Jazz: What made you like it ?

John McLaughlin and jazz fusion

 

I've been playing this record A LOT this week:


It's definitely not the same sound but it made think about 4hero, Goldie (timeless) ... things that I used to love during the 90s.

And those albums, although not jazz, were one of the main reasons I got into jazz.

That makes me think that some of the kids that now are enjoying Yusef Kamal, Comet is coming .... will soon be in looking into the classics.
Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders....

 

I was being on a collision course with jazz ever since I grew out of my teenage passion for pop hits in the 80s and started to look for a more inspiring soundtrack to my life. Throughout the 90s I would gradually exhaust easily accessible pool of rock-related music from the past few decades and I even picked quite a few jazz/fusion titles along the way.

However, I had not crossed into a jazz realm until a wise guy at a music forum at the break of the new millennium responded to my complaints about the sorry state of contemporary rock and hinted me to check some artists from the NY downtown and Chicago AACM scenes. That was finally something alive and happening I could relate to and participate the way I had experienced 90s rock during my 20s, not just archival discoveries from the remote decades.

And from Zorn, Vandermark et al. I began to dig out their roots in a more comprehensive manner, which would reveal larger and larger areas and sediments previously hidden from my ears, jazz and otherwise. Listening to jazz in a longer run changed profoundly my approach to rock, for example it opened my ears to long overlooked post-punk music that had been largely incomprehensible to me, when I had approached it from the classic rock positions. (Avant-)jazz opened my ears to new wave, so to speak.

Another thing that made jazz my inevitable companion was my predilection for live music. When listening to rock in the 90s I quickly discovered my affinity to live recordings, which conveyed better IMO raw emotions and pure energy, often lost in studio perfectionism and over-polishing. Unfortunately at that time I had fairly limited access to live rock tapes (except for the canonical set of classic "live" albums), so crossing into jazz gave me the instant access to a huge pool of live recordings, not just studio-doctored compilations, but genuine documents of full concert sets.

Last but not least, jazz is still goes incredibly strong and the passing decade, although quite good for rock too, has been extremely exciting in jazz. Another great reason to dig it now!

 

I had to think back really hard, but it must have been as a child playing the guitar. I came across Django Reinhardt, and specifically "Nuages". I have always had a lot of interest in composing and musical theory, and it was a really interesting and invigorating jump from the often simplistic chords, chord sequences and scales most rock guitarists I was familiar with stuck to. It's a strange comparison, but as a child, I thought rock and blues were what the guitar was about. On the other hand, I already was familiar with some symphonic music and knew there were other sounds out there. It was also interesting to find those same instruments, like Grappelli's violin, set to a swinging rhythm.

It didn't shape my interest in jazz, really (I'm not a swing aficionado), it just opened up this thing I knew had to be there.

 

For me there was no one specific trigger, It was more of a natural progression. I grew up listening to R&B , Blues and Soul Music,
Then in the mid 196os I became aware of Soul Jazz (Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, Lee Morgan's Sidewinder etc) and this led me into listening to the Blue Note roster of artists ( including Monk), seeking out their earlier releases and the current ones as they came out.
A bit later In the 1960s I read a couple of books by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Blues People and Black Music. This prompted me to seek out and listen to the music of Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Coltrane, Ornette and all the other musicians who played what was then known as The New Thing. I then decided to round out my listening by seeking out some of the earlier forms of Jazz such as Swing, Bebop & Cool.
Today my journey both forwards and backwards is still ongoing as the music keeps evolving.

 

Jazz: What made ME like it, my story
Feb 2011, Houston TX. I went down to Houston for my company for some cross training. While there I made some friends and had my PS3 and a game or 2. Another guy also had his PS3 with him. I can't remember his name but one evening in his room with a few other guys enjoying a game and talking about some others he Slaps a game case in my lap and say "GO PLAY THIS, I think you'll like it". That game was Fallout New Vegas. It took a while for me to get into the game but what helped the most what the music on the one radio station, Radio New Vegas.
If you don't know Fallout is a video game series set in the future but stuck in the the 1950, and it's post-apocalyptic, a global atomic war between the US and China. The world is essentially stuck in the 1950 but it plays on what people in the 50's thought the future might be. This music is Jazz, Big Band, and Crooners. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin, The Andrews Sisters, The Ink-spots and so many others. I fell in love with the music of the 30's-50's. I started collecting Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby records (LP's and 78's) because of that game.
My love of old jazz crooners and big bands made me curious about modern contemporary jazz, which I started listing to almost exclusively since 2015. If you have SiriusXM check out the channel Watercolors. Dave Koz, Boney James, Mindi Abair, Norman Brown, I could go on.

 

I was inspired by a Miles Davis poster on the wall of a local Borders bookstore and bought “Kind of Blue” on a whim. I was absolutely blown away by it. That’s all it took.

 

I just remembered that Grand Theft Auto 4 (which came out in 2008 and I played it that year) had a jazz channel. Miles Davis & Duke Ellington made my heart skip a beat when they played.

 

Seeing the Dave Brubeck Quartet live at university in the late 60s. I'd never seen or heard anything like it before. That led me to Miles, Coltrane, Ahmad Jamal, Monk, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins and on and on.

