Nine Years Ago Today

This happened nine years ago today; adjusting for time zones, this post should go up at the moment (6pm Spanish time, 12pm Eastern US). It's one of the happiest things to ever be on the internet. Go ahead and watch it. Even if you've seen it before, it's worth enjoying again.

Dylan, Nobel Laureate

I am genuinely quite, quite thrilled by this news.

There has been no better writer than Dylan in the years Dylan has been writing. The Nobel for Literature has never gone to anyone more worthy than he.

There are, to be sure, other writers equally worthy: I would love to see someone from the SF field win it (Le Guin is most frequently named, and would be a fitting winner, as would Wolfe, Delany, Crowley, and others). I'd plug Alan Moore. The various sneers at Philip Roth are misplaced; he, too, would be a great winner. All that said: there is no better choice. Dylan is entirely and fully deserving.

A splendid, perfect choice.

Two further points:

First, I would like to thank the Nobel committee for taking my mind off this genuinely stomach-turning election (due, I should add, entirely to one candidate: I mean no false equivalence here), and giving me something to be genuinely happy about this morning.

Second, note to self: really, really gotta resist getting into it with the people who are, in various fashions, sneering. Shouting doesn't help people be less tone deaf.

PS: Ted Gioia totally called it some years ago (fun list all around, incidentally).

Seven Songs Per Decade: 1970s (Part 1 of 4.5)

In the spring, I am teaching I brand-new class, on the history of the United States from 1974 - 2014.  I am currently in the process of preparing the course.  One thing I thought I'd do, mostly just for fun, is play a song as the students walk in every day as a processional.  I'm only going to do this on days I lecture (not on discussion days or exam days), so it won't be every day.

But I want to come up with a list of songs which are A), Good, B) Representative, and C) Iconic.  Some songs will be on the list primarily for one of those reasons, but ideally most will be a mix of all three.  In order to get a comparatively even chronological mix, I'm going to try to do 7 songs each from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, plus 3 from the 10s.

And I'm soliciting suggestions!

To give you a sense of the sort of thing I'm thinking about, here is a preliminary, mostly off-the-top-of-my-head list of six songs (leaving one TBD):

1. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
2. Born to Run (or Thunder Road), Bruce Springsteen (1975)
3. Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees (1977)
4. Psycho Killer, Talking Heads (1978)
5. Gotta Serve Somebody, Bob Dylan (1979)
6. London Calling, The Clash (1979)
7. ??

At the moment, all six are by white men. I'm not happy about that (it's not true for other decades).  That's one dimension I'd like suggestions on how to fix.

Note that as a general rule, I am limiting every single musician to one song on all five lists.  (I am making an exception for one, and only one, musician, to be revealed later.)  But bear that in mind: if you think someone's best or most representative or most iconic song is from a later decade, don't put them on this list!  Save them for later.

Note that while all suggestions are welcome, I'd prefer complete lists, either just a set of seven, or telling me what you'd add/subtract to my rough draft.

Update, November 15:

This query, cross-posted to facebook, generated a vigorous and (for me) very informative discussion, and far, far, far more suggestions than I could actually use.  After reading what everyone had to say, and painfully cutting it back down to seven, I came up with this revised list:

1. After the Goldrush by Neil Young (1970)
2. Search and Destroy, Iggy and the Stooges (1973)
3. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973)
4. The Payback, James Brown (1974)
5. I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor (1978)
6. The Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen (1978)
7. Rapper's Delight, Sugar Hill Gang (1979)

 ...with the idea that the Talking Heads will be on the 80s list instead.

So now I'm soliciting suggestions, comments and revisions on this second draft list.  I'd love to hear what you think — but please, only suggest an addition if you also suggest which it should replace.  Also, remember that we are going for a representative list of iconic songs; quality is important, but only within that larger constraint.

Myself, I am liking the list pretty well.  The one I am most tempted to cut is "After the Goldrush", not as any reflection on the song itself, but since the chronology of the course really starts a few years later, in 1973/1974.

Up next: the 1980s. Stay tuned.

A Marvelous Jazz Visualization

Via, here's a fabulous animation visualizing (part of) the title track to John Coltrane's classic 1959 album Giant Steps, by Israeli artist Michal Levy*.  Take a look:

Sadly, she seems to have done only two such animations -- the other, "One", animates music by contemporary jazz musician Jason Lindner (about whom I otherwise know nothing, although I liked what she used in her video).  You can see that video at the artist's web site.



Some canny jazz educator should hire her to make more of these.  The Coltrane one does such a good job of helping you hear what's going on in the music, while also being a beautiful work in its own right.

_____________________________
* Note the youtube page from which I took the embedded video misspells her name; as shown in the video credits, it's Michal, not Michael.

The Unlearned Traveler's Tales, or, In Praise of Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth

Thus far I have been discussing entrance points to jazz -- first albums, second albums, avoiding albums, and the like.  It's like that section of a guidebook where they tell you what to pack, how to get to the country, and give you a potted history you skip.  It's preparatory.

It seems like it's time to stop talking about how to get into jazz, and to start talking about what you might want to see once you're inside.  --  Or, to uncoil that simple thought from its tangled skein of metaphor, to talk about some music I've liked.

I'm envisioning this as a series of posts, each talking about some music I've liked -- perhaps a musician, perhaps a particular track, or perhaps several recordings of a single song.  But usually, I suspect, I'll talk about albums (notwithstanding): it's the terms in which I grew up thinking of music, and it's how I still largely do.

A few words of warning -- or, somewhat less grandiosely, of classification -- before I begin.

First, I've been exploring largely at random, and I'll be talking about some of the music I've discovered in the same way.  These aren't best of lists; they're things I've heard and liked.  I'm not systematically going through the Great Music; I'm browsing, and talking about what I've found.

Second, do remember that I am an extremely uninformed listener.  I'm in new territory.  Some of these entries will be the equivalent of saying "Wow, I was in Rome, and there's this large building, and one of its ceilings is really nice.  Bit high up though."  Other entries will be the equivalent of walking into a tourist attraction and mistaking the refreshment stand for the main site and gushing about it.  --  My hope, of course, is that the naive view might be worth hearing.  (If you want expert guidance instead, of course, there's lots of places to look for it.)

And finally -- and most importantly -- my status as an uninformed listener will really hamper what I can say about the music.  In some cases I'll have some idea of why I like it; but in other cases I won't.  Even in cases where I do have some idea, I usually won't have the conceptual vocabulary to really pin down what I'm liking about it.  Description always requires knowledge; understanding something simple such as first-blush enjoyment requires a great deal of it.  I don't have that knowledge.  These are reports more than analysis.

All that said, I want to write about one of my favorites of the albums I've heard since I began my recent explorations into jazz, one that I liked instantly at first listening, and have just continued to like more the more I've listened to it.  (And while I don't know for certain -- my listening is across too many formats and programs to keep accurate count -- I think I've heard it more times than any other jazz album I've listened to in the past few months.)  It's one that (unlike some other albums I've liked) I'd not only never heard before, but I'd never even heard of before.  The album is by Oliver Nelson, and it's called The Blues and the Abstract Truth, and it was recorded and released in 1961.



