Jazz: What made you like it ?

I started to buying jazz vinyl when i was fifteen. IIRC, the first one was Miles’ Sketches of Spain, then Bud Powell trio on Roost and the third was Thelonious Monk’s ‘Himself’.
And when I listened to Monk’s Mood, the closing tune of the record, I was convinced that I would keep listening to jazz for my whole life.

 

I couldn't say jazz was not my first interest in music, as I was raised on it, along with classical, standards, folk, and Broadway. Rock and roll occasionally on the radio.

 

I was a blus/rock/folk lover, due to my two sisters playing stuff for me, and I was just a sponge, absorbing the music I heard and always wanting more.I liked 'Live at the Fillmore East' by the Allman Brothers, especially the way they stretched tunes, but what got me going was the annual Pazz & Jop poll in the Village Voice. In 1972 they rated 'The Inner Mounting Flame' as one of the best albums of the year. I had never heard of them. I had my 16th birthday coming up, so I asked my mom to get me that album, and she did. I also saw that that Mahavishnu was playing in Central Park in August, so I bought two tickets. My birthday is in late June, so I got the album, and I played it every day for over a month straight, and even though I knew these guys were great, it wasn't clicking with me. Went to the concert after begging a friend to go with me, and it was like the blinders were removed from my eyes, it all clicked once I saw them live. Some time after that I was in a record store with a couple friends when one of them spied an album with Joh McLaughlin on it. It was 'Live Evil', and now I was introduced to Miles, so I began getting Miles albums, Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett, etc in an ever expanding circle as I discovered Wayne Shorter, Weather Report, etc. Serendipitously, my sister's boyfriend at the time worked in the mailroom for CTI records, so every week he sent me a box with the latest releases when he found out that I liked jazz. 45 years later and I still love it!

 

Xmas 1979, my cousin gave me a box of Maxell Chrome cassettes, and there was a sampler album with some of the earliest digital recordings. And the last one was a show stopper: Count Basie's band with Ella Fitzgerald singing "You've Changed." (That sparkle in your eye is gone...) By the early 80s I was a heavy user of Miles and Coltrane, and by the Napster era I needed to have all of the Jazz!

 

I grew up in 50's/60's rural setting with only AM radio Pop,Rock, and Country mostly. I never listened to Jazz,nobody in my family did either. Closest I probably got was 70's Van Morrison on certain songs from Tupelo Honey and St. Dominics Preview. Then one day I came home and saw one of my speakers in the upstairs hallway pointed towards the bathroom. Playing was some engaging moody music and my 15 year old son was kicked back in the bath with a pair of shades on. I asked what was up and he replied...I'm just chillin to some Miles. Hmmm....what happened to Nirvana,G&R,Pearl Jam? This was quite the paradigm shift for a 15 year old in the early 90's. Anyway,it was Miles Davis-Kind Of Blue that he was listening to and I took note. A few years later when that son was in college he began playing bass in a local Jazz band and I'd go hear him play in a vibes/bari sax/drum/bass group setting. I started to pick up on certain songs that I liked and asked a lot of questions and found out about various artists. Still, even though exposed to live Jazz I never actively bought it for home listening.

Then, along comes son #2 and he gets involved in HS band and horns and bass. He starts buying and playing Jazz CD's around the house and in the car. Now I'm more exposed to this music and start to listen to the CD's he had...Ah-Um,KOB,Time Out,Giant Steps,Lush Life,Roll Call,some Monk and Miles,Pops,etc. ,pretty good collection for a HS kid. Also attended his Jazz live gigs ,bass, and Jazz started to sink in a bit.

Then,I found SHF and my real education began. I like the sharing of recorded Jazz here and I've learned a lot. Still,I've only scratched the surface. I love you educators and enablers. Jazz has become my main focus lately as far as listening/purchasing records goes. So far I like acoustic hard bop and cool 50's/60's stuff best along with early Southern styles.

 

Vinyl LP The Best OF John Coltrane Atlantic mid 80's. "Naima"

 

Jazz wasn't played in the house when I was growing up. It was almost all R&B, modern (for the time) and oldies. Chose to play the alto sax in middle school and spent some time in the "jazz-rock" band where we played a decent mixture - plenty of chick-boom beats but I still wasn't really aware of the music. I was first chair alto those years, and my 11 y/o self found the solo on James Brown's I Feel Good relatively difficult to play - but kind of fun. Man, if someone had just sat me down and played me some Sonny Stitt, I'm pretty sure my life would be very different now...but I digress. I haven't picked up that instrument in over 2 decades now.

Anyway, I've always had eclectic music tastes, so through the years I skirted around jazz with modern swing and ska and dived deep into reggae and dub. At one point I had Coltrane's Blue Train & A Love Supreme, Monk's Misterioso but ended up selling them in the Great CD Purge (one colossal mistake). One day in the past year and a half or so, I was listening to Count Ossie's Sam's Intro and noticed how it reminded me a lot of the opening lines from Trane's Blue Train song. I had been getting into more instrumental songs by then anyway as I've grown a bit weary of what people say with their mouths, so I chose to dive deep into jazz at that point - instrumental solely. I've grown quite a good sized collection, some pieces better than others. I tend to enjoy hard bop, boogaloo & fusion the most right now.

Here's Sam's Intro. I think it's Cedric 'Im' Brooks playing tenor, but I'm not 100% certain:

 

Hearing John Coltrane's tune India.

 

The epiphanic moment was John Coltrane's opening solo in "Blue Train". I felt so thrilled I felt the need of getting into jazz immediately.