 

Somewhere in my 20's/30's, (now 62), I made a conscious decision to begin listening to Jazz. This most likely an outgrowth of my already listening to Jazz Rock - Steely Dan's AJA is one of my all time favorite albums after all, as well as fusion like Spyro Gyra which brought me to Weather Report.

From reviews of albums in whatever stereo magazine I was subscribed to at the time I came to buy 2 random Jazz CDs, Kind Of Blue and Don't Mess With Mr. T. Well Turrentine was easy to digest, after all its not much of a move going from Wayne Shorter's tenor sax on Aja to Stanley's work on the Tenor Sax. I think it was this early affinity for those 2 that made me a Tenor Sax fan. Today I stop everything when Dexter Gordon playing his sax comes on.

Kind Of Blue, that was a different story. Every now and then I'd put it on, listen, and put it away to repeat the process again in the future. Meanwhile, in my 40's/50's I moved to PA, moved more into Home Theater listening over Stereo, and put away my turntable mostly due to WAF, then in 2010 divorced. I pulled out my Denon table and began spinning my old records. And 1 day, I put on Kind Of Blue and it just clicked for me.

From the boards I've been guided by 'what I'm listening to' forums on various audio boards, 1st home theater-centric boards and now just audio such as this one here. From get togethers I've ID-ed folks whose taste mirrors mine and whose opinions I respect. And I was delighted to find that once you get ID-ed as a Jazz-head who collects vinyl folks will just send you tips, links and suggestions, and outright albums and CDs.

There it is in a nutshell. And parallel to my starting in on Jazz, I had the thought in 2010 that I should start broadening my knowledge and appreciation of Classical. In fact, when I first starting going to record stores to buy vinyl, it was originally for Classical vinyl, and some Rock. They practically give away Classical, why I bought a NM boxed set of Beethoven's 9 Symphonies on the Deutsche Grammophon label for $1, incredible!!! I quickly built a library of a thousand Classical albums, most for $1 per 'item, many items being multi album boxed sets.

But a funny thing was happening, for all the Classical, and the smattering of Rock, I was also buying a Jazz title or two each visit, a Miles here, a Lee Morgan there, then a Coltrane, etc. But as time went buy, the volume of Classical decreased, the Jazz increased, and the Rock stayed the same.

Anyway I hope that gets to your question.

Gene

 

I first started getting interested in jazz in college (late 80s). I hardly knew anything about the music, but it seemed "cool" to me. I had heard of the great Charlie Parker, so I got a compilation of some of his Verve sides on cassette. I found it was good music to put on while studying (no words to distract me).

I would regularly browse the jazz section at record stores and I picked up a few things here and there--I got a couple more Parker compilations and a couple of Coltrane CDs. I checked out Bitches Brew but HATED it at the time. I didn't really know what to buy and didn't know anyone who was into it to guide me. A record store employee spotted me in the jazz section one day and recommended Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I didn't get it that day but remembered the recommendation and picked it up a while later and loved it. (I remember thinking it sounded a little like Sonic Youth to me!)

I was still a dabbler. Flash forward a couple of years to law school in Chicago. I picked up a copy of Mingus Ah Um on something of a whim, I think. I put it on and it blew me away. Like, whoa. This is up my alley.

I soon found a used copy of the first edition of the Penguin Guide to Jazz. It became my bible. I learned a lot from that book. I remember when I got it, I thought, well, I'll never own more than maybe 50 jazz records, so this will be a good way to figure out what to buy. But I soon became obsessed, and for probably about a decade or more I listened to practically nothing but jazz. I would seek out records that were highly recommended in different record guides (which I loved poring over), or on this new thing called the internet.

I no longer listen exclusively to jazz. I even kind of fell away from listening to it much for a while a few years back. But I'm back into it lately and finding so much exciting new (and old) music. I feel like it nourishes my soul more than most music.

 

I had a few jazz-inspired / jazz-related albums in my rock/pop collection over the years such as Zappa’s ‘Hot Rats’ and Prince’s ‘The Vault’ but it was listening to the latter one day when I decided I needed to broaden my horizons so bought ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘A Love Supreme’. Two very different albums of course. I took to the former straight away. The latter blew me away in the sense that it was like nothing I’d heard before but it took me a while to get into it. Meanwhile I was snapping up all the big jazz albums at a rate of knots, particularly as many could be found on cd for as little as £3 each.

