pornclerk

Many people speak of listening to jazz from other countries. If you are referring to authentic jazz music then you should know that all types of it originated in the United States, such as New Orleans and Chicago.
I didn't really take a deep interest in jazz music when I was doing my music degree, but I can safely say that a lot of "jazz" music today is not authentic. For example, Michael Buble is kind of a "rip off" jazz musician.

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Who wants a twig when you can have the whole tree?

ozahs

Check out Professor Longhair. "Rock 'n Roll Gumbo" is my favorite. Some consider him the missing link between classic American jazz and modern rock and roll. Elvis was heavily influenced by him.
http://www.professorlonghair.com/index.html

A local favorite of mine is Cuban jazz pianist Nachito Herrera
http://www.nachito.net/
Amazing stuff

For someone coming from a classical background, try Jean Luc Ponty, jazz violinist. My favroite disc of his is "Individual Choice".

rsl12

I think the part that's not going over well is the fact that you're not explaining yourself. Why do you feel this way?

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roachboy

from a listener's viewpoint, jazz is as comprehensable as, say, hip hop is--if you focus on the turntablists and recognize the sides being cut up, you are in on both the joke of the piece and the intertext network the piece sets up. so you understand the piece differently because you are familiar with the tradition being refashioned.
same thing with jazz: the only real distinction is the depth of the tradition and its age. for example, if you are listening to bop, it is good to know something of cheesy 40s pop--which is not the easiest thing to accomplish is 2006, frankly, even given the saturation of historical material triggered by digital recording technologies. you also need to know the history of the music (jazz) up to bop. two major reference sources.

the distinction between these forms lay in the way in which referencing works. in bop, the references were done in two main ways: via harmonic structure and via allusion. both were fit into a fairly rigid system based on the harmonic substructure (the chord changes), which determined the scales (sequences of pitches) that were ruled in or out. so you would need to focus on allusions at the level of form, or on the level of compositional features---hip hop presents you with a wider range of sonic features in the allusions that it makes because it is the recordings that are being cut up--so you can recognize collage elements from the qualities of the recording and so dont have to rely on recognition of compositional elements alone. for example, when tribe called quest chops up roy ayers or the crusaders, you can be tipped to it by the particular qualities of ayers recordings AND by the compositional elements ayers used. (and had there been no roy ayers, there would be no tribe)

that's about it.
if you are playing bop or bop-influenced music (it's 2006--i dont personally see the point of playing charlie parker in 2006, but that's just me--charlie parker was better at beng charlie parker than anyone else has managed to be--well, except for sonny stitt.. maybe...) then you have to cultivate a different relation to these same features simply because you are making choices about phrases or pitches within the rules that govern bop as a form--which is different from recognizing them in the playing of someone else.

all that says is that playing the music and listening to it are not the same activity.
and that one is not better than the other.

it's pretty simple (i just cant say it that way)

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

flat5

"i dont personally see the point of playing charlie parker in 2006"

Then you are a member of "The Church Of What's Happening Now".

Please keep your thoughts about bop to yourself. Your not a fan.

I feel sick. I should not read this forum.

roachboy

cheese louise, i've never been thrown out of jazz fandom before.
i dont know whether to take this seriously or just laugh.
i am laughing now, so i guess i made the choice.

imaybe you didnt understand the previous post, flat5--i spin charlie parker records happily and often--like i spin bud powell recordings, fats navarro recordings, sonny stitt recordings, thelonious monk recordings----like i spin mingus, george russell, dolphy, coltrane, coleman, braxton, the art ensemble of chicago, on and on---like i spin recording so bach and beethoven--like i spin recordings of lots of other kinds of music---i am often fascinated by the music and the recording of the music and learn from them.

but

(1) bird et al were simply better at being bird et al than i will ever be

(2) i see no point in linking affection for elements of the tradition directly to what you play--it is a choice that individual players make for themselves. you dont get to say which is and is not legit, flat5 because your choices are your choices and that's as far as they go.