One question I can't answer is how I came upon this particular album -- since I did, early.  It's hardly an obscure album -- this top one hundred jazz albums list, for instance, currently* places it at #23 of all time.  On the other hand, it's #23, not a top ten or even top twenty album; which is to say, it's a classic, and it's some people's favorites, but it's not a consensus top-tier album, unless the tier in question is pretty broad.  Thus, for instance, it's not on any of the dozen lists of starter albums which I discussed and linked to in this post.  It's mentioned in comments on a few, but I don't think I saw those before.

Of course, I looked at other lists too, including a lot of longer ones.  And it's on some.  I'm pretty sure that I myself got it off of this top 25 list.  (It's also on this top fifty list, this top 100 list, and this one (as well as the previously linked one.))  But it's not a consensus pick by any means.

So why did I focus on it?  Sheer chance clearly had a lot to do with it.  The fact that my local public library (bless it!) had a copy, and that that copy was neither checked out nor damaged, played a big role.  Might have even been dispositive.

But I think I focused on it because of its title.

In a strange land, we grab onto familiar.  I seek out bookstores in foreign countries, even ones where I don't speak the language.  Many Americans seek out McDonald's; Chinese tourists eat at Chinese restaurants in Europe.  And so forth.  Well, I'm far more of a word person than a music person -- I know more about their use, their composition, their aesthetic power and effects.  Which is not to say I don't love music (obviously), but I am at home in words, and abroad in sounds.

And The Blues and the Abstract Truth is an absolutely awesome title.

I'll admit I do this more often than I should.  Looking at a list of jazz albums, or jazz songs, I latch onto great titles.**  It's not unlike judging an album by its cover, which is barely a half-step away from the proverbial mistake about books.  Now, it's true that an album's cover (like a book's) is an artistic and aesthetic object in its own right -- there are good ones and bad ones.  It's just that the quality of a cover isn't correlated at all with the quality of the book/album it wraps.  It's a separate issue.  So to judge one by the other is simply silly.  (Hence, proverb.)  And while I'm not sure that the same is true of titles to quite the same extent -- particularly, perhaps, in the case of stories, novels, poems rather than music -- it's basically a slight correlation, and a silly way to pick music.

But in the midst of vast riches, we grab onto things for odd reasons, or none.  And this is, often, mine.



So enough about the title, then.  What about the music?

Well, it's pretty much an all-star band.  Not quite as much as Kind of Blue, perhaps, but close.  In fact, one person -- the pianist, Bill Evans -- is the same on both albums.  And he is, as I noted before, a star.  Of the other performers, Eric Dolphy (flute & alto sax (& maybe bass clarinet?)) and Freddie Hubbard (trumpet) were both major jazz musicians in the 1960s, being the leaders on important albums of their own, and sidemen on many other important albums as well.  Paul Chambers, the bassist, didn't have, to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, as important a career as a bandleader as Evans, Dolphy and Hubbard each went on to, but he did appear on a great number of important albums as a sideman, including a lot of albums with both Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  Roy Haynes, the drummer, I know less about, but he's been prolific both as a bandleader and as a sideman.  (And I don't know anything at all about George Barrow, who played baritone sax on the album.)  Overall, though, it's clearly a fabulous band.

What about Oliver Nelson, the bandleader (and player of alto sax)?  Well, he definitely made a lot of albums.  Most of them, however, get a mixed reception -- except The Blues and the Abstract Truth.***  Here's a discussion thread on the topic of what other Nelson albums to listen to as a follow B &AT.  I must admit I haven't yet followed up on any of those suggestions, though.  Given that I have so much to explore, I haven't quite felt motivated, much as I love The Blues and the Abstract Truth itself.****  (If anyone has any affection for any particular Nelson albums apart from The Blues and the Abstract Truth, please feel free to sing its praises in comments.)

The album itself, incidentally, is pretty short -- six tracks, totaling 36.6 minutes.  And, unlike many other classic jazz albums, it hasn't been released in an expanded version, including lots of alternate takes, etc.  (This tendency is a mixed blessing: given jazz's improvisational nature, alternate takes are often worthwhile and are certainly interesting; but it can be overwhelming, at least for the newcomer.)  Nelson wrote all six of the songs.  The track titles are: "Stolen Moments", "Hoe-Down", "Cascades", "Yearnin'", "Butch and Butch" and "Teenie's Blues".*****

Ok.  But what's so good about The Blues and the Abstract Truth?  What makes it so special?

Here's where my ignorance, alas, comes into play: I simply don't know.

I can tell you that it is incredibly accessible, even to those new to jazz -- rather in the way that Kind of Blue is.  One doesn't put it on and find it hard to follow; you put it on and it just sounds great.

The solos are all fabulous.  They also seem to have a more straightforward relationship to each other, and to the main theme of each piece, than in a lot of jazz.  They're more obviously melodic.  They're catchy, gorgeous, driving, relaxing, by turns.

Incidentally, some people (at least in this discussion) seem to think the second track, "Hoe-Down", is not as good as the rest of the album.  Speaking personally, I love it; sometimes it's my favorite track.  (Other times other tracks are; often, I just like them all.)  I suppose I'm missing some flaw they hear.

I really like Dolphy's flute.  Flute is not a major jazz instrument -- certainly not like the sax, trumpet, bass, piano or drums -- but it works really well here, and the contrast in tone color is fabulous.

Actually, my (amateurish and vague) sense is that one of the marvels of this album is precisely its tone color.  The mixing of the various winds -- several saxes, trumpet, flute -- really works, and creates a gorgeous sound palette, which Nelson and the others work with in really entrancing ways.

It is, in short, a great listen.  Highly recommended (even as your second album, if you haven't yet moved beyond your first).  It's fun, captivating, beautiful.  Just marvelous music.  But, truth be told, I don't really know why it is.

...Did I mention it has a great title?

Hmm.  This witness doesn't seem to know much about the case, your honor.†  Can we call another?

This record is as good as anything in jazz music, I think.... you've got a lot of musicians who are at a very exciting point in their development. ... on bass clarinet, Eric Dolphy did things that other musicians, even classical musicians, could not do. Great leaps of intervals, great playing of octaves in his music, from top to bottom, very fast and very easily. It's very hard to do that on that instrument, I have been told.

Oliver Nelson... [had] the ability to make a very small group sound large. So you hear the opening lines of "Stolen Moments" which we played a bit earlier, and you think that you're listening to a much larger band than you're hearing. That shows very good writing. He was a very studied musician. And with this very particular record, he was anxious to explore the chordal structure of the blues. He does that well. He also refers to the basic Gershwin structure of "I Got Rhythm" as being something that he wanted to work from here.... The blues is all through this record....

...It would be criminal not to mention the rhythm section of this album. These are three of the greatest players ever assembled for any session, I think.... And, they're full collaborators in the music. Please do not omit this rhythm section as you listen to this recording.

-- Murray Horwitz. & A.B. Spellman

Ah, that's better.  Another?

