Your Jazz Journey

Jazzjet · August 27, 2008

A conversation the other day got me to thinking about how I got into jazz in the first place. So I wondered what other peoples 'jazz journeys' were.

FWIW, my own journey was as follows:

Up to the early 60s I followed the usual pop stuff - Cliff Richard, The Shadows, Elvis etc. Then came the beat boom and bands like the Stones and the Yardbirds led me to pioneers like Alexis Korner and Graham Bond. This prompted me to seek out the original blues, R&B and jazz performers covered by Korner, Bond etc. From there it was a small leap into the exploration of jazz in more depth - mainly modern jazz. The beat boom also stimulated a lifelong love of soul and ( real ) R&B by tracking down the originals of songs covered by the Beatles, Stones etc ( to this day I prefer Twist and Shout by The Isley Brothers to the Beatles version ). My increasing love of jazz led me to lose track of rock and pop over the next few years. I saw my first jazz concert - The MJQ - in 1964 or 1965. There was a brief diversion back to rock during the hippie years ( 1967-69 ) and this was when I got into jazz rock for the first time. From the early 70s onwards I was heavily into British jazz - Mike Westbrook, New Jazz Orchestra, Mike Gibbs, Keith Tippett etc. Thereafter it was marriage, career and respectability etc but also a time when I could gradually afford to expand my jazz collection and explore numerous avenues that either remain a love ( Miles Davis, jazz funk, soul jazz, spiritual jazz, nu jazz etc ) or have remained a mystery ( most free jazz, vocal jazz etc ). I still enjoy original soul, but not modern R&B or rap. I also still enjoy some rock although this tends to be old stuff ( Pink Floyd, Stones, Beatles etc ) and very little new stuff, particularly indie 'landfill'. Blues and increasingly 'world' music still get the juices flowing.

It would be interesting to hear about others 'jazz journeys' and see if there are any common themes.

Niko · August 27, 2008

in 1991 when i was 10 my parents got me a clarinet, i was not the type of kid who thought a lot about what i was told to do so i practised my 30 minutes a day (with very modest progress) when i was 14 they got me joachim behrendts jazz book (they didn't listen to anything other than classical music, don't quite know why they did that), i hadn't listened to music until then but i liked the stories in the book so i got a bunch of stuff, best of duke ellington, best of charlie parker, don't know how fascinated i actually was by the music guess i liked the idea of listening to jazz and as i listened and listened it must have convinced me somehow, and started going to concerts, playing in jazz bands, reading jazz magazines, my interests in jazz were a bit different than they are now, for instance i bought david torn cds, (saxophonist) bill evans hip hop projects, steve coleman, john abercrombie, when i was about 19 i stopped playing jazz, since i realized my solos would never be anywhere near good and then, when i started doing maths, i stopped listening to jazz in favor of music that provided a better background for working, started with stuff that was somehow near jazz, robert wyatt, kevin ayers, nick drake; also started writing song lyrics for a folk rock band so naturally i became more interested in songwriting... i listened to rock for about four years, the first libertines album was the only cd i bought in 2003 i guess, put on a jazz album from time to time but it was only noodling to me, then somehow i felt i wanted stronger music around me... tried classical for two or three months, then tried out a best of john coltrane compilation (prestige recordings as i know now) and noticed that was closer to what i wanted to hear... that was the time of the great ojc sale at zweitausendeins where i bought like 200 cds in the course of a few months, around that time i got stuck here at .org, i had been looking on the web for places that discussed that sale.... since then reading this board has more or less shaped my tastes in jazz (i mean i always knew that wynton marsalis was the opposite of cool - but that i got all john patton albums except for three by now and most don patterson that's out on cd... certainly has to do with this board, when i joined i thought zoot sims was my favorite jazz artist and that i more or less disliked anything recorded after 1958)