(3) it seems absurd to me to pretend that the implications of bop are the same in 2006 as they were in 1946. that would mean that playing bop in 2006 (live, you know) is not the same act as playing it would have been in 1944-1947. in 1944-47, bop was seen as an aggressive nearly atonal music that offended as many as it pleased--it still had the ability to do both. now it doesnt. there is nothing to be done about that--it is simply a function of repetition.
gertrude stein said once that there is a sharp divide crossed very quickly between non acceptance of new forms and acceptance of new forms: acceptance emphasizes what is "beautiful" and in so doing strips away the ability of the work accepted to irritate, to provoke, to challenge what is around it as it is around it.
that has happened to bop: it has become a perfectly acceptable form of music and with that shift everything has changed about performing it.
it is foolish to pretend otherwise.
it simply is.

jesus, this is like talking to a bluegrass player.
personal aside: my brother is a bluegrass musician--and a very good one--i do nto particularly enjoy bluegrass, but i understand why he does, i think--banjo is an unforgiving instrument and so it makes sense that a banjo player would be inclined to transcriptions and to see music as the reproduction of transcriptions--and that is fine--what irks me about him--and about alot of other straighter players--is that while i make an effort to understand something about what they are doing and why they do it, there is nothing like reciprocity: no effort to understand other ways of doing things, no effort to think about sound, about organization as problems (rather than as given a priori) and to enter into unfamiliar territory with ears and mind open to check out what other players who do not find strict adherence to tradition to be compelling and see what they are doing. it is as if these folk internalize the most absurd claims that defenders of tradition for its own sake make about tradition--that they are positioned within a space of legitimacy that exempts them from having to move musically or intellectually.

this is certianly not a question of chops
it is not a question of who is and is not a serious musician.
it is more a question of how an imagined position within a tradition comes to limit what you do, what you take in and how you take it in.
on cyncial days, i think it is intellectual laziness.
on other days, i wonder about the sociological situation endured by music in the states.
either way, it comes to the same thing.

music can be an assault on the senses.
for me, music should be an assault. it is not pretty, it is not about entertaining people----it is not about providing members of a restaurants demographic with lively sonic wallpaper that they can fade into and out of as they eat brunch. it is not about scales, not about changes--it is about making time-scultpures. it is about that strange line between order and disorder, how order comes to take shape and how it breaks up.

but that is just my position and i do not expect it to hold for other people. you, flat5, apparently think that your position should hold for other players.
i dont see the basis for that.
there is no basis for that.
well, apart from your personal dispositions, which are all fine insofar as that is all they are.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

flat5

The thread is/was about recommending music to listen to. To grow as a jazz listener. I missed the part where it was asked how to be "relevant now". Which is a joke.

I'm older than you - I don't see playing music as an assault. I DO look for the pretty notes. I'm very happy to find them.

We are in different worlds. I'm not a writer. This is my stop. Good Bye.

roachboy

flat5: it's nice that you look for pretty notes.
i hope you find them.

i look for other combinations.
it really is not a pressing concern of mine whether you would find that legit or not. it might be if we were going to do some music together--but here, it means nothing.

but i would expect that you could--potentially--have a parallel level of respect for the positions of folk who do not agree with you, rather than try to shift to arbitrary nonsense like speculating about my age and then speaking to me as if from some more fully realized position.

and here i foolishly thought there could be a dialogue--because viewpoints from folk who interact with a tradition can be of great interest to folk who are just getting into it.

but whatever: there is one way to do things and you know what that one way is.
sounds like an industrial aesthetic applied to jazz to me: did you go to berklee?

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

jth

essential jazz will be that everyone has to buy my album when it's released in the spring

muahahaha

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"A real leader faces the music, even if he doesn't like the tune." - unknown quote

neflyte

I'm not die-hard by any means, and am definately not a jazz collector, but my ears perk up when I hear it.

Brad Mehldau (mostly because he covered Radiohead...)
Tory Cassis (Canadian, if you've not heard of him...)
Jazzanova (even if its not traditional jazz...i recognize elements in it...)
Koop (their "Waltz for Koop" album more than any other IMHO)
St.Germain (did i mention that i like electro? )

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aberkok

This unprovoked attack on roachboy's P.O.V. needs some elaboration. I am confused as to why you would snap like this.

There is a difference between listening to music and playing it. I listen to bop and love it but I hardly play it anymore. What do you make of that?

I take your post to mean that the canon of jazz can no longer be added to - relegated to the history books.

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Warden Gentiles: "It? Perfectly innocent. But I can see how, if our roles were reversed, I might have you beaten with a pillowcase full of batteries."

flat5

Well...rereading the quote now I see that he means "playing" (himself) not listening to Parker.

I thought he was saying listening to Parker in 2006 makes no sense.
For a jazz fan to say that turns my stomach.
So I apologize. I'm sorry. I did not understand his meaning.

If he does not want to play in that ballpark it's ok with me.

"Never Mind" - G. Radner

roachboy

ah---now i understand.
my apologies for my response, flat5---i didn't account for that possible interpretation.

carry on.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aberkok

Yay! We all love Bird

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Warden Gentiles: "It? Perfectly innocent. But I can see how, if our roles were reversed, I might have you beaten with a pillowcase full of batteries."

