I don't care for newer jazz at all really, except for stuff like DJ Cam which is more acid jazz and trip-hop. But the samples are from older jazz anyway. and theres some great avant-garde jazz out there. Here's a few more accesible artists/albums I like alot. Miles Davis- Kind of Blue John Coltrane- A love Supreme Soft Machine- Vol. 2 Soft Machine- Third DJ Cam- Mad Blunted Jazz
theres tons of good jazz, i dunno what type you are looking for but here are some names to check out bill evans duke ellington soulive the seatbelts mccoy tyner michael brecker art blakey and the jazz messengers thelonius monk randy weston and of course any coltrane or miles
I've been in the business a long time and have fell in love with groups approach to jazz. www.jazzmatic.com
John Scofield Medeski, Martin, and Wood Ella Fitzgerald Dave Brubeck Duke Ellington Those are my personal favourites.
Check out Fusion too. mix between rock and jazz. stuff like soft machine, zappa, Colosseum, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Napoli Centrale, Out of Focus, Supersister and Embryo to name a few. If you need any fusion, send me a PM or get in touch over aim. I'll be happy to send you some music or give more reccomendations but let me know if that helped.
Herbie Hancock didn't always play funk jazz, that started with head hunters, which you probably need to get. You must have this album if you want to get into jazz funk. It's tough to give you specific names of bands, modern or old, unless you know maybe what type of instruments you like in a jazz band, like, an organ trio or what? I like the b3 organ in a funk setting, so I dig a lot of John Medeski, from Medeski, Martin and Wood. He also played with Scofield, and I think on a couple Club D'elf albums. Ramsey Lewis is also sick, you might want to check out Ramsey Lewis Trio - The In Crowd, it's a sick acoustic jazz trio live album from the 60's. The title song is funky as hell.
Are those three your favourites? I wouldn't have thought Ornette Coleman a good way for someone alien to jazz to get into it. Certainly not at first! Ok, here's a list of names I'd recommend to someone not too familiar with jazz. You can ignore the early ragtime and blues stuff at first. It is important and pioneering and there's a lot of good things in it, but it isn't necessarily a good advert for jazz as we know it today, yet you might want to go back to it when you want to get to know the origins of jazz. I'd ignore all the commercial swing and stuff. Forget Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman on the other hand is worth listening to because it he is technically excellent as are his music and his band. First place to start should be Louis Armstrong. He was the first massive pioneer in Jazz, and nobody even came close to him as an influence in jazz, taking things forward, until Miles Davis came along. His trumpet playing was basically an extention of his voice, and he played it as if he didn't have to think between what note he could hear in his head and what note he should play, he just played it as instinctively as a singer would sing. His vocal style is very unique and very familiar to everyone I'm sure, even if you didn't know it was him you'd know his voice. There are some other important players from that era too, but I'm going to make this a whirlwind tour of big names. So let's move on to Bebop. Charlie Parker. The OTHER big musical genius when it comes to the evolution of jazz. Armstrong and Parker are on the same level as Bach and Mozart. Of that there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind. Charlie Parker extended the harmonic language and technique and was an absolute virtuoso. There has been no better saxophonist than him, classical or jazz, in my opinion. The trouble with playing Charlie Parker tunes, as fun as they are, is that although after a good bit of practice (it's a noun!) you can get your fingers comfortably around all the heads, Charlie Parker would go and play an even more complicated solo over the chords and then, for most players it would be time to give up. Ok, it's not quite THAT depressing but it's amazing nonetheless that anyone could do that. Mind you, he was on drugs. Parker did a lot of work with Dizzy Gillespie (famous for his bent trumpet with a bell pointing upwards) who was another key figure in bebop. Moving on, we have Miles Davis, who decades after Louis Armstrong began took things further with the trumpet, extending the range for one thing. He reacted to bebop in that he wanted to slow things down - completely the opposite of what Parker and Gillespie had been doing. He brought about "The Birth Of The Cool" (also the title of one of his MANY albums). He was also a key player in the beginnings of Fusion, where jazz progressed by incorporating elements of the other musics that were developing at the time. Paricularly, Rock'n'Roll, Rhythm'n'Blues and Disco and Funk, and synth-based music. Then