Oliver Nelson is known primarily as a big band leader and arranger, he is lesser known as a saxophonist and organizer of small ensembles. Blues and the Abstract Truth is his triumph as a musician for the aspects of not only defining the sound of an era with his all-time classic "Stolen Moments," but on this recording, assembling one of the most potent modern jazz sextets ever... "Stolen Moments" really needs no comments, as its undisputable beauty shines through in a three-part horn harmony fronting Hubbard's lead melody. It's a thing of beauty that is more timeless as the years pass. The "Blues" aspect is best heard on "Yearnin'," a stylish, swinging, and swaying downhearted piece that is a bluesy as Evans would ever be. Both "Blues" and "Abstract Truth" combine for the darker "Teenie's Blues," a feature for Nelson and Dolphy's alto saxes, Dolphy assertive in stepping forth with his distinctive, angular, dramatic, fractured, brittle voice that marks him a maverick. Then there's "Hoedown," which has always been the black sheep of this collection with its country flavor and stereo separated upper and lower horn in snappy call-and-response barking. As surging and searing hard boppers respectively, "Cascades" and "Butch & Butch" again remind you of the era of the early '60s when this music was king, and why Hubbard was so revered as a young master of the idiom. This CD is a must buy for all jazz collectors, and a Top Ten-Fifty favorite for many.

-- Michael G. Nastos

Right, that's how you talk (and think) about music.  How about one more?

...a rare marriage between an arranger-composer's conception and the ideal collection of musicians to execute it. The material is all based somehow on the blues, but Nelson's structural and harmonic extensions make it highly varied, suggesting ballads, hoedowns, and swing. The band is one of those groupings that seem only to have been possible around 1960, a roster so strong that the leader's name was actually listed fourth on the cover. Nelson shares the solo space with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, alto saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy, and pianist Bill Evans, while bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Roy Haynes contribute support and baritone saxophonist George Barrow adds depth. In stark contrast to Dolphy's brilliant, convulsive explosions, Nelson's tenor solos are intriguingly minimalist, emphasizing a tight vibrato and unusual note choices. It's not quite Kind of Blue (nothing is), but Blues and the Abstract Truth is an essential recording, one that helped define the shape of jazz in the '60s.

-- Stuart Broomer

Er, right.  All that.  That's what I would have said, if I'd had the technical vocabulary.  (Cough, cough.)

In my own voice, all I can say is it's beautiful.  Give it a listen.

__________________
* The list is by majority vote, so its rankings change over time.

** E.g., album titles:

• The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady 
• Cathexis 
• Conversations with Myself 
• Echoes of a Friend 
• The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra 
• History, Mystery 
• In a Silent Way
• Modern Art 
• Noir Blue 
• Percussion Bitter Sweet 
• Piano Starts Here 
• The Shape of Jazz to Come 
• Sound Grammer 
• Still Life (Talking)
• Tuskegee Experiments

(Compare "Live in/at...", "The Complete...", etc.  Or any of Miles Davis's terrible puns on Miles (Milestones, Miles Ahead, Miles to Go, etc.)

*** None of them have anywhere near as good titles as The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  Clearly that's the main factor here.

**** One obvious place to begin might seem to be the album More Blues and the Abstract Truth, but Wikipedia says of the latter that it "features an entirely different band and bears little resemblance to this record", while allmusic.com notes that "unlike the original classic [The] Blues and the Abstract Truth set from three years earlier, Oliver Nelson does not play on this album," and adds that it "falls short of its predecessor."  None of which means it isn't good, but all of which is enough to make it not the obvious, immediate go-to follow-up its title clearly meant one to think it was.

***** Nelson seems to have used up his good title quota on the album title.

† Viz:

`What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice.
`Nothing,' said Alice.
`Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King.
`Nothing whatever,' said Alice.
`That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury.

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12, 'Alice's Evidence'

Exploring Jazz Sideways (Albums? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Albums)

In my posts on jazz to date -- which I am viewing as a combination of personal narrative and a possible help to any who might wish to follow in my footsteps -- I've talked about albums.  I've talked about one's first jazz album, and one's next; I've talked about the first jazz album I came to really love, and about the Library of Congress's recognition of a particularly notable album.  Albums, in other words, have been the unit of measure in the explorations to date.

But why?  Why albums?

The answer is threefold: my personal history, the music's history, and broad social/technological history, but they all come down to this: albums were the vehicle of music transmission for roughly the second half of the Twentieth Century.

LPs -- a record long enough to hold an album -- were only put on the market in 1948.  They took a while to get settled as the predominant unit of musical consumption, but settle they did; and the format changed little as the medium hopped from records to cassettes to CDs.  Of course, in the Twenty-First Century this has changed again, first with mp3s (legal and illegal) and now with streaming (a universe I know little about).  Still, there was a long time, when the normal way music was consumed -- both in jazz specifically and in American music more broadly -- was the album.  As Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux say in their useful introduction, Jazz:

From the early 1950s until the middle 1980s, the industry was dominated by the LP; many of those albums ought to be considered as integrated works.... Works such as Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain, Duke Ellington's Far East Suite, and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, among hundreds more, should be experienced in their entirety -- no less than a Beethoven symphony or a Verdi opera or St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The album concept remained in force in the CD era, but its hold began to slacken, especially in Jazz. (p. 650)

The point being, that in the era where the majority (or at least the plurality) of music I've so far preferred was made (roughly 1950 - 1970), albums were the relevant unit, and since I grew up in the album era, I am used to that as the relevant unit.  So I think in terms of albums.

But, while granting Giddins and DeVeaux's point about the integrity of albums as an artistic unit, there are plenty of works for which this isn't the case -- everything before 1950 or so, and many things after 2000, but a lot of things in the intervening years.  As in rock and folk, jazz musicians made albums, and consumers bought them, but radio stations played singles, and there were still plenty of cases where a song makes perfect artistic sense in isolation.

In fact, arguably, this is much more the case in jazz than in either rock or classical music.*  While many of the albums post-1960 grew to have very long tracks, a great deal of jazz is based on songs.  So far this is true in rock as well.  But it seems that in jazz musicians are far more expected to know, to play and to record other people's songs.  At least since the Beatles/Dylan revolution in rock, rock musicians have tended to compose their own works.  Covers are done, of course, but they tend to be limited to one or two an album, plus some at concerts.  (Albums with more covers than that -- say, one with all covers -- have the air of a stunt.)  And you certainly don't have the expectation that any given rock performer would know how to play any given rock song, no matter how famous.

But this isn't true in jazz.  In jazz, the idea of knowing a repertory of songs seems to be basic.  A lot of performers have as some of their best-known pieces performers of others' compositions.  Jazz, in other words, formed its traditions and expectations at a time when performers played tunes other than their own -- when they were expected to know them (if, for instance, they wanted work).  And thus there are a lot of songs which have gotten a lot of play in jazz.



I was brought to this (belated) realization by another excellent book, Ted Gioia's useful recent work, The Jazz Standards: a Guide to the Repertoire.  Honestly, I got it out of the library not really having much of a sense of what was in it.  I knew that Gioia was a prominent jazz critic, author of (among many other things), one of the widely-recommended histories of jazz -- indeed, probably the one that, at this point, I'd recommend myself.  (It's that or the Giddins & Deveaux volume; I hope to discuss those and more in a future post.)  I think I vaguely thought it might have a detailed list of recommended albums.

But of course it doesn't.  It's a list of the standards -- the songs that, as Gioia says, jazz musicians are expected to know.**   (The list itself can be seen as the table of contents; you can see it in the Amazon preview, the Google books preview or (possibly simplest of all) at the Barnes and Noble site.)  And that fans, presumably, either should know, or would want to know, or will come to know.  Gioia helpfully provides, in addition to a brief discussion of each song (talking variously about its history, its musical qualities, classic recordings, etc.) a list of recommended recordings.

Which, of course, suggests another approach to learning about jazz.