Edited August 27, 2008 by Niko

randyhersom · August 27, 2008

I used to like to hear an older neighborhood kid play Classical Gas on the guitar, and he would play me some Santana, Temptations and Chicago on the stereo. I didn't start buying my own music until a few years later, started with Santana's first three albums, then singles Love Train and Rock and Roll Part Two. Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan became favorites soon after. When I started thinking about college, I found that a guy at the local record store was a DJ at Temple University's jazz station WRTI, so I found a major and a new style of music to explore. I was a big reader of record reviews, Rolling SToone and Creem at first, to help select my music. Miles Davis - Big Fun came first, then Keith Jarrett's Solo Concerts and Oregon's Winter Light were two early favorites, while I dilligently tried to come to grips with Ornette, Trane and Cecil. When I got to the radio station, I found a strong noncommercial bias that shaped my next few years of listening. I got to meet artists like McCoy Tyner, Robin Eubanks, Michael Ray (the last two before they recorded commercially), Walt Dickerson, Betty Carter and Ted Curson. Max Roach and Sun Ra were artists that I saw live three times each. I took a couple of classes with Harrison Ridley Jr., a self taught expert on early jazz forms who communicated his love and knowledge of Duke and his contemporaries in an unpretentious fashion. I also took a job as a record store clerk in the classical section and explored that style of music also. I did become less of a purist over time after leaving Temple.

mikelz777 · August 28, 2008

Growing up, I remember being exposed to a wide variety of music. Through my parents it would have been stuff like polka, the Lawrence Welk Show, The Harmonicats, The Everly Brothers, etc. Through my older brother, 10 years my senior, I heard stuff like Elvis, The Beatles, Steppenwolf... The first jazz I recall hearing was Vince Guaraldi. I was never conscious of it as jazz, it was just the music I liked from the Charlie Brown cartoons. I seemed to be attracted to instrumental music fairly early on and recall buying 45's of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass before I even hit my teens. For years, until I was in high school, I would have been primarily into pop/rock music. I recall being into the group Chicago and always enjoyed "singing" the horn parts rather than the lyrics. In high school I hung around with a bunch of guys in marching/performance band. Through them I started inching into jazz a bit and got into stuff like Maynard Ferguson, The Crusaders and Tower Of Power. College years was still primarily pop/rock but I got into some pop-oriented jazz like Grover Washington, Bob James, Chuck Mangione and Spyro Gyra. The 15 years or so after college I listened to very little or no jazz of any kind. The spark that sent me on a serious pathway into the world of jazz was during one Christmas season listening to Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown Christmas. I started thinking about how much I enjoyed that jazz trio which inspired me to start searching for other trios. That search eventually lead me to Oscar Peterson. In looking for more Oscar Peterson CDs, I discovered Lester Young (with the OP trio) and instantly fell in love with his sound. After hearing Prez the first time I said to myself, "THATS the sound I'm looking for!!". That lead me from trios to quartets and looking for more of that kind of tenor sound. My love of Prez lead me to Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Scott Hamilton. Logical progression lead me to more and more artists and the rest is history. In the last decade or so I've amassed around 700 different jazz titles in my collection. Jazz probably makes up 95% or more of my listening time when I'm able to listen to music. If it's not jazz it's probably going to be classical, blues, country, bluegrass or traditional roots type music.

Edited August 28, 2008 by mikelz777

A Lark Ascending · August 28, 2008

More or less ignored music until I turned 14 in 1969.

1. A year or so of totally indiscriminate listening to Radio 1 and Radio Luxembourg, trying to sort it all out.

2. Rapidly brainwashed by the music magazines of the early 70s into 'progressive' and 'underground' music - all the usual suspects (Moody Blues, Yes, Genesis etc). Chicago also appeared early on (II and III), I suspect laying the groundwork for brass and reeds. By the mid-70s the Soft Machine, McLaughlin, Henry Cow, the Canterbury bands were starting to dominate my listening. All those Brit jazzers on King Crimson LPs led me to Keith Tippett's 'Septober Energy, though I was brought to a sudden halt by a couple of completely incomprehensible (at the time) Tippett albums.' At the same time I was starting to explore classical (Sibelius, Mahler, Stravinsky, Bruckner). And the Fairport axis of UK folk-rock was getting me to attend the university folk club.

