What Jazz Records Would You Reccommend?

zmotula asks: "What Jazz records do you think are a must-have for a Jazz Geek? I've got about twenty records I really love (Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Tijuana Moods by Charlie Mingus, Lush Life by John Coltrane, just to mention some) and I want to spend some more money on buying more. Alas, I can only afford buying around two CDs a month. What records do you think are essential?"

Comments

John Zorn.

[Roto-Rooter Man]

If you're into easy listening, I recommend John Zorn.

Two Suggestions

[StillDocked]

Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Ella and Louis on Verve Records (which isn't the best of either of their work, however, they are amazing together).

Another suggestion I would make is listen to the Music Choice Jazz channels, which are available on most cable and dish systems(in the States at least) They play great music and have the song/album information.

Get Dizzy.

[handsomepete]

You've got to have a little Dizzy Gillespie in your collection. Pick something from later in his career (there's a three disc Verve comp that covers his career pretty thoroughly), then pick up Groovin' High which has some really beautiful orchestrated music that's perfect for... well... anytime, really.

Let's See

[GypC]

"Mingus Ah Um" Charles Mingus

"Bitches Brew" Miles Davis (early acid jazz, very unnerving)

Try some big band stuff, you can't go wrong with anything by Duke Ellington.

You're definitely going to need some Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday.

Good Jazz Labels

[mcSey921]

Good Jazz is easy to find by label. Look for anything on:

• Blue Note (anything)
  
• Prestige (50's to 70's)
  
• Verve (60's)
  
• Atlantic (make sure it's jazz;) (50's to 70's)
  
• Savoy (any)
  
• Pacific related jazz labels (50's to 70's)
  
• CTI (any)
  

Further if Creed Taylor produced it, buy it. If Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, for Chrissake buy it!

Getting CD reissues of a lot of these labels is not a problem, and you always guaranteed pretty good stuff. Also check out Emusic.com, they've got a pretty good selection of jazz in a hastle free (though sometimes crappy quality) mp3 format.

mcsey

Emusic has 128 Kb joint-stereo mp3s? What is this 1999?

What about modern Jazz

[linkages]

Ok. Enough suggestions for classic Jazz. If you want some more modern sounding albums, I would suggest the following:

Any Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.
You really can't go wrong here.

Jaco Pastorious in any form which includes solo albums and any Yellow Jackets CD you can find.

Victor Wooten
By far the best modern Jazz bassist around.Also part of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

Stanley Jordan
This man is just amazing. Plays the guitar with both hands like its a piano. If you can find any of the live stuff you will defineatly be able to tell that it is live and he is just that good.

If you want more mellow stuff try John Pattatuci (spelling?). Modern Jazz bassist that plays with lots of emotion which most will translate into lullabies. Morons.

Can you tell that I am a bass player.

Re:What about modern Jazz

[SimplexO]

Can you tell that I am a bass player.

And on the modern saxophone front:

My personal idol, Michael Brecker. My fav CD is Two Blocks From The Edge. On there is Delta City Blues which shows Mr. Brecker's extraordinary control over his overtones... It is phenominal!

Also, try Joshua Redmond's Wish. He playes with (among others) Pat Matheny who is always a treat. I know it might sound corny, but you ought to listen to their version of Tears in Heaven. Tasty!

Also:

Any GRP All-Star CD is worth your money. It's like having every big-time artist under the GRP label playing in one of the tightest big-band's ever. I'm just surprised they could keep their egos in check!

Dave Grusin Presents: West Side Story is a remake of the original, but (in my opinion) is better than the original soundtrack.

Hope someone found these helpful.

P.S. It is always the best to get CD's of people you have played live with. I have played with Patitucci, Jim Widner, The Jazz Ambassadors, and other less-known yet still stellar guys.

My Top Ten album

[light101]

"Kind of Blue" Miles Davis Columbia CK 40579

"Night Train" Oscar Peterson Verve 821 724-2

"Time Out" Dave Brubeck Columbia VCK 40585

"Birth of Cool" Miles Davis Capitol Jazz C2-92862

"A Love Supreme" John Coltrane MCA Impulse GRD155

"Getz / Gilberto" Stan Getz/Jao & Astrud Gilberto Verve 810 048-2

"Giant Steps" John Coltrane Atlantic 781337-2 Rhino R2 71984

"Blue Train" John Coltrane Blue Note B2-46095

"Sketches of Spain" Miles Davis Columbia VCK40578

"Bill Evans Trio Sunday at the Village Vanguard" Bill Evans Riverside RCD-018-2

I like this type of Ask Slashdot

[The Mayor]

When I am new to a music form, I tend to seek out the opinions of "experts" with that music form in order to start my collection. I'd love to see this same question asked with other music forms. Rap, house music, world music, jam bands, alternative music....let's see a string of these questions.