 

Agreed. What kills me is that so often the numbers of black musicians on the stage outnumbers the white musicians. And Buffalo has a long and storied jazz tradition and a very significant minority population (that within the city limits constitutes a majority) so it's both perplexing and worrisome.

 

I just noticed Yesternow had started this thread and what his avatar is. Long before I could consider myself a fan of jazz I'd gone with a friend to one of his friends' house. The kid's parents were home and we were upstairs in his bedroom and did a couple of tokes out the window before he put on a record by a band I'd never heard of. It was Mahavishnu Orchestra--Inner Mounting Flame. Then he put on MilesDavis's Jack Johnson. Shortly thereafter another friend got me turned on to Return To Forever. I recognized the jazz influence in all of those but they didn't strike me as "proper" jazz.

I grew up in a household where a lot of that "proper" jazz was played. I think the reason it took so long for me to embrace the larger idiom was that my father never hesitated to voice his negative opinion about the music of our youth. It took me many years to mature to a point where I understood both jazz and the place where my father was coming from, and then to forgive him for being kind of a jerk with his kids.

 

Kind of Blue. That album changed my perception of jazz forever

 

I'm still working my way into it, but the moment that started it was one night in spring when I was sitting in a smoker's room with a cigar, depressed, and all of a sudden heard Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain", to be exact his interpretation of the Concierto de Aranjuez. I was fascinated and after that I listened to Birth of the Cool, Ascenseur pour l'echaufaud, Kind of Blue before starting with 'Trane, Tjader and Brubeck

Hopefully I'll get round to more of all that Jazz

 

Glenn Miller's AAF and Band Of The AEF, non-civilian V-Discs and radio broadcast recordings. Now THAT was the ultimate swing band. It just kind of grew out from there for me. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the absolute tops though. In modern jazz I'd also rate Dave Brubeck very highly. Miles is okay too.

 

Watching Charlie Brown specials when I was a kid... And to bring it full circle, we occasionally play these same songs in my band when the need arises.

 

When I was a kid, my older brother had a copy of Heavy Weather by weather report. And I loved it when he played the song Birdland on his stereo. So when he was off to college, I snuck into his room, and borrowed this record one day and I started listening to the whole album on my new stereo that I was desperately wanted to find music for. And after several listens where I didn't get-it at all, eventually I began to get-it, and it suddenly transformed from sounding like random noises into sounding like incredible music.

I then discovered some Return to Forever inside of my brother's collection, and after several listens to those albums, I was hooked forever.

 

Seeing it live is the only way to really appreciate the musical interplay; with any LP you're just imagining what it's like. Like watching sports on TV, you're missing half the action. Not saying LPs are waste of time but they're just not there.

My first live show was at the Banff Centre featuring Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler, Steve Coleman and others I can't remember. I thought I liked jazz before that, but after I LOVED jazz. I was in awe of the chemistry, something clicked in my soul and then I was totally hooked.

 

In the early 90s I had a copy of CD Review magazine, iirc, and it had an article about Joe Henderson and his rebirth with Lush Life, the Music of Billy Strayhorn. Even though I heard heard some jazz, that was the first jazz album that I searched out to buy. Got hooked with that and the follow-up So Near, So Far and then back tracked to Joe’s Blue Note catalog and got really hooked branching out to all the Blue Note artists and then adding over time Coltrane and other Impulse stars. I now dabble in a little avant garde - Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago, etc, but it has been a progression over a long time and Joe will always be my first love!

 

The first album I really got into was Oscar Peterson’s Night Train. That was about ten years ago and my jazz interest is still very much a work in progress. Hope to fully “get there” one sweet day. Until then there’s always good ol’ r’n’r!!

 

Nothing in jazz really grabbed me until I heard Dancing in Your Head by Ornette Coleman. That one made me crazy about Coleman. Immediately graduated to Pharoah Sanders. Then on to Miles and Trane. Never looked back.

 

When I was in grade school my bedroom was 1/2 flight of stairs up from my dad's basement listening room. He loved jazz, played jazz records, sometimes playing along on the cornet. He also played jazz and dance gigs on the weekend with other local musicians. I fell asleep listening to my dad spinning and playing jazz standards. How could I not love jazz?

 

Sitting in a now closed Jazz Club in NYC with just me and a friend watching Dave McKenna play 'Limehouse Blues'.

 

My Mom listened to WNEW-AM in NY all the time when I was a kid. It wasn’t all jazz, really, but it soaked in. Wiilem B Williams and the Make Believe Ballroom was the first DJ I remember.

 

I think that unless you grew up in a house where jazz plays all the time, jazz is one of those things you really can't appreciate until you reach a certain maturity level.

For me, that was around my mid-20s. Around 2005 or so, I was browsing at a record shop and found a brand new reissue of Mingus Ah Um. I liked the cover art, I knew Columbia had an amazing repertoire of jazz recordings, and I had seen Charles Mingus listed on tons of lists of best bassists ever. So, I took the plunge. I remember putting it on the turntable that night and just being blown away by the musicianship and the sound. It was like I had a bunch of dudes jamming in my living room.

Up until that point, I had always viewed jazz as that "old music that my grandparents listened to." Mingus Ah Um dispelled that stereotype for me and really sent me down the jazz rabbit hole.

I like all periods of jazz from the 50s to the modern day, but I find that most of my favorite jazz recordings were done between roughly 1955 to 1980. I very much like cool, bop, post-bop, that style. I also like a lot of the fusion that was going on in the 1970s. I also really liked some of the loungy, spacey, electro-jazz from the 2000s, stuff like Medeski, Martin & Wood.