Jazz: What made you like it ?

+ substitute Mingus and Monk for Beethoven

 

When I went away to college, I was exposed to a wider variety of music. The first jazz-ish music I got into was Zappa. In 1980, I listened to a college station that played jazz, when I could pick it up. I bought my first jazz album in that year, Terje Rypdal's Odyssey. Through the 80s and 90s and bought a few jazz records a year, mostly ECM, fusion, third stream, swing and dixieland. I really got into it after Ken Burns jazz.

 

When my brother bought Jack Bruce's Things We Like when it came out, he was dismayed to find it was jazz. Being younger and more open-minded, I heard something of interest and bought it from him. I dug it.

Then came Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill, which included, along with Jack Bruce, other rock-related people. Not strictly jazz, it was an experimental cornucopia of styles: jazz, rock, cabaret, circus, Indian. Very avant-garde. I loved it.

Then my co-worker at the record store I worked at in the late '70s introduced me to the music of Ornette Coleman. I really didn't get it at first, but, determined to understand it, I persevered and had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to analyze it. Ornette has been for some time in my top two of jazz faves (with Monk).

 

The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Time Out" lp
in my parents record selection is the first jazz that pricked up my ears at age 4. "Take Five" is aguably the most recognisable jazz tune of the early 1960s, at least it was at my grade school in middle class suburbia. Eventually journeying through the DBQ discography, and then Miles Davis, "Miles In The Sky" in '68 - that was a big game changer.
It got me to branch out a bit, Modern Jazz Quartet, Billie Holiday, Gábor Szabó.

 

He wouldn't just give it to ya?

 

Really! How do you like that? But, on the other hand, it was an expensive import. Like 5 or 6 bucks!

 

One of the times I joined BMG’s music club in 1998, instead of one of the 6 or 8 introductory CD’s I’d ordered, they sent me this Miles Davis comp by mistake: Miles Davis - The Best Of Miles Davis (The Capitol / Blue Note Years)

I knew nothing about jazz and had never even heard of Davis. I planned to just return the disc, but a co-worker who played trumpet in her school band encouraged me to give it a listen. I liked the album enough at first, but hearing “It Never Entered My Mind” got me hooked on it. I fell in love with the whole disc as I listened to it repeatedly. A little bit of reading up on Davis got me interested in Coltrane. I bought ‘A Love Supreme’ within a couple of months and fell in love with that one, too. I expanded my reach over the next few years by borrowing LOTS of CD’s from the library. I’d say I’ve strongly enjoyed a good 80% of the instrumental jazz I’ve investigated since.

 

When I was seventeen in the late eighties and heavily into Rock & Metal (still am) I got a job in a Technics hifi store. Every Saturday the owner would bring half a dozen albums from his enormous jazz collection on vinyl. He would bring Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Peterson and many others mostly on the Verve JATP Norman Krantz label and he would play them at very loud volume on the (then) top of the range Technics hifi and I was hooked from day one. The first album he played on the first day was by Charlie Parker. When I left to another job the owner gave me that album as a gift and I still have it framed in my office but the real gift he gave me was a lifetime of jazz (and a love of hifi).

 

My mother used to play piano and watched Oscar Peterson's Piano Party on the BBC many years ago and my dad adored Louis Armstrong. That and the fact that thin ties look pretty cool.

 

Miles in the Sky



Use to hear this album on a friend's college radio station gig. He had a Jazz slot on the station. I would hear this album on his show periodically, it slowly got me into jazz.

 

Jazz has been a HUGE influence on my life and it continues to provide me with so much happiness and, most of all, it fulfills my intellectual curiosity while satisfying me emotionally. My gateway into jazz probably was hearing Miles Davis’ work with Gil Evans, especially Miles Ahead and Porgy & Bess, but also Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’ and A Night in Tunisia. Horace Silver’s A Song for My Father also made quite an impression on me. These were the albums I say initiated this love as it was through these albums that jazz got into my bloodstream. Prior to getting into Bebop, Hard-Bop, etc., I was into Fusion, but, honestly, while I do still like some Fusion music, it was the late 40s, 50s, and 60s jazz scene where I truly fell in love. As usual with me, I blame this rather expensive hobby on my Dad who is still my musical hero (he played trumpet, french horn, piano, guitar, and bass guitar), but doesn’t really play too much anymore, but he’s the one who introduced me to so much of this music that I love (and cherish) now.

