"Wow, I guess Jazz Doesn't Stink"

Most of my co-workers know that I have a "good stereo" or call me an "audiophile" or what have you.  In any event, I was in the office of a colleague and he had a disc labeled "Jazz 101" and I flipped it over and saw a whole host of B-listers and not that good songs.

"What's this?" I asked
"Oh, I want to learn about Jazz - and this was on sale"
"Huh.  Hmm"
In the next couple of minutes I promised to make him a "mixtape" of Jazz (Well, CD, but you get my drift).  The following Monday I handed it off to him, with a "If you don't like this, you won't like Jazz." Swagger.  I have it when it comes to music.

"Wow, that was good" he told me a couple of days later.
I could have been ten feet tall.  Yes, validation works on me.  I am a sucker for compliments.

I used that list with a few other curious people, and made converts or at least got a "Wow, I guess Jazz doesn't stink" comment.

While it's heyday has passed, Jazz was the pop music from the 1920's to the 1950's.  The golden age of recorded jazz was definitely around 1948 -1964 or so (the Beatles pretty much crushed Jazz for popular music, and while there are a few great albums after that, they are much thinner on the ground - since most prodution money got diverted to the more lucrative Rock artists).  I found that a lot of Jazz is pretty damn good music, and skill on the instruments was astonishingly high.  There are a lot of albums, since they were prolific, and the lineup changed fairly swiftly - they had a habit of sharing band members with each other.  It would be like if Jimi Hendrix recorded for himself, and also played with Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Rolling Stones without a "special project."  It is kind of cool when you find a genre where about half the albums you see would be the equivalent to a supergroup where everyone is at the top of their game - and in many cases Jazz is that genre.

While there were Jazz superstars, they rarely made enough money to rise above the middle class - the record labels took nearly everything from both tours and record sales.  This, of course, got turned on its head with the advent of Rock music with million dollar advances, and incredibly high record sales.  It is possible to view the current situation that an artist faces regarding performance and income to be a return to "typical reality" and the past 40 years as an aberration.  For a little perspective, one of the most famous and popular Jazz musicians, Miles Davis, lived in a regular sized house, and drove a Mercedes, but a low end one, that a fan helped finance because Miles simply couldn't afford it on his income.

But they sure made some good music.

So, here's the list I use to show people that Jazz doesn't suck.

1.  Miles Davis  The Birth of the Cool "Move"
2.  Charles Mingus Mingus Ah Um "Better Git it in Your Soul"
3.  Art Pepper Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Session "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To"
4.  The Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out "Blue Rondo a la Turk"
5.  Sonny Rollins Saxophone Colossus "St. Thomas"
6.  Lee Morgan The Sidewinder "The Sidewinder"
7.  Miles Davis Kind of Blue "Blue in Green"
8.  Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto Getz/Gilberto "The Girl From Ipanema"
9.  Madeleine Peyroux Careless Love "Dance Me to the End of Love"
10. Wynton Marsalis Magic Hour "Feeling of Jazz"
11.  Herbie Hancock Head Hunters "Chameleon"
12.  Medeski, Martin and Wood End of the World Party "Anonymous Skulls"

As any genre of music, this small playlist is only scratching the surface. If you like half the songs on this list, you are more than likely a Jazz fan, and just didn't know it!