While I have, so far, mostly been listening to jazz albums, I have also done some listening to jazz songs.  It's a bit harder: given that the library is my primary source of music so far, it's a lot easier to find out if they have a particular album, and then to lay my hands on it, then it is to figure out if they have a particular recording.  And they're more likely to have albums that show up on top-ten lists than Gioia's lists of recordings, which tend to deliberately include some rather obscure (and/or just contemporary, where the library is weaker) renditions in nearly every case.

Still, it's possible, and there are some advantages to it.

First, if you pick enough songs (and the right songs) and go through them, you can actually get a decent overview of jazz history, jazz styles, and so forth.  Not completely -- it's not clear to me if free jazz or fusion will be adequately represented, for example.  And obviously there will be holes, unless you're really thorough.  (I imagine that Gioia's complete list -- all 2000 or so versions of his 252 songs -- would do it.  (It's available as a spotify playlist, if that's your thing.))  Still, most of the major performers will be represented, and most of the major styles.  So it's a different route in -- but one arguably as valid as albums.

Which, incidentally, is not true of any given list of songs from rock -- there's no set of songs so covered that you'd hit most of the major figures.

But it has other, more significant advantages too.

I hope that no one reading these posts has been mislead into thinking that I am in any way an informed or educated or particularly sensitive listener to jazz.  I've liked a lot of what I've heard.  (I've loved some of it; I've thought some of it was okay; I've hated one or two tracks.)  But I don't really understand what I'm listening to, or what I'm supposed to be listening for.  The entire thing is often rather obscure to me.

And it seems I'm not alone.  Giddins and DeVeaux's book opens by talking about how even experienced listeners sometimes have the "what is that musician doing up there?" bafflement during a concert -- and that it's common for novices such as myself.  An older (and honestly rather outdated) introduction to jazz, by Martin T. Williams (who edited the first Smithsonian jazz anthology which I mentioned in an earlier post) was frankly called Where's the Melody?: A Listener's Introduction to Jazz.  A more recent introduction to jazz volume, Jonny King's What Jazz Is: An Insider's Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz, has an opening chapter titled "Where's the Melody?".  The point is, it's a common complaint.***

And Williams's case, he starts of by telling a story of two friends, a novice and a long-time jazz fan, going to a jazz club:

The novice turns to the insider and asks, "What are they playing, do you know?"

The master replies, "That's A Foggy Day."

At this point we can discern puzzlement, and perhaps despair, on the face of the novice. He knows perfectly well what A Foggy Day in London Town sounds like, and he hears nothing whatever like its melody coming from the musicians in front of him.  Yet his friend is sure that it's A Foggy Day.  Jazz must be some kind of musical puzzle.

In effect, our novice has asked a prevalent question, "Where's the melody?"  Or, to put it more crudely, "What are those musicians doing up there?"  It is a question that is considered so square by some jazz fans, and even some musicians, that they refuse to answer -- or even hear it.  Yet I think it is a perfectly valid question, and answering it can be enlightening. (pp. 3-4)

Well, I can't help but agree that it's a valid question, because it's mine, more often than not.  And I too would hope for enlightenment in its answer.  And while Williams has some reassurance on this score,**** I personally continue to hope for yet further enlightenment,

The point is that, while the music often sounds nice, I often don't really understand what's going on.



Which is an advantage of exploring jazz sideways.  If you listen to two or three versions of the same song, you get more of a sense of what is (in a jazz interpretation) what is essential and what is not.  You might -- or, at least, over time I hope to (I haven't yet) -- get to better understand the relationship between the improvisations and the basic stuff of the song.

There are a number of ways to do this.  One is to find a song that one knows and likes which is frequently recorded by jazz musicians, and seek out that; another way is to listen to a bunch of jazz, find a song one likes, and seek out alternate versions; a third way is to look at a list of jazz songs one has already and note duplicate titles.  I've done a little of each; I hope to do more of all.

Again, in either case, one possible guide to use is Ted Gioia's The Jazz Standards: a Guide to the Repertoire.  His use of recommended recordings in particular is useful, but so are his discussions of each song (sometimes including useful comments on the , to say nothing of the listing of songs itself.  Frankly, it's rather irritating that the library wants its copy back.

(I do have a few complaints about Gioia's book, incidentally.  First, it's indexing is not what one would want: he gives a single, 'general mention' index, without distinguishing the type of mention.  For a book of this sort, it would be helpful to have separate indexes of composers, artists & albums on recommended lists, and mere mentions.  Second -- and this is not a mark against his success in writing the type of book he set out to write, but simply a note about its utility for some purposes -- while a focus on current standards is obviously most useful for musicians, or those who plan to frequent jazz clubs, a list including one-time standards that have fallen out of favor would be more useful to those exploring jazz's recorded history.  But obviously both of these are nitpicks; it's a very good book overall.)

Incidentally, here's where knowing some selections from the Ella and Louis album series has served me well: a number of the songs they recorded are on Gioia's list,***** and a number of others probably qualify too.  Simply knowing some of those songs gave me a way in.

Other songs I already knew.  Well, as Chamira, a commentator on my first jazz post noted, John Coltrane famously recorded "My Favorite Things" -- yes, from the Julie Andrews movie, although the film hadn't come out yet (it was a Broadway show first, and that's where Coltrane got it).  Chamira, quoted a reviewer discussing

Trane's shocking demolition of the dainty brickwork of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favourite Things" which he stripped back to a brutal but dazzling modal exploration in E minor and E major...

Indeed, it became a hit for him, and thereafter a song particularly identified with him.  And, yes, it's in Gioia's book -- because Coltrane's influence made it a standard -- and Gioia includes among his recommended versions two Coltrane takes (the one from the album of the same title, and the one from a 1965 live album), as well as versions by Bill Evans, Sun Ra, and others.  And, yes, Chamira's right: that would be a good second album.  (That track, if not the whole album, was one of the ones I heard first this time around.)  Coltrane's success with "My Favorite Things" spurred him to record "Greensleeves", which was always also a favorite of mine.

And I've used other methods, too.  I encountered both Duke Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft" and Thelonious Monk's "Bemsha Swing" in the course of exploring jazz, liked both, and sought out other versions.  Simply searching out recommended jazz albums, on the other hand, led me to encounter a lot of copies of Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" and Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight".  (And no, the duplication of those composers is not accidental: as far as jazz composers go, they're among the most important.)

So if you are a little into jazz, or decide to follow me down this crooked, happenstance highway, consider exploring it sideways.

I won't say it's a good way to use as one's sole method.  Among other things, it's my sense that later on (perhaps from 1959 on?) recording standards became less central, at least for the major artists, and possibly for everyone.  Partly this is because of the phenomenon Gioia laments (but acquiesces to), that fewer songs these days are becoming standards.  (More on that later perhaps.)  But it also seems a trend.  A lot of important albums in the post-1959 period are single artistic statements -- I'm thinking of things like Coleman's Free Jazz, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Davis's In a Silent Way, Jarrett's Köln Concert -- where covering standards just wouldn't fit.  In a lot of other cases (such as most if not all of the five 1959 blockbusters) those 'standards' that are on there (using Gioia's list as the criteria) are there because those initial recordings made them so.  (Thus, "So What" from Kind of Blue, "Giant Steps" from Giant Steps, and "Take Five" from Time Out are all on the list because of those initial recordings.)  To some degree this is probably the phenomenon that Giddins and DeVeaux discuss, that jazz was, in this period, increasingly an art of the album.  Another factor might be changing notions of artistry and the importance of competition -- even, perhaps, influence from other musics (although rock wouldn't come to focus on performer-composed songs until a few years later, I believe).

