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The First Jazz Albums We Owned


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Over the decades, when I was in my 30s, 40s, or 50s and lugging home all these jazz LPs, I would sometimes be so knocked out by a particular record, that I would ask myself, "What if this would have been my first jazz album instead of Dave Brubeck's Greatest Hits?"

This got me to thinking about my first jazz albums that I bought in high school, and how they affected my taste in jazz and overall aesthetics.  In browsing through my accumulation, I can report the following:

I was in junior high when I bought my first two jazz albums.  The were:

  • Dave Brubeck's Greatest Hits
  • Benny Goodman's Greatest Hits

I bought the following albums when I was in high school.  These are listed alphabetically, and not by purchase date, though I can say that the Brubeck purchases were earlier rather than later.  The list is fairly complete, based on memory and looking through my LPs.

  • Anthony Braxton - Duets 1976
  • Dave Brubeck - Time Out
  • Dave Brubeck & Gerry Mulligan - Blues Roots - Columbia that I unloaded
  • Dave Brubeck - College Concert (Columbia twofer)
  • Dave Brubeck - Gone with the Wind
  • Ornette Coleman - Ornette on Tenor
  • John Coltrane - Giant Steps
  • Chick Corea - Piano Improvisations 1
  • Miles Davis - Round About Midnight
  • Eric Dolphy - The Berlin Concerts
  • Bill Evans - Village Vanguard twofer
  • Bill Evans - Columbia album with hideous cover art that I unloaded
  • Herbie Hancock - Empyrean Isles
  • Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage
  • Freddie Hubbard - Hub-Tones
  • Milt Jackson/Coleman Hawkins - Bean Bags
  • Ahmad Jamal - Live at Oil Can Harry's
  • Lambert Hendricks & Ross - Flyin' High
  • Mingus - Blues & Roots
  • MJQ - Last Concert
  • Monk - Underground
  • Monk - Always Know (Columbia twofer comp)
  • Wes Montgomery - Movin' (Riverside twofer reissue)
  • Oliver Nelson - Blues and the Abstract Truth
  • Herbie Nichols - Love, Gloom, Cash, Love 70s reissue
  • Charlie Parker - Savoy box set
  • Oscar Peterson - Verve Best of twofer
  • Bud Powell - Amazing Vols. 1 & 2
  • Bud Powell - Genius of (twofer of Jazz Giant and Genius of)
  • Bud Powell - some later albums which I unloaded
  • Wayne Shorter - The All-Seeing Eye
  • Jimmy Smith - Sounds of
  • Jimmy Smith - A New Star, a New Sound
  • Jimmy Smith - Live at Club Baby Grand Vol. 1
  • Art Tatum - Masterpieces (MCA/Decca twofer)
  • Art Tatum - Capitol solo sessions
  • Art Tatum - two volumes of the Pablo solo albums
  • Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures
  • McCoy Tyner - Expansions
  • Randy Weston - Zulu (comp of his early Riverside LPs)
  • Weather Report - Best of, which I unloaded
  • Various - The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (Massey Hall twofer)
  • Various - The Bebop Boys (Savoy twofer)
  • Various - A Jazz Piano Anthology (Columbia)
  • Various - Herbie/Chick/Keith/McCoy album that I unloaded

Unless otherwise indicated, I still have all of these albums, but in a few cases, I traded up for mono copies.  

At the same time I was buying these LPs, I was also buying 1960s pop/rock, 1960s-70s soul/R&B, and punk/new wave.  I vividly remember returning from a Saturday morning piano lesson one day and spinning Art Tatum Masterpieces followed by the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday.

Many of these albums were recommended in Jerry Coker's Patterns for Jazz, which may have been the first jazz instruction book that I bought.  Some I heard on jazz shows on our local community radio station.  Others were recommended by friends. Some were blind buys from the cutout bin. My list is piano-heavy, because that was my instrument.  

Looking back, I think I did OK for a high school student, and I managed to avoid fusion and smooth jazz when it was everywhere.  Still, I wonder what would have happened if I had heard at that age, for example, 1950s-60s Latin jazz or West Coast chamber jazz, two sub-genres that were not played on our local jazz station, at least that I can remember.  

I still spin most of these on occasion, the Brubecks not so much.  The older I get, the more I treasure these albums, because I heard them at a particular time.   

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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Two C90 cassettes that I made in the Fall of my junior year of college (1989)…

Side 1:  Mode For Joe + “Gary’s Notebook” from The Sidewinder (also with Joe Henderson).

Side 2:  Power to the People

 

Side 1:  KOB

Side 2:  Nefertiti + “Prince of Darkness” off The Sorcerer


Played both those tapes 100 times each over the first few months I had them.

