What are the best jazz albums?

me ^ | now | me

[Big Guy and Rusty 99]

my choices in no particular order:

miles davis - kind of blue
charles mingus - black saint and the sinner lady
john coltrane - a love supreme
duke ellington - the webster-blanton years
the quintet - live at massey hall
sonny rollins - saxophone colossus
bill evans - live at the village vanguard

[Big Guy and Rusty 99]

which Blakey album?

[BluesDuke]

I sometimes think the trick to playing like yourself, even if you had a particular model musician, is to simply take the particulars of what you learned from that musician, what it was about him which gripped you, and use them as a starting line rather than the goal. I'm just a blues player, but with any blues guitarist or other guitarist who came round again to the blues, like Wes, I would pretty much do that, as best I could. Guys like B.B. King, Albert King, Mike Bloomfield, Wes, I'd think of what made them special to me when they played the blues, learn up what I could of that, and then keep them as starting lines rather than the finishing line. (Not to mention players on other instruments who could do the blues right - Miles Davis is a perfect example; that guy said more laying four stretched notes over a blues verse than most people said playing four hundred notes over eight bars, and any guitar player who thinks that can't give him something, better call a cab.)

I'm no Wes Montgomery, but I'm myself. Simple but from as deep as I can wring it. I'm basically of the school which says, if you can say it in five and make it mean something, you're way ahead of the guy who can say it in twenty-five without saying a bloody thing. On the rare occasions when I get to get out and play the blues, some of the response I get tells me I chose wisely.

[Lower55]

Another point made and taken. True that maybe tastes vary. I guess'music' must be a generic term to most people, like the Coke/soda thread, but to me words mean things. You have your opinion, I have mine. (the right one)lol

[kinghorse]

Billy Cobham - Spectrum

Jeff Beck - Blow by blow

Weather Report - anything between 73 and 79 (Jaco on bass).

Steve Khan - all good

Tom Scott and the LA Express - Tomcats

Santana - Amigos

[condolinda]

"Like Someone in Love". I'm leaving now... Good night! I mean it!! :)

[Lower55]

I have nothing I could ask you that I don't know the answer to already. If I did, you'd just make something up. No, not a drummer. We used to say 'a drummer is a person who hangs around musicians'.

[BluesDuke]

Translation: Bitches Brew nice, Miles in the Sky much better!

[UofHoustonRepublican]

I know this may seem awfuly main stream, but any of Diana Krall's albums are great!

Also, continuing with the jazz theme, as a brand new guitarist, are there any Freeper recommendations for a good jazz guitar for under 700 bucks? Everyone tells me to go Gibson, but those are a bit too pricey, maybe there are some decent Yamaha knock-offs or something? I just want somehting that I can learn on, but still hold onto even when I do learn some skill. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

[Big Guy and Rusty 99]

I really hate noodlers' (people who just sort of try to play every note possible without thought.) If you listen to the great jazz musicians, their solos are well thought out. A lot of these free jazz students don't think before they play. If solos are talking, then most free jazz is tourettes' syndrome.

[Lower55]

It's hard to have a comeback to that paper-bag comment. I guess you win on that one. I just can't compete with a mind of your level. Whether you think that level is higher or lower than mine, is your prerrogative.

[BluesDuke]

Most free jazzers, but not quite all of them. Albert Ayler was one free jazzer who knew what he was doing, plus if you listened closely enough (especially to his trio recordings) you could hear a root from the old field holler of the blues in there. But even the guys who keep it simple and keep it swinging, if they're playing what they feel and listening to what they're playing, they don't have to think it out. They just feel it out. And it invariably says more when they do. Think of Johnny Hodges, the great alto saxophonist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra - he was as thoughtful a musician as they came, but he knew how to get his brain out of his own way and just feel. So did one of the best improvising accompanists in the Ellington band, trombonist Lawrence Brown. You could set up your group and tell him you're going to play the blues, and he'd lay lines behind you that beat the hell out of most guys' improvised highfalutin' solos - and then, when you handed off to him for a solo, he'd see and raise himself without having to think about it. He played from his damned heart. And that's the way to play the blues...or, really, any improvised music. If you're just looking to shoot the lights out, whether from a chart or improvising, you just shoot yourself in the foot. Which is precisely what killed both free jazz and its bastard offspring fusion...

[Big Guy and Rusty 99]

I think even Hodges and Brown knew the idea they were going to play before they did. As for free jazz, I think it could only really work four or fewer players. Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures not withstanding.

[BluesDuke]

Many players do, of course. But more often than not, especially with the more self-assured jazz players, their idea might consist of little more than a small impulse to begin. Sometimes, they might pick off something in the solo of the guy going before they step in (Lawrence Brown was especially good at this - on the other hand, he was all but fated to spend half his life trying to find new ways to play the solo for which he received the most requests, his take of "Rose of the Rio Grande," it was so popular in Ellington concerts). Blues players do it, too; most of the time, I'm liable to spin a solo off something so simple as a little vocal swoop by the singer somewhere in there. You could even hear something in the full ensemble which struck you as just so in need of an amplification, and it could be two notes or ten, that you find yourself kicking off from those notes and answering or amplifying them - and if you do it right, up from the soul, you've got yourself a hell of a statement. And you didn't really have to do anything harder than listen.

Most free jazz, I found, worked best in formats from trio to sextet. Anything more than that, and it got particularly trying, if not an outright mishmosh (like John Coltrane's Ascension). Unless you align something like a straight doubling of your basic group, as Ornette Coleman did with the double quartet lineup (two reeds, two trumpets, two basses, two drummers) he used mostly effectively for his album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation), anything larger than a sextet is usually a guarantee for the sonic equivalent of a battlefield shootout.