Still, tracing a song out -- going sideways across albums, rather than simply feasting on one album before moving on to the next -- seems like a good additional way to approach this particular body of music.  -- If that's a trip you want to make.  Speaking for myself, so far I've found it one well worth taking.

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* Folk is more like jazz in this regard, I think.

** Gioia argues, persuasively, that

...knowledge of the repertoire was even more important to a jazz musician than to a classical artist. The classical performer at least knows what compositions will be played before the concert begins. This is not always the case with jazz. I recall the laments of a friend who was enlisted to back up a poll-winning horn player at a jazz festival -- only to discover that he wouldn't be told what songs would be played until the musicians were already on stage in front of 6,000 people.  Such instances are not unusual in the jazz world, a quirk of a subculture that prizes both spontaneity and macho bravado.  Another  buddy, a quite talented pianist, encountered an even more uncooperative bandleader -- a famous saxophonist who wouldn't identify the names of the songs even after the musicians were on the bandstand. The leader would simply play a short introduction on the tenor, then stamp off the beat with his foot... and my friend was expected to figure out the song and key from those meager clues. (The Jazz Standards, p. xiii; second ellipsis and emphasis in the original.)

*** See also Chuck Berry:

I've got no kick against modern jazz,
Unless they try to play it too darn fast;
They lose the beauty of the melody,
Until it sounds just like a symphony,
That's why I go for that rock and roll music...

**** These two bits, for example:

...anyone who has ever watched a group of jazz fans will be led to suspect that more than a few of them are responding to jazz rhythm -- and very little else.  There is nothing invalid about such a response, for its particular way of handling rhythm is indeed one of the unique things and one of the most compelling things about jazz music.... (p. 4)

And (using Miles Davis as a more general example):

What's going on is that Miles Davis is offering a new melody, one which he is improvising on the spot.... The way to listen to him now is to listen not for something we already know or have already heard, but for the music that he is making as we hear he.  If we also hear, or sense unconsciously, that "outline," that related chord structure the player is using as his guide, fine.  But we don't have to.  Jazz is not a musical game or puzzle.... Where's the melody? The melody is the one the player is making.  Hear it well, for it probably will not exist again.  And it may well be extraordinary. (pp. 7, 8, 13)

***** Five of the twelve songs on the "best of" version (i.e. that I know really well) are on Gioia's list (and in four cases their version make his 'recommended recordings' list): "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You". "A Foggy Day", "Stompin' at the Savoy", "Summertime", and "They Can't Take That Away From Me". Four more tracks from the various Ella and Louis albums make his recommended recordings list; and another handful that they recorded are in Gioia's book without making his preferred recordings list for that particular song.

My First Favorite Jazz Album: Ella and Louis (Again, Porgy, Compact)

I have been talking about the first and subsequent jazz albums one ought to listen to, as well as about some of the famous ones that have achieved Governmental Recognition.  Those are all great places to start listening to jazz.  And I did, many years ago (when I started a never-really-engaged exploration with jazz) start with the first and then hear a few of the seconds before trailing off.

Then they got shelved, added to in a trickle, and enstoraged, and not heard again (save as incidental music to a modern life) for years.  (And now I have pulled them all out, and added to them substantially, and have heard more jazz in the last month than I've heard in the rest of my life combined (save for the album I'm about to discuss.))

Except that, in the same time -- starting, actually, probably a bit before, so this really was my first jazz album -- I heard another album.  And heard it over, and over, and over, and over, and over.  Memorized it; loved it.

I just didn't have the slightest idea it was jazz.  Which was pretty stupid of me, when it comes right down to it, since it had the word "JAZZ" right there on the cover in what Douglas Adams would have called big, friendly letters.  But when I thought "jazz", I thought of various instrumental music styles.  I didn't think of vocal music, which is what this was.  Letters be damned, or at least ignored.

I'm not sure what I would have called it, really.  "Popular music", I suppose.  Older, pre-rock popular music.  Maybe I would even have called it jazz, had anyone asked or I ever thought about it.  But I never did think about it what it was.  I just listened to it.

But, of course, it is jazz -- clearly, unmistakably jazz -- performed by two legendary jazz musicians, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

The album in question was called Compact Jazz: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.



This particular album is a compilation, a "best-of" collection (Compact Jazz was a series of those but out by Verve; I don't know how many were released, but it was a lot -- more than two dozen, certainly, possibly many more), drawn from three major albums released in the 1950s.  The three albums in question were: Ella and Louis (1956), Ella and Louis Again (1957) and Porgy and Bess (1957) (which, of course, were EF and LA's rendition of the classic Gershwin opera.)  It had four songs from the first album, six from the second, and two from the third.  (List of songs here.)

So, why did I hear it? Why didn't I think of it as jazz?

The answer to the latter is the answer to the former: I didn't think of it as jazz because I didn't seek it out; I heard it at work.

When I was in college, I worked two summers, full-time, and two years part-time during the academic year, in the package room at Harvard's Science Center (a big building of classrooms, offices, labs, public spaces and a library).  The package room at the Science Center received, in addition to the packages for the Science Center itself, all the packages for all the buildings in Harvard Yard, since package trucks weren't allowed in (letter carriers were).  Those were the freshman dorms, above all, but also a lot of office buildings and classrooms and so forth.  So it was a busy mailroom -- overwhelmingly so, at the end of every summer/beginning of every fall, when it would receive huge sets of all the earthly possessions of various freshman about to arrive, or just arrived, for the fall term.  But even otherwise, it was busy (the dorms housed summer students over the summer, who were generally high-school students in the pre-college program, and who thus got more than their share of packages).  Lots to do.

The person I worked for, the chief of the mailroom, was a large man named Sam McCleary.  He was friendly, good humored, whip-smart and a kind and generous boss (without tolerating any bullshit); I liked and admired him, and got more from knowing him, than I was ever able to properly say.  I would run out to deliver notices, but mostly I worked in the package room itself, as did he.  So we were together for hours every day (albeit busy and in different parts of the room).  When things got really slow, we'd chat.  He taught me how to play cribbage.

And we had a tape player which we could listen to music on while we worked.

I don't recall where this tape came from.  I assume it was Sam's.  I occasionally brought in tapes of my own; I remember once I brought in Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, which we listened to; when the UPS delivery guy remarked on it, Sam replied "we're very spiritual here".  And sometimes we just listened to the radio.  But there were a few tapes, and this was one of them.

Well, I liked it, so I put it on.  And again.  And again.  At some point, I remember, I told Sam that when I was a kid I used to listen to every album I really liked over and over and over and over, so he should tell me when he was sick of it, because I wasn't going to get sick of it myself.

"Well, you see," said Sam, "I did the same thing when I was a kid."

For all that, I think he flinched before I did.  Although I think it was more than a day.

But we kept listening to it frequently -- at least once a day, is my memory, although we're talking about two decades ago,  The point is, I really got to know that album very well.  Without ever thinking about what it was.  At some point, in a CD store, I saw the CD for sale, and bought it: I wanted to be able to hear it after I graduated -- forever, or the indefinitely that humans so often mistake for forever.

