Frank Zappa once said,
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny."
And if you want to hear jazz, Zappa certainly recorded a fair amount--pretty much every Zappa album has at least one track that would qualify as "jazz." But there are "jazzier" artists I'd recommend before FZ, or perhaps it would be better to say that jazz wasn't Zappa's primary intention, but he often committed many acts of jazz in the course of his artistic pursuits.
Jazz... There is a great episode of "Reading Rainbow" that would be an excellent intro to anyone new to the artform, but who knows when that will be on again? I'll briefly summarize how Levar Burton sums up what jazz is.
Jazz happens when a highly proficient musician/musicians start playing on a theme, then improvisize off of that theme, often deliberatley creating tension by playing with time signatures, dissonance, strange key changes and unusual chord patterns before returning the listener back to the 'comfortable and familiar' of the original theme just before the end.
There are many styles that jazz can follow--Ragtime, New Orleans/Chicago, Bebop, Big Band, Jazz Folk, Jazz Fusion, Hard Bop, Post-bop, Avant-Garde (or "Out There") Jazz, Scat, Latin Jazz, Mainstream Jazz, M-Base, Acid Jazz, Smooth Jazz (can be often mistaken for elevator music or Muzak...), Swing, and Lounge. One could document the styles, or just list the various "greats" and the style or styles they created or contributed to. I'm just going to throw out some names and genres that I would recomend to someone starting out, stuff that come to mind as signinficant which means its really stuff I've listened to more recently than other genres/artists.
First post was quite excellent, Nate--I'm not up on all those old guys like I used to be, but Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet...all good "old stuff." I have nothing to add or amend to that list, and would recommend anyone who likes the old old stuff to listen to
Ray Smith's Jazz Decades streaming on WGBH Sunday nights. Personally I really like the direction that jazz in went after the late 40's, when Miles Davis and Charlie Parker first started to stand out from the Big Bands like Duke Ellington, so that's mostly what I will recommend here.
Trumpeters Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis, along with Charlie Parker, basically these three took jazz out of the Big Band era in the late 40s and into the solo/improvisational Bop or Bebop style played in smaller groups...Bird went in the ground, Miles went Cool and Dizzy went Latin...Meanwhile the Modern Jazz Quartet, led by pianist John Lewis--with the cool vibes of Milt Jackson, took jazz in a more erudite direction. They're an incredible West Coast sound ensemble -- give
Django and
Concorde a good listen...also the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond on alto sax, whose musical goal was to try to make his horn sound like a "dry martini." He succeeded brilliantly with that. Brubeck's 1959
Time Out and his 1963
At Carnegie Hall are good places to start to hear that West Coast / Cool Jazz sound at its best.
One essential jazz musician from this era is saxophonist John Coltrane. He came to the fore playing Hard Bop with Miles in the mid-50s, developing an absolutely mind-blowing style of playing called "sheets of sound." He also began deliberately incorporating overblowing into his playing, much the same way Hendrix would deliberately introduce feedback into his compositions a decade later. (
My Favorite Things and
Giant Steps are a good starting place to begin with Coltrane -- anything he did in the 50s with Miles Davis, Red Garland or Thelonius Monk. Coltrane's essential masterpiece,
A Love Supreme), with his classic quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. After 1965 Coltrane parted ways with modal jazz and went way out into free jazz--a lot of squonk and honk; some people like it, other people call it noise. Ornette Coleman (another early leader of the Avant garde "free jazz", start off with "The Shape of Jazz to Come"), Eric Dolphy is another free jazz sax player --
Out To Lunch is required listening.
Ben Webster was another often unsung sax great of the 50s and 60s, more west coast though, and defintely not avant garde. Talk about "acid jazz" though, one night in the mid-80's WGBH played 6 hours of nothing but late 50s Ben Webster while my friend Uncle Meat and I were tripped our asses off, sitting his AMC Gremlin and drinking cheap--ah, never mind all that. Ben Webster's warm warm tones will be permanently etched in my mind...Another great alto sax player from this time is Cannonball Adderly.
More about Miles Davis. First the guy invented Be-bop with Charlie Parker. Then in the early 50's
Birth Of The Cool laid the foundations for Cool Jazz, but then he abandoned it almost immediately for hard bop and his first great quintet with Coltrane, then went Modal with
Sketches of Spain and the classic jazz album of all time,
Kind Of Blue. After this he puts together his Second Great Quartet with Wayne Shorter (sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass), a group that composed some of the greatest most sophisticated Modal & Post Bop ever laid down. Almost anything any of those guys recorded in the sixties is worth a listen, especially Wayne Shorter's stuff. Then Miles plugged jazz into the wall in the late 60's. First he invented what would later be called ambient with
In a Silent Way and then all out Jazz-Rock Fusion with his next release,
Bitches Brew.
Out of those sixties Miles Davis bands came just an amazing slew of 70's fusion: Tony Williams Lifetime, Chick Corea's Return to Tomorrow, Wayne Shorter's Weather Report (with the incomparable Jaco Pastorius on bass, well, maybe Les Claypool is comparable...). John McLaughlin, guitarist on Bitches Brew, founded the absolutely brilliant The Mahavishnu Orchestra--check out
Inner Mounting Flame and especially
Birds of Fireif you really want a good dose of jazz fusion...
Just before Hendrix died he jammed with Mclaughlin, but perfectionist that he is McLaughlin won't let the tapes of those sessions see the light of day (hell, it's taken nearly 20 years just for "the lost Trident sessions" to see the light of day)--but is you want an idea of where Hendrix was heading, Larry Young, (also from Davis' B-Brew band) jammed out on Hendrix's posthumous "Nine To The Universe" Too bad Jimi choked to death one week before he was scheduled to go into the studio with Miles himself...
By the time Chick Corea left Miles to form Return to Forever (employing the young Stanley Clarke on bass) jazz fusion began to blur into prog rock, and bands like King Crimson, Yes, Traffic, Emerson Lake & Palmer and even the Grateful Dead begin to sound jazzier and jazzier as a result...
And the masterpiece of it all, Miles Davis 1975
Agharta. No band ever jammed harder or more telepathically than Miles band did that afternoon in Osaka... absolutely amazing stuff.
This is getting long, so I'm just going to throw out some more great names from the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Each of these guys put out some phenomenal material (and those that's still alive still do): Freddie Hubbard, Paul Desmond, Horace Silver, Red Garland, Roy Haynes, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson...
Current--go check these guys and gals out if they come to a jazz fest or club near you: Joshua Redman, Eric Alexander, Christian Scott , Anat Cohen, Brad Mehldau, Esperanza Spalding, Kenny Baron, James Carter, Steve Coleman, Joe Lovano, Cyrus Chestnut, John Scofield, Christian McBride, Wallace Roney, Chris Potter, Geri Allen, Marcus Miller...Medeski, Martin and Wood and The Bad Plus are worth checking out too.
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Posted 18 April 2004 - 10:45 PM