3. Jazz stole up on me around 1975 through hearing 'Escalator Over the Hill' and then buying a few Jarretts ('In the Light', 'Facing You', 'Bremen/Lausanne', 'Death and the Flower'. I'd heard jazz on the radio but didn't quite get it - I knew I liked the sound of the piano trio but didn't know where to start. Seeing Stan Tracey do 'Under Milk Wood' (the 1976 version with poet!) and Harry Miller's Isipingo and buying Mike Westbrook's 'Love/Dream Variations' deepened the interest.

4. The real determining factor was punk - I loathed it. Overnight there was nothing I wanted to listen to in the rock world (most of my earlier favourites had broken up their groups or were producing weak stuff). So I had to look elsewhere for musical sustenance - jazz, classical and folk all became the main areas of interest. Miles, Coltrane, the Ogun and ECM labels were major areas of focus.

5. Jazz dominated around 1978-80 and again 1983-4; then a long period when classical took over. But around 1991 jazz came back with a vengeance and it has been out front ever since.

6. Up to the late 90s most of my buying was either American (exploring the history and some new stuff) or British. But the arrival of the internet and regular attendance at festivals like Cheltenham and Bath introduced me to mainland Europe - Italy especially got me excited.

7. Today jazz dominates though I still have an active interest in classical and folk with Scandinavian folk, Brazilian music and a little country and wider world music added. I live in a small house with inexpensive furnishings but with a wealth of wonderful music that I never tire of. Though I might lose enthusiasm for particular areas for a time, I always come back later - and that includes those very early rock records.

Edited August 28, 2008 by Bev Stapleton

Jazzjet · August 28, 2008

Interesting how often Chicago's name crops up in these memories. I was a big fan too. I still have their widely panned 4 disc Carnegie Hall set.

kh1958 · August 28, 2008

Around 1973, a combination of Frank Zappa (Hot Rats especially), John Mayall's Jazz Blues Fusion (especially the live record featuring Ernie Watts), and seeing Miles Davis on TV led me to buying jazz lps, the first two that really grabbed me were The Best of Cannonball Adderley on Capitol, and Basic Miles.

Larry Kart · August 28, 2008

This piece I wrote for Down Beat's Music '69 incorporates my experience along these lines (or a good bit of it), plus some other things in that it's focused on the '60s avant-garde. It's in my book. (Again this was written 39 years ago):

NOTES AND MEMORIES OF THE NEW MUSIC (1969)

“People put all these labels on the music, but actually all it is is cats playing.”

Lester Bowie

And cats listening, too. When Something Else, Ornette Coleman’s first record came out in early 1959, I was a seventeen-year-old high school student living in a Chicago suburb. I’d been listening to jazz for about four years.

The first jazz record I’d bought, back in the spring of 1955, was an 45 EP by Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, entrancing not only for the music (its calculated rusticity sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard) but also for the liner notes (which proclaimed that this was “the only real jazz band in America.”) Early in the next school year, my eighth-grade home room teacher, hear¬ng that I was interested in jazz (he was a fan himself), recommended that I buy a Charlie Parker record and took me and a friend to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Chicago Opera House that featured Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet, among others. That was it. From then on, all the money I could spare went into records.

I found others who shared my enthusiasm--that aforementioned friend, with whom I engineered what seemed to us monumental record trades (a ten-inch Ellington LP that contained “Ko-Ko” and “Concerto for Cootie” once brought ten less desirable albums in exchange), and, later on, an astonishingly good fifteen-year-old drummer, who had practiced for two years to Max Roach records in his attic before playing in public. I’m sure that his necessarily practical approach to listening--a quest to discover in other musicians virtues that he himself could put to use--helped to deepen and ground my own understanding.

Eldridge, Young, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Roach, and Philly Joe Jones were my gods, and their records were the texts of a religion. We were still too young to hear these men in clubs unless we brought a parent along, so we went to off-night, all-ages-welcome sessions run by Joe Segal and discovered a host of local deities--multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, pianist Jodie Christian, bassists Victor Sproles and Donald Garrett, and drummer Wilbur Campbell.