 

That's awesome about your father. My Dad loves music and passed his love of music on to half of us children, the oldest and the youngest. He did play jazz around us, but it was mostly Gershwin, Beethoven and Mozart, his three passions. Now though he listens to more jazz than ever before and some of my greatest times the last five years since I moved back near him are listening to music with him, sharing the sensations and thoughts that come.

 

Indeed. Sounds like we’re both incredibly fortunate to have such great parents with exquisite tastes in music that helped guide us along.

 

John Zorn and Dave Dunn. The former was the link between Metal and Jazz. The later was my Jazz mentor while I was working at HMV. His passion was infectious and his knowledge immense.

 

Yes! And I forgot to mention that my Dad played clarinet an bass clarinet in high school. . . but I never got to hear him play, he never kept up with it and I sure wish I could have heard him! But he did encourage we children to learn and I (the eldest) taught myself drum, and some guitar, bass and piano, and my youngest brother (the youngest of we four) is quite an accomplished trumpeter. . . and jazz fan.

 

I got my love of music from my mother, who sang folk songs to me from age 6 months. But my interest in jazz was self-motivated, and I ended up making my mother become a jazz collector by the time she was 50. She had gone to the 52nd Street clubs in the 1940's, but her records were mostly folk. My interest in being a radio DJ was also self-motivated, although my mother's mother and brother had been radio personalities before I was born.

 

You and your family....

 

Hip-Hop put me on the path. I'd search for the samples used in beats that I loved. Also, my favourite beatmakers happened to be psychedelic cratedigging jazz heads, so they mutated, growing several heads out the sides of their necks and made jazz albums, beat tapes and formed quintets.

 

Why jazz? How jazz? Where jazz?

I discovered jazz as a teenager - I was 13 or 14 and somehow come into the possession of two promotional records from Maxell designed/compiled to help customers "test" their stereo systems (I guess no one had a copy of Aja around). One album was rock and the other, jazz. The rock album had Styx - a band I hated even then - so that went into a stack somewhere. The jazz album had some fusion - Jeff Lorber Group is the only one I can recall - but the one cut that made me stand up and shout "Great Googly-Moogly" was courtesy of the Oscar Petersen Trio.

I knew of jazz...but outside of some Tony Bennett records my grandfather had, I didn't really know jazz. I'd ingested a steady diet of rock and roll, pop, and soul and loved them, but also felt like I knew them. What I loved about this Oscar Petersen cut was the simple yet stirring dynamics of piano, bass, and drums. To paraphrase the Grinch - "It came without wah-wah pedals! It came without feedback! It came without screams, yells or shrieks!" This was something so seemingly simple...and yet, so complex.

...and as any jazz musician will tell ya "The first taste is always free" and there I was, needing more.

In the days before the Information Superhighway, I did what every kid then did when they needed to know something their parents didn't - and hit the library. I'd just started high school and visits to the library were an essential part of my weekly educational diet. I went to the music section and selected a book on Duke Ellington, which I brought back to my table. A teacher I admired noticed my book on Duke and complimented me on my clearly non-teenager taste in music. Ego fed, I signed out the book.

...and that led me to Ellington At Newport.

What I loved then about jazz was the discovery - one artist led me to another who's style led me to an influence, so on and so forth. I'm still digging and discovering - and given the low profile jazz has in the modern music marketplace (What Sinatra once called "Equal time in Beatleland") the journey feels personal.

...and I'm still looking for the next fix.

 

Just to contribute my little story. Growing up and most of my adult life I was strictly a rock & roll dude. The Stones, The Beatles Hendrix, etc. I guess that I was never fully conscious of jazz most of life, even if I heard a song here and there. About the end of the last millennium I heard Miles Davis Kind Of Blue and it just hit my senses just right.