If the music labels would only wake up and realize that people that engage in P2P filesharing actually buy *more* music, they might realize that this is the perfect application for (illegal) downloading of copyrighted material. Want to expose yourself to some of this music? Download a bunch of mp3s. Buy what you like (some of the liner notes on these jazz albums are fantastic), and delete the rest. After all, you don't want the RIAA on your butt when they come to arrest 1/6 of the population!

Don't ask me, find out for yourself

[babbage]

It sounds like you're off to an excellent start -- you're about where I am in learning about great old jazz. If you want to go beyond this, I highly recommend raiding the CD section of your local library. I've gotten to sample box sets from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, a great Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington set, etc from there, not to mention lots of individual albums.

To go beyond that, read & listen. When Christopher Lydon used to do the public radio show The Connection from WBUR in Boston, he used to do lots of great jazz shows. The ones on Kind of Blue & A Love Supreme greatly deepend my appreciation of what was already two of my favorite albums, and Lydon's enthusiasm for the music also got me interested in hearing more from people like Count Basie and others. Thanks to the magic of RealAudio and the generosity of Boston University, you can still listen to these great radio shows today. On a similar note, NPR's Curious Listeners Guide to Jazz looks like a pretty good overview of the genre but deeper conniseurs than me might disagree about that one.

Really though, the library is the best thing. Check out everything you can, make a note of what you like & what doesn't do anything for you, and focus on the artists & time periods that you like the best. For me, the stuff from the late 40s (Davis' "Rebirth of the Cool", 1948 [?]) through the late 50s (1959 gave us Davis' "Kind of Blue", Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" & "Blues & Roots", and Coltrane's "Giant Steps" -- four of my favorites) and into the early 60s (Contrane's "Blue Train", 1961) seems to have been the golden age of jazz. Before that was a lot of big band & swing (fun, but not as personally satisfying to me) and after that came a lot of avant garde & psychedelic stuff that I only care for in small doses.

As for whether you'll like modern stuff, I dunno. The 60s & 70s seemed to bring a lot of psychedelic free jazz & funk, but personally I haven't yet found anything from that era or since that has won me over. The closest thing I can find to modern jazz that I like is Martin Medesky & Wood, who in some ways do an interesting blend of that older cool jazz mixed well with modern hip hop -- making me wonder just what John Coltrane would have done if anyone thought to have a DJ in a band back in the 60s. My problem with MMW though is the whole hippie jam band thing, which I find great for naptime. Oh well. The other modern jazz person I've found to be consistently interesting is John Zorn; if you've ever heard Mr Bungle's albums and tried to puzzle out how they got to be so different from what Faith No More did, blame/thank John Zorn. To the extent that the first Bungle album didn't sound like "The Real Thing", to my ear it's almost all Zorn's influence (he produced the album). This stuff is fascinating to listen to, but it can barely be described as music in any conventional sense: his Cobra album seems to go out of its way to discard rhythm, melody, harmony & tempo -- it's just vaguely organized bursts of sound on disc. Very very weird.

Bonus points: compare & contrast the album cover for "Blue Train" with that of one of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs -- the cover art & logo are similar, and the back cover tiny font text are like mirrors of each other. First time I ever got a chance to see Cowboy Bebop (again, at the library -- I don't have cable tv :), I could tell just from the cover that the people that did this had excellent taste :) :) :)

Anyway, this is al

Re:What kind of Jazz?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Question: Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G - it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely - but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally supportive of other musicians it seems.

Pat Metheny's Answer: Kenny G is not a musician I really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. There was not much about the way he played that interested me one way or the other either live or on records. I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like Grover Washington or David Sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - Lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. But he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the key moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again). The other main thing I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.

Of course, I am aware of what he has played since, the success it has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians and serious listeners. This controversy seems to be largely fueled by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years.

And honestly, there is no small amount of envy involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so well financially, especially when so many of them who are far superior as improvisers and musicians in general have trouble just making a living. there must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than Kenny G on his chosen instruments. It would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement.

Having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many jazz musicians (myself included, given the right "bait" of a question, as I will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as to say that what he is playing is not even jazz at all.

More right here...