-- So why did I like it so much?  -- That's easy: because it's so damn good.  -- All right then, why is it so damn good?  -- Let me count the ways.

• The songs.  This was my first introduction to a number of classic American popular songs from the pre-rock era (say, before the mid-1950s) which can sound, to modern ears, old-fashioned if not mannered and contrived.  But they're really quite good: catchy melodies and quite witty lyrics (including lyrics that I remember thinking were racier than I would have predicted).  My favorites (although I never put it together at the time) were the ones by George and Ira Gershwin -- in particular, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and "A Foggy Day" -- but the album also included songs by Benny Goodman, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein (without Rodgers), Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, and others.  In other words, I got to hear a rich tradition of song which I was more or less ignorant of.  And they really are quite good.

• The performers.  They're just fabulous.  Ella Fitzgerald has a gorgeous voice and is a brilliant singer.  Louis Armstrong has a very different voice -- gravely and low -- but it's wonderful in its own way.  (Readers not into jazz might be most familiar with it from his famous version of the song "What a Wonderful World".)  And Armstrong plays trumpet on most of the tracks too -- and it's his trumpet which made his reputation and (in the process) remade jazz.*

• The duets.  But it's not just two brilliant performers.  It's what they do with the collaboration.  First, Fitzgerald's gorgeous voice and Armstrong's gravely one make a marvelous contrast, either sung together or in alteration, which is (I think) far better than either apart.  (I have to admit that, having learned to love this album first, hearing any of Fitzgerald's solo performances feel somewhat lacking to me.)  In addition to the marvelous textures of their raw voices, they play off each other, tease each other and quite noticeably interact in marvelous ways, that add a lot of humor and verve to the performances.  Then there's the fact that most of the songs are love songs (not all: for instance, "It Ain't Necessarily So, from Porgy & Bess, isn't one.)  So that singing them as duets makes an enormous amount of thematic sense -- and Fitzgerald and Armstrong play that up marvelously, to great effect.  They flirt, musically, and it really works.

• The music.  And then there's the instruments.  However much I may distinguish in my own mind (yes, still (perhaps mistakenly)) between vocal and instrumental jazz, there's a lot of great jazz instrumentation here.  One of the challenges in learning to listen to jazz (which I hope to write about in future posts) is figuring out what various soloists are doing -- which can be a puzzle even if you actually like it.  But for me, because I've heard them so much, Armstrong's trumpet solos sound not only good but inevitable: I can't imagine how you wouldn't orchestrate the songs that way.  (Which is to say that not only are they great -- which they really are -- but that they're great in a way that seems to make sense, rather than being great but mysterious.)  In that sense, this album did help me learn to hear jazz.

So, yes, it's a great album.  And in my most recent flurry of jazz exploration, one of the things I did was track down a more complete set of the Armstrong & Fitzgerald collaborations, and I can report that the other songs are as good as those on the Classic Jazz selection.

Would I recommend it as a starter jazz album?  Well, unquestionably, but with one major qualification: it's vocal jazz.  Perhaps I'm wrong to distinguish so sharply between vocal and instrumental jazz, but hearing them just feel very different to me.  For me, at least up until this point, they're different varieties of musical experience, on a fundamental level.  (And, in general, I'm more interested in instrumental than vocal jazz.)  I don't think I'm alone in this -- a few of the starter lists I talked about in an earlier post are specifically limited to instrumental jazz.  (And one of the lists that wasn't so restricted did include Ella and Louis in its suggestions.)  But if you're interested in jazz, then you have to hear at least a bit of the vocal jazz -- and for those purposes, I can't imagine a better starting point.  Speaking as an uneducated and beginning listener, it is one of my two favorite sets of jazz vocals; it's simply marvelous.  For that matter, even if you're not particularly interested in jazz, but just want to hear some great music, I'll recommend this unreservedly too.

So, if you want to hear it, how should you get it?  There's no reason to stick to the best-of set I happened to hear.  Get the full set of duets.  But how to do that?  It's complicated.  There's no one single set that has all of the recordings that Fitzgerald and Armstrong did together, but there are a couple that have most of them.

It goes like this.  (I'm working from the discography here.)  They did six songs (three singles, each with a B side) for Decca in 1950/1951.  Based on the success of those albums, I believe, they went on to produce a whole album -- Ella and Louis -- but this time for a different label, Verve.  Verve also produced the follow-up albums Ella and Louis Again, and Porgy and Bess.  The first and the third albums had pretty stable track lists (of 11 and 15 songs, respectively), but the second varied, with a fair number of bonus tracks added later.

Now, Verve released an album called The Complete Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on Verve -- but note those last two words, sometimes deemphasized, and occasionally omitted altogether: the six songs from Decca are not included.  But all of the three Verve albums are, the second in its most expanded version, plus two extra tracks that don't seem to be otherwise available.

Then there's an import set called the Complete Album Collection, which I snagged on Amazon.  (At the moment it's listed as out of stock.)  This has several advantages.  First, it's nearly half the price of the Complete on Verve set ($15 for CDs as opposed to $27 for mp3s).  Second, it's slightly larger.  The Complete Album Collection lacks one song that Complete on Verve has ("Undecided", one of the two never released prior to the Complete on Verve set); but it has two of the six Decca tracks ("Can Anyone Explain?" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me").  Which is a good trade.

...And then it has a song that's neither on the Verve nor one of the six earlier Decca songs -- one which is, in fact, not listed in the discography I'm relying on at all -- but which is, unmistakably, a duet between Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (including trumpet by the latter): "The Frim Fram Sauce".  I have no idea of its provenance.  But it's a third addition to balance out the single omission.  (And, of course, it raises the possibility that there might be still others.  I don't know of any; there are several other songs on the album Our Love Is Here to Stay: Ella & Louis Sing Gershwin, but I think they're all actually solo versions, by either EF or LA, from other sets they did.)

But the truth is the two sets are nearly identical: stick the CDs of the Complete Album Collection in a computer, and in two of the three cases the automated track namer will think it's actually the Complete on Verve set; only disk three differs at all.  (There are still others, such as one which is (mis)labeled** Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: the Complete Studio Recorded Duets, which omits some things from the other collections, but has all the Decca tracks.  Etc.)  Either will get you the bulk of their fabulous collaboration.***

Way or another, check them out.

____________________
* Really.  That's not hyperbole.  Armstrong's playing was what established the tradition of the individual solo, and his style dominated for nearly two decades (until the development of Bop in the early 40's.)

** One thing that a non-jazz listener has to get used to in getting into jazz -- at least in my experience -- is the really astonishing number of albums that are labeled "complete", or "best of", and so forth, which turn out to be nothing of the sort.  Sometimes there's some hidden qualification -- complete/best of from a particular record label -- but in general, there's a fairly shocking amount of poor labeling around.

*** I think the rest are purchasable as individual mp3 tracks; I haven't bothered to do this yet, though.  Some day.

Your Second Jazz Album

So we've established that the first jazz album you should listen to is, clearly and unmistakably, Kind of Blue.  What's the second?

....Here, things get complicated.  Rapidly, and Very.

If there is a really clear answer, and something approaching a consensus, to the number one slot, below that what we have is chaos.

(And, as a forthright warning, I should make it clear that I don't have an answer.  I'm not sure there is an answer, the way that there is for the question of one's first jazz album.  So if you're interested only in a single answer, you might as well bail now.)