Jimellow

I've been listening to KJazz 88.1 FM's online stream, and it's fantastic!

They play both Jazz and Blues. The hosts often provide history and put the pieces played in context with the history of the time.

They have a large chunk of evening programming dedicated to Blues, and I am really digging them! In a sense, I may enjoy listening to Blues more than jazz. It's very pleasing music to me.

The station plays lots of music, very little advertising, and the program hosts are great; very informative. The station is based out of the California State University system.

This music (both jazz and blues) is great! I find it very pleasing and often smile just hearing it. I also find the voices of the female vocalists to be quite beautiful. And I love when the instruments are played in a way that it sounds like they are singing too! Fantastic stuff.

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Paradise Lost

I almost feel kind of silly doing this, since I last posted here right before July started, but I just wanted to reiterate that I don't think Jazz can be any less good today than it was back in the day, but I feel that most artists who started their work before 1975 start to become stagnant after 1975. And no, I don't think rock died with the Beatles, I think it died with Disco. It's not that there still aren't great acts around anymore (I made the point to say that there are plenty of great recordings still coming out by ECM artists - which would include the Kenny Wheeler/Dave Holland statements put forward by another poster) it's just that I find that a lot of artists start to become boring, or move into directions totally lacking in substance (ie, Herbie Hancock after a while). There's a general sense of creativity/imagination/spirit/excitement that starts to become lost, and why move on to re-hashings of their old work when you can look back into their glory days and pick out oodles of great records? And I'd like to know how I was generalizing anyway? I went so far as to pick out individual artists and show that within a short period tended to go from one type of jazz to another type of jazz within the blink of an eye, lending support to the idea that you can't really generalize that time period at all. It kept moving, kept staying interesting, kept staying exciting. That's not to say it couldn't get boring... even Miles got boring after a while.

And it's not that I don't feel like I'm stuck in a certain time period because it's all I've ever listened too, far from it. Just like rock, I've delved into plenty of artists from plenty of time periods before and after, playing lord knows how many different styles. My dislike stems from the fact of how the music is created, not from the time period (and I certainly hope no one's dislike of music comes from the time period.) I find a lot of today's rock boring because it's just plain bad, boring, and shitty. The music doesn't have any of the qualities that once made it great except for a few rare exceptions. I find early 50s and 60s rock to be, with a few great exceptions, to be too watered down, filtered through to the general public without any regard to the masters who formed it. I find the same holds true for a lot of jazz, and not I didn't say all of jazz. That would be a broad generalization. Early period jazz tends to sound too much the same, with the lovely exception of most female jazz/blues singers, later jazz tends to sound too boring. I do concede that I'm not quite as knowledgeable on newer artists as I am on older artists, I make the recommendations I do because I feel that that time period made so many advancements and was so thoroughly creative that they stand head and shoulders above the rest. And this usually has nothing to do with technical achievements by players.

While I'm not sure if this helped my case at all, all I was originally trying to do was point out to the original poster my favorite recommendations, and trying to explain myself a bit without publishing a book. Which I could probably do at this point.

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aberkok

Certain forces in the improvised music scene right now (ain't gonna use the dirty "J"word), namely Dave Douglas and Ethan Iverson, have been making a small but growing effort to expose post 1970s jazz to a wider audience. They've started a list of essential recordings to have emerged post 1973 (an arbitrary year - Iverson explains on his site). I highly recommend it for those who have only a vague idea of what happens after Miles plugged in. Beware...it is a monster list, so here's the link:

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothem...iversons_.html

I recommend anyone interested in jazz have a look. Look up the titles on iTunes and listen to the first few seconds (if they have them)...that way you can hear what you're getting into.

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Warden Gentiles: "It? Perfectly innocent. But I can see how, if our roles were reversed, I might have you beaten with a pillowcase full of batteries."

Locobot

A lot of the suggestions in this thread are pretty off the deep end in terms of intoducing someone to jazz--John Zorn? Come on! He's great but...

For the OP RHCP fan I would recommend Herbie Hancock - Headhunters. And from there he could move back to the more esoteric Herbie Hancock - Sextant. But he hasn't replied once to this thread and is probably rocking out to Panic at the Disco or some similiar shit as I type this. Not really sure what the hell Paradise Lost is talking about Herbie Hancock becoming stagnant after 1975, the man was definitely still growing towards his creative peak at that point.

How is it though that no one has mentioned Rashaan Roland Kirk on this thread yet? Ah well...