there was John Coltrane who ushered in the Avant Garde era, but also did some classic tuneful stuff as well. He was one of the few big jazz names who didn't tragically die young suffering from a drug problem. He tragically died young suffering from cancer. He took the saxophone forward again in the same way that Charlie Parker did. The downside of John Coltrane is all the stupid bastards who try to immitate him. Then we have Herbie Hancock, who was a MASSIVE player in Fusion. He got into a fair bit of trouble for his album Rockit. It was cool and pioneering then though, but a bit dated now in my opinion. I'm a big fan of his Dis Is Da Drum album which he did in 95 I think. It sounded cool to me when I first heard it in about 2000, even though electronic music had come along a VERY long way in that short time. David Sanborn - another sax player although of the cheesy porn music jazz funk variety. Highly skilled and has a saxophone joke to his name - "How many sax players does it take to change a lightbulb? 4. 1 to change the bulb and the other 3 to contemplate how David Sanborn would have done it." Courtney Pine. He's one of those Coltrane Immitators, but he actually does it really well. he's also highly influenced by the likes of Bob Marley and brings a cool Reggae and Ska element to a lot of the jazz he plays. Wynton Marsalis. He hates fusion, so he takes his modern jazz forward in a way that he imagines would have happened if Miles Davies hadn't come along. Good stuff. Michael Brecker. One of the few current jazz musicians who does things his own way without just being derivative of things that have gone before. He has both an excellent technique and a good musical mind as well, an extremely rare thing it is to have both. Courney Pine is all about technique, whilst Sanborn is all about musicality. Both are excellent players, but Brecker has both. Pat Metheny. Yep, there's such a thing as a GUITARIST playing jazz too (no, I haven't forgotten Django Rheinhardt but he's not THAT good) - there, now all you rock heads don't have to feel so alienated. Forget Hendrix, forget Brain May, Forget all the other guitarists you aspire to, as Pat Metheny has a technique that would wipe the floor with them. His compositional style is unique and extremely intellectual and sophisticated, and yet a listener un-afilliated with jazz could listen to his music and take it in as a simple beautiful experience, in the same way that a person not clued up on classical music can listen to Rachmaninov all day long.
That's true because Jimi Hendrix is not Don Cherry. It' just that Hendrix had a certain soul when he played that you could just feel, and his playing always had a mean groove.
Even Hendrix had a couple of downsides. First of all he wasn't first and foremost a jazz man. Secondly, it was pot luck which Hendrix you ever got to see. Some nights he might put on an absolutely amazing gig. Others, it'd be a pile of scheidt. And if you just stuck with recordings, well that's like the safe option, never really bad, but never truly incredible either. I knew I shouldn't have mentioned guitars. It's going to take this thread away from jazz completely now. There are enough rock discussions on this forum as it is! Still Pat Metheny is that good, and it was worth the risk. Shame it backfired, you lot have probably never even heard of him. Oh well.
No, no, I was just saying... it was kind of a weird analogy cause Hendrix definately wasn't jazz... but I love his music til i die. I'd say that MMW shows are more like 'pot luck.' (to get back to the topic of jazz).
Tell you what else is pot luck. Actually it's not even that. And still within the topic of jazz. All those albums you see in shops called things like "The very best of smooth jazz". It might be a 2CD 40 track album, but there'll be maybe 2-3, no more, pieces of jazz on there. It's a joke. it's all that laid back half baked unsophisticated ambient scheidt that has no thought or feeling behind it, that old ladies like my mother like to listen to and point out saying "ooh listen, there's some nice jazz on the radio". Jazus Chroist, my mother is a journalist and yet she uses the word nice! I try to buy her some smooth sounding recordings by proper jazz artists such as Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Bob James, and the like and she just doesn't bother listening to them and would rather hear Glenn Miller. I give up I really do! Jazz FM, FINALLY put an end to its trade description skullduggery. It could have gone down one of two routes. Either changing its name, which is what it has done, to 'Smooth FM'. OR, just start actually playing jazz. Apparantly they were caught between two sets of potential listeners - people who didn't like jazz so were put off by the name, and people who wanted to hear actual jazz and were put off by the content. I'd have much preferred them to play actual jazz and get all their listeners back that way. never mind!
