So, jazz.
There’s too much ground to cover here, really, because I can’t think of another genre so sprawling, even if what most people think of as ‘jazz’ is arguably a closed circle, or to quote one of the most influential figures in jazz:
We gotta start somewhere so where better than Davis, who’s behind the first album that Cuba listed, which also turns out to be, by far, the most popular jazz album of all time. People like to say that’s because it’s the jazz album for people who don’t actually like jazz. Lots of shade gets thrown around the jazz scene, which is frankly a real strong point in its favor.
It’s also something that covers a lot of ground, stylistically. When Kind of Blue came out, there was already 4 decades, give or take, of jazz. Jazz, for some time, was mostly dance music, music for speakeasies and people out to have a good time. Miles breaking out was part of the rise of “modal jazz”, which was some music theory stuff that I don’t want to go into; what you got though was a transition from dance music, to music that was to be sat and listened to, and this is where you get Davis, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, eventually Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Pharoah Sanders, Bill Evans…basically the jazz loved by people who have subscriptions to jazz magazines and giant vinyl collections.
And if you love jazz, there’s just so damn much of it. On another forum I’m on, there’s this guy, I think he’s German, he’s been posting multiple jazz tracks per day during the pandemic in this thread that’s mainly just him. I think he’s up to 1700-some tracks at this point? From every continent, every style, just on and on and on. It’s a well that will never run dry, that you will never reach the bottom of, even if you assign a cutoff date like 1982. There’ll always be more. So I’m going to stop trying to grasp at this giant, diaphanous thing that I’ll never be able to grasp and instead jump in, restricting myself to a few landmark albums/tracks that I think are good stepping stones.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin’ – So this group is a fun one because basically it feels like if you were somebody in jazz during its most fertile period, you were part of the Jazz Messengers, who only had drummer Art Blakey as a permanent member. The other players? Upward of 150 different ones, by most reckonings. When they were most relevant, they were part of the “hard jazz/hard bop” era, a halfway step stylistically between jazz’s past as dance music and its future as an Important Piece of Art.
Miles Davis - Bitches Brew – While Davis had been moving away from “traditional” jazz since Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew was the album that blew everybody’s mind (although it is not the best Davis album, or even the best Davis album of that era) because of what it did that was “not jazz”. More specifically, Davis used, groan, shudder, moan…rock music structures. And [grinds teeth] electronic sounds. This is the Rubicon of jazz, for better or for worse, depending on your point of view. If you want to get into jazz, and you have even-slightly-vague idea of what “jazz” sounds like, you can listen to this album and tell where you want to go from there. Is this shit just…noise? Head backward, my friend, especially if you liked Moanin’.
Herbie Hancock - Headhunters – And, once those floodgates opened, jazz entered into its fusion period, with all sorts of wild cross-pollinations happening between genres and styles, to a degree that for “real jazz heads” the period has a real bad stink to it, like people got too out there, too sloppy, too freeform…it’s not a coincidence that this was followed by a reactionary period in the 80s, where jazz went back to a reflection of what it was in the 60s, with Wynton Marsalis being kind of one of the leaders of that movement. Which is fine! If you like that, that’s fine. That said, the fusion era produced some of the most amazing pieces of music put to tape and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters is one of those. Hancock started out learning from Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins before joining Davis’ band, then started getting more and more into electronic sounds, leading to this jazz/funk/synth…masterpiece. Probably a word that gets thrown around too much, this album fucking cooks though.
Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown - ‘Build a Nest’ - I played this for my wife’s stepdad, who has two subscriptions to jazz magazines and he was like “I’m not sure that I would call this jazz exactly”. Which speaks to a few things, one, you could say that this song has more “elements of jazz” consisting of the quick guitar solos and a piano melody that are both definitely “jazz-y”, except they’re placed in a larger structure that really sounds more like a hip-hop beat with some soul-inspired vocals. Two, what the fuck exactly is jazz at this point? This is not to throw my father-in-law under the bus, he’s a great dude, it’s just a good example of how the genre has splintered that something like this might not even be recognized as such by a self-professed fan of said genre. Anyway, this particular artist, Jeff Parker, was a member of the Chicago group Tortoise, which is best described as post-jazz? Avant-jazz-rock? Anyway, his last couple albums have been real real good and have a real mixtape vibe to them.
Fuck, I forgot to talk about Sun Ra. Future post, future post.