jazz

He's so understated on this - leaves so much space.

smokin weed and listening to jazz

watching this specifically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoZnindlI78

Smooth

It was Charlie Parker for most of the day in celebration of his centennial. Dug out that Town Hall concert from 1945 that was rediscovered in the '00s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4q1HEkRal8

Archie Shepp's "Four for Trane," which is a masterpiece in my book. How often is a great artist's best LP a tribute album?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu0fuR4tSPY

I was looking for this months ago, and while it's out-of-print on its own, I stumbled on to the 5 Original Albums reissue, which is basically Universal Music's budget reissue of five studio albums that Shepp cut for Impulse! They use the 1990s era remasters, but the whole thing's packaged in cheap cardboard sleeves - the paper itself ain't bad, but they really are cheaply done, with no liner notes, errors in the credits, and poor reproductions of the album covers. (And just to be clear, these are indeed legit reissues.) The one for Four for Trane is particularly shitty, with washed out color on a poor crop job of the original that's squished in vertically. Still, the whole package was less than $12 shipped, and the discs themselves are more than fine. I just wish they did a better job of replicating the original LP sleeves - cosmetically this isn't much better than a pirated disc and it's kind of insulting to an artist's legacy when his best work is presented this way. (Shepp is still with us, but maybe he doesn't care.)

i've never really been into or known a lot about jazz, and now i feel like i can't get enough. it feels like this massive continent though that i only know one or two tiny valleys of. i love oscar peterson and basie and ellington but a tremendous amount of the hard bop stuff - what the cognoscenti love - leaves me pretty cold. i guess i'm kind of a basic jazz bitch. i like bluesy, lyrical jams, but not so much the 12-minute modal journeys. herbie hancock and bill evans are about as far out as i'll push that boat. anyway i'm in love with GRANT GREEN and WYNTON KELLY. hit me up.

Grant Green - Nigeria is just straight amazing from top to bottom

Ben Webster meets Coleman Hawkins is a great one for basic jazz degenerates and is as bluesy as it gets!

Nice - I will look!

As far as new people go I know NOTHING. Literally the only two ppl I know are like Dave Douglas and Shabaka Hutchings. Both of whom I love unreservedly!

Will start trawling through the jazz d-bags threads too...

Tracer I'd poke around in the late 50s/early 60s Blue Note catalog, that will keep you busy for a long time (there are some 12-minute modal journeys in there but plenty of stuff in the vein of Grant Green and Wynton Kelly).

Oh, also I highly, highly recommend these two Bobby Timmons Trio records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30LDcvjONT0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9q4LRyhufo

xp it's Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster I meant, wrong way around!

Some of my favorite basic jazz bitch albums are the Milt Jackson/Ray Charles duets -- Soul Brothers and Soul Meeting.

Go back to the, um, fountainhead and listen to some Count Basie with the All-American Rhythm Section- Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jonathan Loved David Samuel “Papa Jo” Jones- featuring Mr. Five by Five, Jimmy Rushing on vocals.

Yeah I still haven't really ever understood vibes tbh, I don't get it lol I'm so standard.

man alive yeah i love bobby timmons! Late 50s early 60s Blue Note is like CANON DE CHEZ CANON but it does seem like an endless well of amazing music. i'm sure real jazzbos grew out of that in elementary school but hey it's where i'm at.

JR - sounds good. love basie.

I was listening that series of awesome early 60's Andrew Hill albums on Blue Note t'other day. Possibly not what you are strictly looking for TH but they are so good.

One good, one really good thing about jazz, from where I sit right now, just don’t tell anybody, is you don’t really have to like everything everybody else likes. There is so much going on you can just find your own path to thread your way through the maze.

I tell you a really fun cool jazz classic, TH. Shorty Rogers & His Giants - Martians Come Back! from '56

Tracer which "hard bop stuff" in particular leaves you cold?

not questioning your taste, just trying to understand the line btw what you like and what you don't.