Then came John Coltrane’s Blue Train album, with the leader’s galvanic solo on the title track. This, to me, was the first sign that the music could and would change. Perhaps because I had come to jazz during a period of musical consolidation, it hadn’t oc¬curred to me that the music might once again undergo an upheaval comparable to that of the 1940s. But Coltrane’s playing made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, something new was happening. Listening to Blue Train again, I realize that, beyond Coltrane’s stylistic innovations, it was his music’s emotional aura of intense and unceasing search that was the clue. Today it appears that Sonny Rollins will have a deeper musical effect on the new music, but Coltrane was the herald for me.

Fortunately, at about the same time, I heard Chico Hamilton’s quintet, and, amid the polite thumping, the group’s reed man picked up a strange-looking ebony horn and played a solo that sounded like Coltrane translated for the human voice. Of course this was Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, and now my belief that change was occurring had a second point of reference.

Ornette Coleman was the third, and the leap in understanding that Something Else required was more than I could manage at first. In fact, Something Else remains a weird record. Pianist Walter Norris attempts to accompany Ornette with pertinent harmonies, creating “ad¬vanced” harmonic patterns that clash with Ornette’s homemade, and ultimately downhome, tonal, rhythmic, and melodic concerns. The record is a perfect example of Ornette’s distance from the conventions of the forties and fifties, but the emotional tone of the music is bizarre--as though Johnny Dodds had recorded with a Red Nichols group.

The next Coleman record I heard, The Shape of Jazz to Come (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins), had a more homogeneous atmosphere. “Peace” and “Lonely Woman” were such direct and intense emotional statements that I found myself. listening to them constantly, even though I had little understanding of what Ornette was up to in purely musical terms. I felt that the music was beautiful, but my fifties-trained ears told me that it was exotic and “outside.”

That barrier finally fell when I heard “R.P.D.D.” from the Ornette album under rather unusual circumstances. As I played it for the second time, late one night, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt that, in a pastoral setting, I was hearing a music more warmly human and natural than any I’d heard before. I awoke to discover that Coleman’s “R.P.D.D.” solo was what I’d been hearing in the dream, and that the quality I’d given it there was one it actually possessed. In no emotional sense was this music “far out” or abstract. Instead, I found that I had to turn to blues and early jazz to find music that conveyed human personality as directly.

The next beneficent shock to my ears was administered by Coltrane (by this time, the summer of 1960, I was about to become a student the University of Chicago). Ever since Blue Train, my drummer friend and I had listened to every Coltrane recording we could find. The then most recent one, Giant Steps, sounded to us like it might be the end of the musical road he had been traveling for the past sev¬eral years. Still, when Coltrane came to the Sutherland Lounge in mid-August, we went ex¬pecting to hear those qualities which had marked most of Giant Steps (recorded in May 1959 and released early in 1960)--dense harmonic patterns negotiated with a brilliantly hard and even tone. Instead, we heard something quite different.

This was the group with pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Pete LaRoca (the direct predecessor of the group that would record the album My Favorite Things two months later), and the difference between Giant Steps and the manner and matter of Coltrane’s current playing seemed immense. The tunes on tenor were mostly up-tempo blues with the harmonies stripped down toward modality, and the keening, granite-hard tone now exploded into growls and honks. The tunes on soprano saxophone, a horn we had some difficulty in recognizing, used harmonic change to form hypnotically circular rhythm patterns, over which Coltrane wailed like a blues-possessed snake charmer. To say the least, we were astonished and moved. As Coleman had done in his way, Coltrane unearthed a degree of passion rare in any music. [2004 P.S. I also recall Coltrane conversing between sets at the bar with the visiting Johnny Hodges, his former boss, and passing his soprano sax on to Hodges for examination. Hodges had played the instrument himself in the late twenties and early thirties.]

From then on, Coltrane’s Chicago visits were essential experiences. I remember in particular an engagement at McKie’s Disc Jockey Show Lounge, during which a tune from Giant Steps, “Mr. P.C.,” became a nightly challenge. “My Favorite Things” and the other soprano tunes would be dealt with in the first two sets, and by one a.m. he would be playing “Mr. P.C.” on tenor with an intensity that seemed to demand in response all the volume Elvin Jones could muster. The tune would be played for at least forty minutes, and some performances lasted well over an hour. As novelist Jerry Figi wrote of a later Coltrane group: “What they did prove was just how hard they could try. That they could beat themselves bloody pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only their effort as an answer.”

