Jazz sped up my clock

[Chase]

I've heard some of their sheet music (tribute band) at the Sky Bar in Houston...It's good music, but I'm way to reserved/layed-back for the upbeat they played...Maybe it was just the band or atmosphere...The Sky Bar is small and gets very loud when live bands play?

Chase

[sharpdressedscot]

I'm more of a metalhead/rocker but I like old swing and big band music... I have weird tastes in music for my age.

[sputnik]

1956 Miles Davis went into the studio with four other jazz heavy-weights. (John Coletrane, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, and Philly Joe Jones) The results were four perfect albums originaly released on the Prestige label. Remastered version can be found easly, or just pick them up on iTunes here.
Must have albums: Workin', Relaxin', Steamin', Cookin'

[beloitpiper]

1956 Miles Davis went into the studio with four other jazz heavy-weights. (John Coletrane, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, and Philly Joe Jones) The results were four perfect albums originaly released on the Prestige label. Remastered version can be found easly, or just pick them up on iTunes here.
Must have albums: Workin', Relaxin', Steamin', Cookin'

I know it's overused, but I still treasure Kind Of Blue like nothing else. Also, Coltrane, while an amazing sax player, got kinda crazy later on. "Sheets of sound" isn't really my thing. Just another example: don't do drugs.

[sputnik]

I know it's overused, but I still treasure Kind Of Blue like nothing else. Also, Coltrane, while an amazing sax player, got kinda crazy later on. "Sheets of sound" isn't really my thing. Just another example: don't do drugs.

Miles was no stranger to drugs. just give "Bitches Brew" a listen.

[TheKiltedWonder]

I know it's overused, but I still treasure Kind Of Blue like nothing else. Also, Coltrane, while an amazing sax player, got kinda crazy later on. "Sheets of sound" isn't really my thing. Just another example: don't do drugs.

This is by no means an advocation of drug use, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a Jazz or blues player from that era that didn't use some form of drug. Most of their music didn't suffer; it was their lives that did. Most of the best players died in rather pitiful conditions because of addiction.

[Tattoo Bradley]

This thread makes me think of Bill Cosby as seen on The Cosby Show.

While I respect the musicians, it's just not my taste.

[Alan H]

I'm a diehard Jazz fan.....from Chicago, circa 1925 and scratchy 78's to todays ongoing experimentation and hybridization of "World Music"....(whatever that is) and Jazz....I love it. Things like how the Bossa Nova movement affected jazz...I love stuff like that.

Listen to this....Joao Gilberto, solo, singing "Estate"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC19UZcqQwY

Now, here's the composer of the music from Black Orpheus, playing Desafinado with American tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LTQt...eature=related

Did you see the movie "Black Orpheus"? You youngsters who haven't seen that movie...SEE IT... Rent it. The music is *Incredible*. Sure, it doesn't have the snazzy special effects of star wars, but watch it and listen. Understand where it came from, the time...all of that. It'd be a great date with your boy/girlfriend.

I tend to the intellectual side rather than the testosterone side, and grew up with, and still love the West Coast Jazz of the 1950's and 1960's. I like Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz.

I'm also a big fan of sophisticated Big Band stuff like the Stan Kenton, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, and Don Eills bands of the 1970's, as well as the admittedly testosterone-soaked big band jazz of Maynard Ferguson.....jazz candy but that's OK.

Yeah, I stand in awe of Charlie Parker and Mingus, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie...in some ways Dizzy was bigger than just his music, he was a great human being as well. But their sort of blazing technique doesn't really get into my heart.

My own roots as a player? Bennie Goodman leads the list because of my Dad. Brubeck and Desmond come next.

Something I really love about Jazz is that essentially all of it's history is available to listen to....not ALL of it, the pre-1925 stuff we have to imagine. We know what King Oliver sounded like, but we don't have a lot of his stuff. Earlier players like Buddy Bolden we only know by reputation. Nonetheless, you can hear, and learn and understand how in a very short time (30 years, maybe 35) jazz evolved from Ragtime and Society Music and primitive stuff in New Orleans to the intensely cerebral music of Bill Evans. You can follow probably the greatest American Jazz composer...Duke Ellingtons...his career from simple piano player to complex composer over a span of over fifty years. I LOVE that.

Yeah, big jazz fan, here....and mediocre clarinet/sax player.

[Alan H]

This thread makes me think of Bill Cosby as seen on The Cosby Show.

While I respect the musicians, it's just not my taste.

If the drug scene and all turns you off, I recommend Dave Brubeck, who is intensely Christian as well as being one of the finest jazz pianists, EVER, and one of the most interesting composers as well. Dave is 80 and still concertizing in large part due to "clean living".

Or Marian MacPartland....check out her "Piano Jazz" show on Public Radio. Marian is a freakin' National Treasure and I hope every single one of her radio shows is archived because they are a massive source of historical insight as well as wonderful music.

Marian was there at the beginning. She was married to Jimmy MacPartland, who was one of the two or three in-demand white cornet players in Chicago in the mid-late 20's.... Jimmy, Wild Bill Davison, Muggsy Spanier... all cornetists...members of the Austin High Gang, named because most of the guys went to Austin High School. Not part of the gang, but contemporaries with them is someone else you might have heard of...a Jewish kid named Bennie Goodman. These guys dared to go to the Black parts of Chicago and hear the black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory and . It was they who brought Jazz into white America and turned the syncopated "New York Style" Society Music of Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverines into something grittier....that really became jazz.

Marian was there.

Look at this picture http://www.glennmcdonald.com/images/...20-%201958.JPG

It was taken in Harlem, I think in 1933.. It's mostly black men, though there are some white men in that picture. There's one white woman in the front row wearing a white dress with a plunging neckline.....Marian MacPartland.

Check out her album from the 70's "An Outing with the Bombay Bicycle Club" I believe....this is Marian exploring the outer reaches of abstract piano jazz. From stride to abstract, she's been there through it all. She's very old now, she is the grande dame of piano jazz and still plays wonderfully. In her Piano Jazz show, she interviews and plays with Jazz Musicians of all ages, one each week. I LOVE this show.


Bless You, Marian MacPartland.

[McMurdo]

Alan you would love to listen to My Kind of Jazz with Jeff Healey on Jazz FM 91 the music he plays goes from 1900-1940's