I guess that I am kind of a music elitist. I like my music sounding just right, no distortion, instruments in just the right place, lots of dynamics. These are things that jazz has in spades, so I took into jazz like nobody's business. In just the last two decades I must have acquired about 1,000 jazz albums, or more, mostly on SACD.

In hindsight I can see the jazz that already existed in my collection. It is not a stretch from Steely Dan and Supertramp to Lou Donaldson and John Coltrane. Of course my favorite jazz is hard bop from about 1958 to about 1962, but my Mosaic sets go way back to the early 20s and 30s, so I guess now I am a real jazz fan.

Rock

 

Easy. My oldest brother turned me on to music. It was the 70s and he always had (and still has) great taste.

We each had our own bedroom and in his room he had a nice stereo setup. He collected records and let me play them. This was when I was 8 or 9 I guess.

Then he and my middle brother fell hard for the Grateful Dead. At first I didn't get it, but then I did.

Saw my first show at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco in September 1980, on the run that produced "Reckoning". I've been madly in love with the GD ever since. To this very day.

A very natural and joyful transition from the "group mind" (as I heard Phil Lesh describe it) of the GD, led by the inimitable Jerry Garcia, from and to Jazz.

Jazz is my new(er) passion but I'll bring my love of the Dead to my last days.

 

I had spent all my life (63 yo) listening to Dylan, John Martyn, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and various other pop bands Pink Floyd, Beatles etc and was never ever interested in Jazz, found it discordant, and ugly to my ears.

A few years ago I was snooping around my local second hand music shop and spied the metal spine Miles Davis Gil Evans set, I was struck by the presentation of it and the wealth of information within it, it seemed so very respectful of the artists involved, so I bought it and enjoyed it, I then bought Sketches of Spain and In a Silent way, to say I was hooked would be a understatement, just loved them.

I then started reading the "Listening to Jazz" thread started by Lonson, learning a lot, then bought complete Miles Davis box, then slowly started buying anything at all by Miles and have ended up with pretty much everything he had ever released including all the Bootleg series, all the complete box sets (yes, I am a completist).

Have also branched out to Coltrane, Art Blakey, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Monk, Charlie Parker and many others.

I can honestly say that if I never heard another pop record/cd I would not miss at all, but my thirst for jazz is ever increasing.

Sometimes I feel that I had become exhausted or tired of listening to lyrics etc and to just listen to music and admire the discipline and skill etc of jazz musicians is something I have progressed to and am so ever thankful for, it is like a whole new exciting chapter in my musical appreciation has come to be.

 

Listening to college radio starting back in 1979-80. They played a lot of electric stuff like JL Ponty, Pat Metheny, Allan Holdsworth, Weather Report, Larry Carlton. It was all fusion for about three years.

After that I got into Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Miles, Coltrane, Monk, and Horace Silver. And John Scofield. But then I discovered Tribal Tech, and Brand X, and it was more fusion...

 

My relationship with jazz and how I came to love it is quite fortuitous really (and also quite recent).

I was (and still am) a massive fan of the blues. I love John Lee Hooker, which led to getting the soundtrack from the film The Hot Spot which happens to feature Miles Davis. It's definitely not a jazz album but I really liked Miles' playing, enough to seek out some of his albums. I'd heard Miles' best albums were Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew so I went out and bought those. I found KoB boring, but Brew intriguing enough to further explore the electric period. I liked In a Silent Way and Jack Johnson a lot.

So I was digging the fusion stuff but I wasn't pursuing an interest in jazz other than that, until one night my wife was watching American Hustle which features Ellington at Newport quite prominently. I liked what I heard in the film and made a note of it, but it wasn't for a year or so until I stumbled upon the complete double-CD at a second hand CD fair. That's the album where it all clicked for me. Everything about that album is perfect, and I guess from then on I not only "got" jazz but I have really come to love it.

And in case you were wondering, I can't get enough of Kind of Blue now either.

 

For me it was a chance purchase at my local Post Office when I was about twelve years old. They had a rack of LPs at knock down prices. I picked up Sonny Rollins "Sound of Sonny" on Prestige simply because it was cheap and I had money burning a hole in my pocket. Been a big fan of Sonny and jazz ever since.