But there were other answers, or their beginnings, in the music of Coleman’s Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor. I see that, so far, my memories have centered on the emotional freedom that Coltrane and Coleman won for the individual improviser. The group settings seemed basically to be springboards for their solo efforts, although the wholeness of performances like “Lonely Woman” and “Ramblin’” should have been clues that Coleman, at least, had something else in mind.

Free Jazz made it clear that the relative liberation of the soloist was only the beginning of this music. The discovery that one soloist, using emotion as a determining force to an unprecedented degree, could produce music of great power, led quickly to the thought of what might come from a group of musicians who simultaneously played in this way. The musical risks in such an approach are obvious. But Free Jazz overcame them to an amazing extent. Here were four hornmen, only two of them having much in common stylis¬tically (Coleman and Cherry), producing a collective music that multiplied the power of Ornette’s playing without sacrificing its order.

I had heard Cecil Taylor’s music before this, but Free Jazz made me aware that he had an alternative and personal approach to the same situation. Taylor’s orchestral approach to the piano determined the nature of his groups’s creations. His recordings show that, given reasonably sympathetic musicians, he could enclose and order their playing from the keyboard, in one moment overseeing both rhythm section and front line. Still, as Taylor grew in solo power, or perhaps revealed more of what was always there, his virtuosity became overwhelming, and none of the hornmen he recorded with could function on a similar level. Taylor plays more brilliantly on Live at the Cafe Montmarte and Unit Structures than on Looking Ahead, but the group inter¬action on the earlier album is more satisfying. Perhaps, like Tatum, Taylor would fare best as a solo performer.

But I seem to be getting ahead of myself, because by 1963 I had heard local musicians who were playing the new music. I’ve never been able to pinpoint the different effects produced by live and recorded music, but the difference is a real one. Therefore, hearing in person the bass playing of Russell Thorne with the Joe Daley Trio was a revelation. Thorne was the first bass player I know of who could create an instantaneous combination of passion and order out of the new music’s materials. The quality of his arco playing has not yet been approached in jazz, and, if the kind of order he created owed something to modern classical composition (he had symphony orchestra experience and knew his Boulez, Cage, and Barraque), it never had the sterility of so-called third-stream jazz.

His music and his acquaintance also made me aware of a source for the new music that is gradually being acknowledged--the innovations of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh. I suspect that their music, with its unique rhythmic and harmonic qualities, and its emphasis on group creation, has already had an effect on a number of young musicians. Thorne no longer seems to be active as a musician (he works in a bookshop), but I doubt that music could ever be far from his mind. I hope that once again he will give some of it to us.

The second Chicago-based player of the new music I heard was Roscoe Mitchell. Coltrane was in town, and Elvin Jones was appearing at an off-night session. As Jerry Figi once put it, Elvin was laying about “with a vengeance, one of those prehistoric movie-monsters crashing through a city…”--in the process wiping out a James Moody-like tenor player. Suddenly, in the middle of a tune, a young alto saxophonist climbed on the stand and played a solo that met Jones more than halfway. What he played, a version of the bird-like cries that Dolphy used, was inseparable from the way he played it. His raw, piercing sound was powerful enough to cut through the drums, and Elvin found himself playing with and against someone. When the saxophonist had finished, he climbed down and disappeared into the audience. Someone was able to answer my question with the name Roscoe Mitchell, and I filed it for future reference.

Another in-person listening experience occurred during a New York visit in the spring of 1964, when I went to a loft session featuring the Roswell Rudd-John Tchicai group, with, as I recall, bassist Louis Worrell and drummer Milford Graves. They were playing well when one of those incidents happened that helps me understand the antagonism many older musicians and listeners feel toward the new music. A tenor player sat in and played the same note, spaced out with much “significant” silence, for about ten minutes. In between notes, he screwed up his face in dramatic indecision, as though he were considering and rejecting countless musical possibilities. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad.