Now, while it's chaos, it's not total chaos.  If you look at the dozen lists of introductory jazz albums I linked to last time (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12), you'll see there's a great deal of overlap.  In particular, if you omit the last two (both of which are specifically trying to be different from the consensus), you'll see a lot of overlap.  Here -- I obsess, you benefit -- are the albums that appear on more than one of those ten lists*:

• Davis, Miles, Kind of Blue (10)
• Brubeck, Dave, Time Out (4)
• Coleman, Ornette, The Shape of Jazz to Come (4)
• Getz, Stan and Joao Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto (4)
• Mingus, Charles, Mingus Ah Um (4)
• Coltrane, John, Blue Train (3)
• Coltrane, John, A Love Supreme (3)
• Evans, Bill, Sunday at the Village Vanguard (3)
• Adderly Cannonball, Somethin’ Else (2)
• Armstrong, Louis, Best of the Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (2)
• Davis, Miles , Bitches Brew (2)
• Evans, Bill, Live at Town Hall (2)
• Haden, Charlie & Pat Metheny, Beyond The Missouri Sky (2)
• Jarrett, Keith, Köln Concert (2)
• Parker, Charlie, Best of the Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings (2)
• Rollins Sonny, The Bridge (2)

The first thing to note is that Kind of Blue is on all ten lists; the next most frequently represented album is on four.  This is why it ought to be your first jazz album.

Apart from that, though, this is a list of fifteen other albums, and probably even makes a pretty decent starter list on its own.  It even has the "one recent album" feature that so many of the lists seem to include, since two of the lists chose the same recent album (Haden and Metheny's Beyond the Missouri Sky).

Oh, and remember how I was saying that 1959 was sort of an annus mirabilis in jazz, with no less than five albums selected for the Library of Congress's list of significant recordings?  Well, four of those albums are in the top five on the list -- Kind of Blue, Time Out, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Mingus Ah Um.  The only album mentioned on as many as four lists that is not from 1959 is Getz/GIlerto (from 1964)**; the only album from the 1959 set not on this list is Coltrane's Giant Steps -- which seems, on these ten lists, to have been overshadowed by his most famous earlier (Blue Train) and later (A Love Supreme) albums.  (Personally, I'd have gone for Giant Steps, not necessarily as the best of those three, but as the most accessible -- certainly more than A Love Supreme, good as the latter is.)

But of course this overemphasizes artists who made one very popular (or very accessible) album, and de-emphasizes those for whom there is no consensus about which album to recommend for beginners.  So here's a list, again drawn from those ten linked above, of just of the performers the lists agree on, giving the performers one point for each album (thus if a list gives two albums, they get two points for it).  Then you get:

• Miles Davis (14)
• John Coltrane (8)
• Bill Evans (6)
• Ornette Coleman (5)
• Louis Armstrong (5†)
• Dave Brubeck (4)
• Stan Getz & Joao Gilbreto (4)
• Charles Mingus (4)
• Thelonious Monk (4)
• Charlie Parker (4)
• Duke Ellington (3) 
• Herbie Hancock (3)
• Sonny Rollins (3)
• Cannnonball Adderly (2)
• Art Blakey (2)
• Ella Fitzgerald (2†)
• Carlie Haden & Pat Metheny (2)
• Keith Jarrett (2)
• Wynton Marsailis (2) 

The ones in itallics are those where each of the lists mentioning them mention the same album.  (Miles Davis is a special case here: all mentioned Kind of Blue, four others added a second album.)  The daggers (†) are because I've credited both Fitzgerald and Armstrong separately for the listing of their joint album (Ella and Louis).  But I credited Haden & Metheny as a team, despite the fact that one list also mentioned a Metheny solo album (it was one of the two that listed the collaboration -- presumably a big Metheny fan).

Coltrane's place here is more clearly representative of his importance (and accessibility); there's just no agreement about which album to start with.  The same holds true in other cases.  More than half the lists think that you should try some live Bill Evans; they just can't agree on which (and whether to recommend Sunday at the Village Vanguard or the complete recordings that were released from that same set of performances).  Minugs and Monk get the same number of votes, but everyone plugs Mingus Ah Um, while the lists that mentioned Thelonious Monk mentioned four different albums (Brilliant Corners, Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1, Misterioso, Monk's Dream).  Herbie Hancock too was represented by three different albums (Empyrean Isles, Gershwin's World, Head Hunters).  This is true too for Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, but it's less surprising in their cases because they had such long and storied carriers, and their work is usually considered by the song not the album (there was a switch at some point).

But if you put these two lists together, you get a sense of some of the places to go -- after, of course, Kind of Blue.  Now, obviously, these are just ten "start here" lists I pulled off a few Google searches.  (And I'm working with the short ones here -- there are a lot of longer lists I'm ignoring because obsession only goes so far.)  But it does show you some of the suggestions people make.

Have I followed these lists?  Somewhat.  I've been listening to a lot of things, including most (but not all) of the albums on the first list (and the artists on the second), but a bunch of other stuff too.  For me, however, the single most important consideration has been whether it's been available at my local public library***.  I'll try almost anything that I can get there; otherwise, my degree of selectivity goes way up.  I have bought a few things the library either didn't have or didn't have playable copies of (one example: Coltrane's A Love Supreme ****).  But my budget is limited, so albums I can listen to for free are prioritized.  -- And this is the way these things usually work, I presume: the lists are then integrated with other considerations, and a new list generated.

Still, those are some albums and artists some people have suggested you might like to listen to, if you'd like to listen to some jazz.  A list to consider with the rest.

...except that all this is assuming that albums are the right category to be looking for.  My next post (if and when I get to it) will consider another possibility entirely -- one that some people, at least, might find more to their liking.  Stay tuned.

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* Actually, these are also the albums that appear on all twelve lists more than once, since the last two have no overlaps with either each other or the other ten.  This doesn't hold when it comes to artists -- if I integrated the other two lists into the artist list, it'd change -- but, as we Jews say around this season, diyanu.

** The whole album Getz/GIlerto isn't on the L of C list, but its most famous track, "The Girl from Ipanema", is.

***  And whether the disk then works -- our library's CDs have a fail rate of about 10%, based on my not at all random sampling.  I'm not complaining, mind -- I love hearing the music for free, and kvetching that some of it doesn't work would be petty.  But I have found that just because something's listed in the catalog doesn't mean that it's actually available for hearing.  (There are also a fair number of disks which are, seemingly indefinitely, 'out for repair'.)

**** Yes, the library had it, but it was hopelessly scratched.

The Shape of Jazz to Come Recognized as the Shape of Jazz That Was (and Other Jazz at the LIbrary of Congress)

If you're at all serious about it, t takes a really stunning amount of self-confidence to label a record "The Shape of Jazz to Come".  Particularly if you're a relative unknown putting out their third-ever album.

Which makes it pretty bloody remarkable if you title your album that, and you're right.

But Ornette Coleman did, and was.

Appearing only a few weeks, I believe, after Miles Davis's groundbreaking Kind of Blue (1959 was a really astonishing year for jazz), Coleman's album was the opening shot in the "free jazz" style -- avant-garde jazz that (in the way of avant-garde artists everywhere) ditched all the rules, made great art and lousy sales.  Or, as someone who actually knows what they're !@#$% talking about puts it, it

was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with. The record shattered traditional concepts of harmony in jazz, getting rid of not only the piano player but the whole idea of concretely outlined chord changes. The pieces here follow almost no predetermined harmonic structure, which allows Coleman and partner Don Cherry an unprecedented freedom to take the melodies of their solo lines wherever .they felt like going in the moment, regardless of what the piece's tonal center had seemed to be.