 

Thanks for calling.
That is a long, long story. Here is part I
Beginning allready in highschool in the special class music we had to select a topic for a special report in front of the class. Some selected Mozart, some Bach, some Teleman but these were not "my cup of tea" because I listened more to the US dancebands on the german radio. So I selected what was known as "Jazz" but noone on my highschool had really an Idea what is was including myself. My special topic then was the orchestra of Shorty Rogers coming from an 10" LP "Cool and Crazy". I saw only strange faces staring at me when playing thisd record and giving some amateur explanations about these sounds.
At that time I had listened also for some time to the AFN radio in Germany and was confronted with different sounds which were neither the usual pop pop at that time but had a different sound. To make it short most impressive were a group called "the Four Freshmen" and the music of a band of Stan Kenton as well as US dancebands like Ray Anthony.
Radio was the only entertainment at that time (= 1950ies). US LPs did cost a fortune if you did see some in the windows of the shops.
Also in the night I was listening to the VoA, an allied forces broadcast coming via long wave from Tangeer (Maroc) just after WII . The voice of Willis Conover really made it for me and the next 50 years.
Some of my pocketmoney was invested in Records and a portable turntable (45 & 33 1/3 rpm) with 2 speakers.
It was a "Perpetuum Ebner" (PE) brand.
That was the beginning and there is no end until today. Jazz is a living art and always changing as does life
W.

 

This is tricky.

Most jazz washes over me with no effect...which is a great shame,
given how excited I initially was about it.

My first turntable came in 1998, and I duly bought the obligatory Kind of Blue,
and another album.

Wonderful, but it was the second purchase that made me think a whole new
world was opening up - Miles Smiles, or, more specifically, Circle.

Circle easily makes it in my top 10 favourite pieces ever of any genre; probably number one more often than not.

It just never got any better than that, either with Miles, or anyone/anything else,
and I threw a lot of time and money at it for quite a few years.

Long story short, I hit the jazz jackpot first try, and should have stopped right there.

Think I wasn't disappointed?

This was how jazz got me into Circle.

 

In 1968 I was a huge Hendrix fan. But being a 12 year old in small-town Wisconsin, it wasn't all that simple to find out about cutting edge music. Moved to England, luckily, and read the music press, esp Melody Maker, voraciously. As well as avant and prog rock, eventually I read fascinating articles about Jazz guys like Miles Davis, Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman. Was hooked with the first track on my first Jazz album:

 

Well I would not underwrite this (I mean the last part of the quote).
Correct is the first part but there is more. Have you ever looked into the big bands?
W.

 

Ah, bless!

I knew there'd be some well- meaning souls trying to rehabilitate the enterprise for me
with some alternative suggestions.

I'm not going to itemise what I listened to; suffice it to say, it was as much and as varied
as a primarily rock/pop orientated non- musician could rationally be expected to stomach.

It included bigger bands, smaller bands, soloists, and fusion of all eras.

I'm not claiming it was an exhaustive search, but it exhausted me.

Cheers!

 

Well accepted.
Jazz is like life it changes constantly and your preferences may change again. Who knows. The Lord?
See you then.
;-]]
W.

 

What got me into listening to jazz was in the early to mid 7os when my dad bought a pile of jazz records off of a student who needed money for the flight home at the end of his course. In the pile was some Art Blakey, some Les McCann (inc "Plays The Hits" which featured Johnny Pacheco) and two live Cannonball Adderley Sextet records - one recorded in New York and the other in Japan. I loved those albums and they were my route into Weather Report (Zawinul was the pianist on both), Ellington and Coltrane (Duke's "Come Sunday" and the Trane tribute "Brother John" are both on the "Nippon Soul" album). That's what got me started. Adderley was also my jumping off point to "Kind of Blue".

I would have got there eventually but hearing "Gemini" for the first time was a revelation at a time when I thirsted for new music but couldn't afford new records very often and our local library only had classical "Gemini" is a long Jimmy Heath tune (something which I was already attuned to via Prog) but the solos were another world. Lateef's solo especially which has some over-blowing on the tenor and hints at non western tonalities. I could also pick out the main modal riff on the bass a lot easier than anything with Chris Squire on it. No small thing when you are 13/14 and trying to get to grips with an instrument. Lateef's oboe on "Syn-Athesia" was also unlike anything else I had heard at that point. It's very Miles / Evans and also has a bit of a "Far East Suite " feel but again with a more shifting and unsettling harmony. Not a big jump from there to "Nubians of Plutonia" but it took me another seven or eight years to get there.

Amazing records. Then and now.

 

This my entire jazz collection:

frank zappa - hot rats
billie holiday - lady in satin
billie holiday - body and soul
charile parker with strings
miles davis - in a silent way
miles davis - bitches brew
miles davis - big fun
weather report - sing the body electric
herbie hancock - crossings
herbie hancock - mwandishi
alice coltrane&carlos santana - illuminations
brand X - unorthodox behavior
billy cobham - spectrum

Would you call me a jazz fan?

 

If you like those records, yes.

 

nice! I thought other jazz fans would reject me.

 

It's a big tent, man!

 

One day in the summer of 1996, shortly after my grandmother died, I was driving aimlessly in the car listening to the radio and someone played Lush Life, the Billy Strayhorn song, as sung by Johnny Hartman, with John Coltrane and his band backing him up. It suited my mood perfectly and that was the first time jazz connected with me.

It's now one of my favourite genres of music. Some real titans worked in this genre.

 

I was learning to play piano and was interested in music that featured piano, keyboard, etc. I was always draw to rock/pop that had piano, but it’s limited. I then stumbled on Jazz trios and jazz I’m general as piano is part of most jazz. I no longer play piano but still enjoy jazz (second to various rock genres I listen to).