Although, James, don't you find that the Jazz Canon looms larger in the appreciation of the music than it does in rock? For instance, you don't even get a shrug on here if you say you hate the Beatles but love some other type of rock music, whereas I think people would seriously question your jazz fan bona fides if you said you hated [iconic jazz artist].
Maybe this reflects the fact that I've been listening to jazz pretty steadily for 35 years, but still feel like I'm an outside to the "real fans". I have been taking my own path through the music as you suggest, but there's a background feeling of "doing it wrong".

There are certain jazz artists that you pretty much never hear any jazz fan say they don't like (Miles, Coltrane, Monk come to mind). TBH it would be pretty interesting to hear someone's case for why they didn't like one of these (but liked jazz).

I had a prof who said he went to music school with metalhead kids who liked fusion but thought Kind of Blue was really boring.

sorry man alive i probably should have said 'post bop' or 'post hard bop'

in my EXTREMELY limited sense of it i feel like once you get to the late 60s, jazz has either turned jammy/funky or cerebral. maybe i just need a big walking bassline to love it idk! i like stuff with riffs, big bold A patterns.

I think if I had to get stuck in a 20th century listening decade it would be '53 -'63.. lol I say "if"

If you want something very un-cerebral, un-post-bop, hard swinging, greasy, and not at all canon, this is probably my favorite not very well known jazz record:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht-cXJO2biI

Nice thanks. i judge this sort of music by whether or not Bob Wills would appreciate it, is how i break it down to an extent.

ha okay i think that organ is even a little bit too on the nose even for me! yowza.

once you get to the late 60s, jazz has either turned jammy/funky or cerebral

There's tons of straight-ahead acoustic hard bop-style jazz all the way through the 70s. The only thing that really changed was the production style. If you can hack the bass sounding like it's strung with giant rubber bands, go to Discogs and look for anything on the Milestone label - albums by Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, and Joe Henderson, and other folks too.

what would you say changed about the production style in the 70s?

to me most stuff sounds a bit closer mic'd. like higher fidelity on each instrument but you lose the sense of all the players being in the room together.

what would you say changed about the production style in the 70s?

A lot cleaner, a lot more isolation, the aforementioned rubber-band sound. I've never written much about 70s jazz production (though maybe I should!), but I did write a piece about Rudy Van Gelder's 1960s productions for Blue Note last year.

by whether or not Bob Wills would appreciate it
Do you know about the musician who played with Bob WIlls and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra?

50s and 60s jazz production is like Steve Albini vs. 70s jazz production is I dunno, like Bob Ezrin.

Don't know if he has an Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath number though.

v much dislike 70s straight ahead jazz production, esp the rubber band bass sound

Lots of people I know don’t like many current jazz production sounds even now. One time I asked a friend why his record sounded so good and he said that he gave the producer/engineer/whatever a Jeff “Tain” Watts CD and said “Make it sound like that!”

There are some good sounding jazz records now. I like the way JD Allen's albums sound. I think the worst recent (recent being relative; this is jazz, after all) production was on Telarc albums of the 90s and early 2000s, just super shiny and digital, every instrument completely separated out in a gleaming sonic vitrine. Awful.

yeah that last JD Allen album had a lovely sound

You also mentioned Oscar Peterson: have you heard his trio w Stan Getz? If you like that, and Getz, maybe try Getz albums a Kenny Baron. You mentioned Ellington, maybe check This One's For Blanton, a late album w Ray Brown, where Duke's as spare one second and as rich the next as needed: it's the elegant Ellington, no orchestra needed, for this scene (Ray Brown's bass and Ellington's left hand are very conversant, though never long-winded). Also the ones with Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, and, if you're in a what the hell mood, try Money Jungle, which is him w Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Mingus's own Blues & Roots has been the gateway for several friends.
Bob Wills might dig (and I think recorded some of the same tunes as) the Nat King Cole Trio, esp. w Oscar Brown Jr. on guitar (Grant Green prob liked Oscar too). Likewise Django Reinhart & Stephane Grappelli, and Willie Nelson's all-instrumental Night and Day, and his mostly-instrumental Let's Face The Music and Dance
Also check: Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s,by Ira Gitler, and, in that same transition/back and forth/two things at once and more, anything involving Charlie Christian---my gateway was Genius of the Electric Guitar, where for instance he's to be found in these raw-edged, tuneful and stompin' group outbursts (live on the radio) w Benny Goodman combos and so on.

