass time.
Great question! Personally, I'm not really aware of these as separate things. A piece of music might inspire me to get up and dance, or I might be totally wrapped up in the story of the lyric emotionally or the emotional rise and fall of a musical performance and at the same time I'm almost also always aware to some degree of the structure and shape, if not the specifics of the harmony or anything, and I really find myself very much emotionally engaged by and drawn into and satisfied at a profound level by experiencing the structures and shapes. To me so much of what's fulfilling about art is the shape and sense it gives to a kind of meaningless world -- it's the meaning we put into it as humans (and as artists). And I find a lot of my emotional fulfillment in experiencing the structure and the specific human effort I hear (or see or read) in it. So I can't divorce my emotional response to the music from my awareness of its shape. But I've also always been a musician and a maker. I mean, my mother had me starting with piano lessons at 6 or seven and I played trumpet at an early age and later I learned drums and guitar. I also took art lessons (and later worked as an artist's assistant) so I learned painting and drawing and printmaking. And then I studied writing and became a professional journalist. So as long as I can remember I've never been able to separate my experience of listening to music and reading writing or looking at art into parts where there's a kind of sensory component here, and emotional component there, and an intellectual component somewhere else or something separate from an urge to make stuff (though now in late middle age, that urge doesn't quite burn in me anymore). They're totally wrapped up in one another for me. BTW, I think you left out a word there. Copland's phrase is the "sheerly musical" plane.
For whatever reason, one of the first things I thought of when I read your post was a memory of listening to Rush's Moving Pictures album - probably one of my earliest forays outside of a relatively simple 3 min pop song format. (I spent my formative years living in Toronto and it's hard to live there in those days and not hear some Rush). I remember being intrigued but not quite comprehending the intricacies of the music. Nowadays there's nothing mysterious about that music to me even if I still admire it - I can hear and reasonably understand what's going on. It probably helps that I've been playing guitar for 35 years. Still, the drummer in the band I play in once sent us a link to youtube video of a dude explaining the musical layers of the song Limelight from that Rush album and even though I say I don't find it mysterious there is indeed a lot going on, more than I realize from casual listening. Even the familiar can have some details not obvious at first blush. Anyway it's been a process going from listening to 3 minute songs to listening to prog rock and jazz fusion and I feel that I understand a fair amount of the music in those categories. Generally speaking I am not baffled by these kind of musics anymore. I should say that a lot of my measure for comprehending music (or any art) is a need to have some sort of understanding of the structure of it. With jazz I alternate through stages of 'getting it' and still not quite getting it and being totally perplexed - all while still enjoying the music at some level. I think listening to Miles' Kind Of Blue is really easy going to me - I've enjoyed it from day one. On the other hand I was totally perplexed by my first Sonny Rollins purchase - A Night At the Village Vanguard. A big problem with that one is the lack of a piano or other harmony instrument; it's just Sonny and bass and drums. On top of that the bass is not really upfront in the cd version I bought. To my newbie ears it sounded totally atonal. Well, of course that album is far from atonal - I just wasn't familiar with the tunes and their chordal structures. For example the version of the album I had opens with A Night At Tunisia, the theme of which has phrases moving a half step up and down back and forth. When the average brain hears this it gives the impression of the musicians flaunting a discord at the listener - like hitting two adjacent keys on a piano. Now that I know A Night At Tunisia this doesn't bother me but my younger self was really baffled by it. In the end I should've picked a different album to acquaint myself with this music - but I was young and dumb and hadn't made my way to the internet for better information that might set me straight. Keep in mind that in parallel to all this, I was loving free jazz and other music leaning in that direction. I loved and still love Coltrane's Ascension. I was listening to Derek Bailey and the band Last Exit. I didn't necessarily know what was going on in these but sheer intensity and energy really captivated me. As far as I'm concerned the journey is far from over; I'm always learning or at least trying to. I do tend to separate my experience of art into layers, with say the emotion being at a different level from structure, which is in turn at a different level from the sheer momentum (or repose) of a piece. I guess I seem to be a structure first kind of person so if I don't have some grasp of that I'm lost.