After this performance, another man borrowed the tenor player’s horn, and joined Rudd and Tchicai. His remarkably broad sound bristled with overtones, and his melodies moved from a groaning, funereal lyricism to jaunty, anthem-like marches. The group fell into a joyous New Orleans polyphony (aided by Rudd’s Dixieland experience), but the effect was of the 1941 Ellington band in full flight--Rudd the whole trombone section, Tchicai the trumpets, and the tenorman capturing perfectly the overtone-rich sound of the Ellington reeds. As you may have guessed, he was Albert Ayler, whom I’d read about but never heard.

That fall I returned to the University of Chicago after a two-year absence to discover that the Hyde Park-Woodlawn area in which the school is located was the scene of bur¬geoning new music activity. At first, my ears and my mind were in conflict, because I’d been trained to think that New York City must be the center of artistic endeavor in this country. These local musicians, both in conception and per¬formance, seemed to be going beyond anything I’d heard before, but surely this couldn’t be so. But a few months of listening to Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell et al. convinced me that my ears (and emotions) were correct.

The first Roscoe Mitchell album, Sound, was probably all the evidence I needed; for here in three performances (“Ornette,” “Sound,” and “The Little Suite”) were the past, present, and future of the new music. “Ornette” was the new music’s past, i.e. Coleman to 1966. Over a dense but swinging pulse set up by drummer Alvin Fielder and bassist Malachi Favors, the horns played excellent solos (tenor saxophonist Maurice McIntyre, at once downhome and abstract, was es¬pecially impressive). But the jolly, Coleman-like theme that began and ended the performance was phrased with a savagery that implied that this kind of enclosure was no longer sufficient. “Sound” was the present answer-- a blank canvas upon which each solo¬ist in turn was free to determine melo¬dy and rhythm for himself, without reference to a stated theme or a steady pulse. Whether it was planned that way or not, the actual performance did have a constant point of reference--an evolv¬ing mood of melancholy that each soloist extended.

While “Sound” was perhaps bolder in conception than “Ornette,” the latter’s mercurial leaps of energy were a more direct link to “The Little Suite” and the future. My first reaction to this piece was that it was primarily fun and games. The absence of separate solos, the use of harmonica, slide whistle, etc., and the overall tone of dramatic satire seemed unserious. After all, wasn’t solo prow¬ess the final test of a musicians worth?

But as I relaxed and let the music work on me, I heard the beginnings of a new kind of musical form. In a sense, the piece was composed (there were prearranged sections, like the little march), but how such sections would be reached and where they would lead seemed as freely determined as the playing of any soloist. The form was dra¬matic, for, as in “Sound,” mood was the dominant force in every passage, but the shifts between moods were kaleidoscopic, and the opening theme’s return seemed spontaneous rather than preordained.

Shortly after Sound appeared, I heard a live performance by Mitchell that confirmed and elaborated on the direction of “The Little Suite.” At the time, Mitchell’s regular group included trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Favors, and drummer Phillip Wilson, but Favors was absent for this miniature concert, held in a darkened lounge on the Chicago campus. In fact, for most of the evening the group was a duo of Mitchell and Wilson, because Bowie chose to offer only occasional comments.

Perhaps it was the darkness of the room, the absence of a stage, or the quiet participation of the listeners, but for whatever reasons the music was relaxed and serene in a way that had been largely foreign to the new music. What had been lost with the disappear¬ance of swing was regained, for both sound and silence were filled with music. The feeling of a man moving through time with grace and power was once again as vivid as it had been in the music of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, and so many others. With this, the new music no longer seemed imprisoned in the intensities of the moment, like so much of modern, energy-determined art. The force of memory in music was rediscovered, both as procedure and historical reference, and the music “past” was now a living part of the present--e.g, Bowie’s statement which began this article.

With the mention of memory, I find that I’ve come to the end of my own, since what I’ve heard in the past year feels as if it has all occurred yesterday. As Roscoe Mitchell has said, “Jazz is young, it’s not like other types of music.... It’s broad but not as broad as it’s going to be as it matures, as the musician matures.” It will happen.

Larry Kart · August 28, 2008