Further reflections on the album from the actually informed can be found here.

I don't have a lengthy review of it -- except that, to ears as utterly untrained as my own, it's fabulous, but not particularly difficult or revolutionary (we're not talking Schoenberg here. Or, to once again quote the above-cited "actually knows something" person,

Coleman's ideals of freedom in jazz made him a feared radical in some quarters; there was much carping about his music flying off in all directions, with little direct relation to the original theme statements. If only those critics could have known how far out things would get in just a few short years; in hindsight, it's hard to see just what the fuss was about, since this is an accessible, frequently swinging record. It's true that Coleman's piercing, wailing alto squeals and vocalized effects weren't much beholden to conventional technique, and that his themes often followed unpredictable courses, and that the group's improvisations were very free-associative. But at this point, Coleman's desire for freedom was directly related to his sense of melody -- which was free-flowing, yes, but still very melodic.

...It's always nice to have one's naive impressions backed up by actual knowledge.  Yeah, this is an album that is fun to listen to and not particularly challenging to the modern ear.

The reason I bring this up is that I saw this morning (via) that the Library of Congress had put out its annual list of 25 items added to it National Recording Registry this week.  Naturally I (given my recent preoccupations) scanned it to see what jazz, if any, had been added, and I noticed at once that Coleman's Shape of Jazz to Come had made the list -- indeed, it seems to be the major jazz album on the list.  So I thought I'd mention it.

(There's a lot of other great stuff on the list, obviously, but that's the album that stood out for me as a nascent jazz fan.)

So three cheers for Coleman, and the Way the Shape of Jazz to Come Was.*

...All of which leads me to the obvious next question: what other classic jazz albums are among the 375 recordings so far chosen for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry?  (Which, in addition to other types of music also contains speeches, news events, recordings of poems, the famous WPA recordings of former slaves' memories, recordings of whale and bird songs, radio dramas, baseball games -- all sorts of other things.  The criteria, I believe, is historical significance (not aesthetic significance.))

It's not as easy a question to answer as it sounds -- where do you draw the jazz/blues line, for instance?  And there are a fair number of items which I simply don't recognize, don't know anything about even if the name is familiar, or which I know in other recordings -- and in those cases I don't know if the (included) recording counts or not.  And, truth be told, I don't have time to research each piece on the list.  But glancing it over, these are things which (I think) are jazz recordings on the list:

• Ragtime compositions on piano rolls. Scott Joplin. (1900s)
• "Tiger Rag." The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. (1918)
• “Canal Street Blues.” King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. (April 5, 1923)
•  Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Louis Armstrong. (1925-1928)
• “Black Bottom Stomp.” Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. (1926)
• "Singin' the Blues." Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra with Bix Beiderbecke. (1927)
• "Star Dust." Hoagy Carmichael. (1927)
• "Ain't Misbehavin'." Thomas "Fats" Waller. (1929)
• “Night Life.” Mary Lou Williams. (1930)
• “Stormy Weather.” Ethel Waters. (1933)
• "Begin the Beguine." Artie Shaw & His Orchestra. (1938)
• Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert Benny Goodman. (January 16, 1938; released 1998)
• "Body and Soul." Coleman Hawkins. (1939)
• "In the Mood." Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. (1939)
• "Strange Fruit." Billie Holiday. (1939)
• "New San Antonio Rose." Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. (1940)
• "Sweet Lorraine." Art Tatum. (1940)
• Porgy and Bess. "Original" cast recording. (1940; 1942)
• Blanton-Webster era recordings. Duke Ellington Orchestra. (1940-1942)
• "Artistry in Rhythm." Stan Kenton and His Orchestra. (1943)
• "Straighten Up and Fly Right." Nat "King" Cole. (1943)
• "Down by the Riverside." Sister Rosetta Tharpe. (1944)
• Hottest Women's Band of the 1940s International Sweethearts of Rhythm. (1944-1946; released 1984)
• “Uncle Sam Blues.” Oran “Hot Lips” Page, accompanied by Eddie Condon’s Jazz Band. V-Disc . (1944)
• Jazz at the Philharmonic. (July 2, 1944)
• "Ko Ko." Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. (1945)
• "Manteca." Dizzy Gillespie Big Band with Chano Pozo. (1947)
• The Jazz Scene. Various artists. (1949)
• Brilliant Corners. Thelonious Monk. (1956)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book. Ella Fitzgerald. (1956)
• Descargas: Cuban Jam Session in Miniature. Cachao Y Su Ritmo Caliente. (1957)
• Dance Mania. Tito Puente. (1958)
• The Music from 'Peter Gunn. Henry Mancini. (1958)
• Giant Steps. John Coltrane. (1959)
• Kind of Blue. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, and others. (1959)
• Mingus Ah-Um. Charles Mingus. (1959)
• The Shape of Jazz to Come. Ornette Coleman. (1959)
• Time Out. The Dave Brubeck Quartet. (1959)
• The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings. Bill Evans Trio. (June 25, 1961)
• "The Girl from Ipanema." Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Astrud Gilberto. (1963)
• A Charlie Brown Christmas. Vince Guaraldi Trio. (1965)**
• The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake. Eubie Blake. (1969)
• Head Hunters. Herbie Hancock. (1973)
• Live in Japan. Sarah Vaughan. (1973)
• Crescent City Living Legends Collection. New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation archive/WWOZ New Orleans. (1973-1990)
• Aja. Steely Dan. (1977)
• The Audience with Betty Carter. Betty Carter. (1980)

And two non-musical but clearly relevant items:

• Jelly Roll Morton interviews conducted by Alan Lomax. (1938)
• Interviews with Jazz musicians for the Voice of America. Willis Conover. (1956)

I probably missed something obvious, and included something bone-headedly.  But that's what I saw at a glance.  (So, at my rough count, 48/375 items.  A decent total, given the scope of the list.)

Incidentally, the other jazz item to have been added this year was The Audience with Betty Carter, about which I know nothing other than what the L of C says in its list.  Sounds worth listening to, though.

Oh, and following up on the "1959 was an annus mirabilis for jazz" thought, note that there are now no less than five jazz albums from 1959 on the list: Coltrane's Giant Steps, Davis's Kind of Blue, Mingus's Mingus Ah-Um, Brubeck's Time Out and, this year, Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come.  Really remarkable, frankly.  In no other year could a "best of the year" list be mistaken for a "best of all time" list.

The list itself contains all sorts of utterly fascinating things, and maybe I'll explore it again sometime.  Check it out if you're curious (and if you're curious, you should be curious about this, because it's worth it.)

In the meantime, again, chapeaux! to Ornette Coleman's bold, justified arrogance -- in the tradition, as someone has said, of Babe Ruth pointing in the direction he was going to hit his home run.  In America, it ain't considered arrogence if you follow through.  Coleman, like Ruth, did. 

_________________________
* Apologies to Frederick Pohl.

** No, really!  It seems like it is.  I haven't heard it yet.  But I've seen it listed on at least one 'best of' list of jazz albums.