JR no!

oh excellent unperson!

yeah the 50s and early 60s just feel like this incredible flowering of the form, you could spend a lifetime learning about it and listening to it. like late 90s-early-00s rap, or 90s house and techno. vast shifting archipelagos of school and subschool.

xpost whoa dow

I think jazz production has been past its nadir for years now. My only complaint about some contemporary jazz production is that some of it kind of sounds *too* good, like it has this luxuriant fullness at all times that can get tiring

money jungle is a huge favourite. have played it approximately 5 million times. i love it.

“this one’s for blanton” looks like it’s extremely my jam - thank you dow. and for all those other recs. i feel well stocked!

It took me like 17 years but Charlie Parker finally sunk in and I can't listen to any other jazz now except for him and the occasional random Monk tune for variety. Even on crummy bootlegs Bird sounds like a laser beam or something, every note perfectly clean and clear and articulated and just fucking alive. It's really something. The real thing. It's nice (a revelation, really!) to finally 'get' why Bird is Bird, why he as a solo voice dominates the entire history of jazz so singularly; he's a summing up of what came before -- the pinnacle! -- and he points towards everything that comes after. I also like more and more nowadays how Charlie Parker's jazz is formally and logically basically short pop tunes, even when his groups spread out live, only mostly pitched at like top speed and curving like corkscrews all over the sonic landscape!

I find now that I have grown, after years of listening quite a lot, to really hear and appreciate the harmonic wholeness of the form, which I think helped a lot in particular with abstracted jazz. By harmonic wholeness I don't mean the chord progressions, but the way the different instruments live in their different ranges, performing chordal functions but still living and breathing as individual voices. The stripped down instrumental combinations evolved to, by the time Bird appears, complement each other almost holographically or something -- and jazz goes from being just a music genre to being a legit classical art form. Or something! Just some random thoughts!

As far as the discussion goes, I like jazz with a couple well-placed mics in a room and no production except a good take! I like classical and opera like that, too. Transparent. Unnatural reverb in particular kills performance-oriented music dead.

how great is Pablo Records. i feel like every one of their LPs is just back room jammin with the greats.

xpost ah that’s really interesting about your journey with Parker. i also have never really clicked with him - like, i can understand intellectually why he was so electrifying. maybe it’s because i’ve had to fight through bad recordings to hear it. i fully intend to revisit but not until i’m “ready” whatever that means lol

ok "This One's For Blanton" is absolutely killing me. MY GOD.

re:'basic jazz bitch' - makes me think about how when i was younger i had a lot of friends on the punk/alt/underground rock spectrum who would mercilessly clown me for liking any jazz that didnt immediately code as difficult or subversive. basically anything that was melodic or non-spiritual-hat was the equivalent of the andrews sisters to them, basic bitch stuff for grandpas and r crumb. now all those dudes are in their 40s and 50s and paying heavy coin for 50s blue note pressings.

i get my 'told ya so' licks in sometimes, but its also a blast to finally be able to talk about non-sun ra jazz with these guys and turn them onto stuff like the ellington suites or charlie parker & machito. one aging hardcore pal flipped recently when i was playing the coltrane/johnny hartman album, had no idea that coltrane played 'stuff like that'. its fun.

xp
you should also listen to Ray Brown on Jimmy Guiffre's The Easy Way, it swings so hard even your eyes will be tapping their toes!

there were so many good bass players in jazz that there isn't really such thing as "the greatest" but Ray Brown is up there!

It's hard to tell what you've heard or not heard Tracer, but the first thing that sprang to mind reading your post was the two volumes of Monk's Genius of Modern Music on Blue Note. Chances are you're already well aware of them, but I've had success playing those for jazz newbies since they're accessible but totally distinctive