 

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Wes Montgomery - Small Group Recordings

Kind Of Blue

Rooster - I like those cassettes!

Felser - I also had Lighthouse early on, along with The Procrastinator.  Hard to find anything else by Lee in those days (early 80s).

Arounf that time I found the 101 Best Jazz Albums book by Len Lyons to be indispensable.

Edited by Eric
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My parents had jazz albums that I spun, Ellington, Basie, Brubeck, Goodman, Miller I know for sure, but I didn't own them.

The first that I owned were gifts of a Peace Corps volunteer who my Dad directed in Swaziland (one of my brothers thinks it was Chris Matthews who was among those volunteers, but I don't think it was, at least I don't remember specifically who it was). In 1968 Atlantic Records sent a box of twelve or so records to each volunteer as a sort of care package. Many didn't have any record player to play them on, and passed them on. I ended up with three mono copies of jazz albums: Sister Salvation, Blues Shout, and Another Dimension. Those efforts by Slide Hampton, Leo Wright, and Charles Bell and the Contemporary Jazz Quartet were fascinating to me, I played them over and over and they are definitely responsible contributors to the love of jazz that grew and grew from then on.

Edited by jazzbo
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1 hour ago, jazzbo said:

My parents had jazz albums that I spun, Ellington, Basie, Brubeck, Goodman, Miller I know for sure, but I didn't own them.

As I've written elsewhere, my Dad had The Double Six of Paris and Mundell Lowe's TV Action Jazz, one of the greatest albums ever made and easily one one of the greatest LP titles of all time.   Those were both gateway albums for me.

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8 hours ago, Stonewall15 said:

Dick Johnson "Music For Swinging Moderns" on Mercury label. 1956.

Benny Goodman Trio Plays for the Fletcher Henderson Fund  (bought a stationary store c. 1954 on the basis of the names; didn't like it then, never liked it later on, but I kept on the hunt). Second was a 10-inch collection of the Ellington '40-'42 band. Bingo!

 

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3 hours ago, Eric said:

Rooster - I like those cassettes!

I feel like Joe’s last BN leader-date, plus Power to the People having an ‘all-Miles’ rhythm-section (Herbie, Ron, and Jack D) — plus Miles’ last all-acoustic Second-Great-Quintet album — all set me up pretty damn well.

Plus, I listened almost nothing but Jimi Hendrix my last two years in high-school (more true, than not) — which set me up for electric-era-Miles too.

A near perfect indoctrination, far as I’m concerned. :cool:

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4 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Two C90 cassettes that I made in the Fall of my junior year of college (1989)…

Side 1:  Mode For Joe + “Gary’s Notebook” from The Sidewinder (also with Joe Henderson).

Side 2:  Power to the People

 

Side 1:  KOB

Side 2:  Nefertiti + “Prince of Darkness” off The Sorcerer


Played both those tapes 100 times each over the first few months I had them.

Ah, yes, the two albums on a 90-minute cassette approach!

I mentioned the Charlie Parker Savoy box in my first post.  I created a cassette with the master takes!

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Also bought there:

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A. O. including some of the Crown Maxwell Davis big band tribute records discussed a few months ago. Woody Herman and Charlie Barnett. But those were it as fast as jazz went. Still, an album every few weeks, hey, everything was new and 8 weeks or so was forever. 

It was downtown Gladewater. I could ride my bike there and back, about 7 minutes each way. 

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I grew up with an ex-jazz fan dad and a mum who never ever listened to music and didn't tolerate it in the house. The first jazz record I owned was John Coltrane and Jonny Hartman, which was bought for me when I first left home by a friend of the family, as what I assume was a joke baby-making record.

It's a great record.

My first purchases for myself were the usual Kind of Blue; plus Freedom Suite and Concert by the Sea, both of which were favourites of my dad and aunt, but which at that point I had never heard. First jazz record that I fell in love with was My Favourite Things.

Then I randomly bought Sounds by Roscoe Mitchell and that was me done.

Edited by Rabshakeh
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Does it count if they were really your parents' and your older sisters'?   If so, Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert, Ambassador Satch, a 10" Goodman Trio, and a 10 inch Ellington.  No one in my family was a jazz fan but these were popular records at the time.  

First jazz Lp I bought (after I'd bought Harry Belafonte, Elvis and Fats Domino) was Brubeck: Red Hot and Cool because I'd read about him in Time magazine and I loved the record's cover.  There were very few jazz Lps in the only record store in my home town and I bought the next one i saw;  Sonny Rollins and the MJQ at Music Inn.

So I joined the Columbia record club in 1959 and the first Lps I got were KOB, JJ Johnson (forget title), Lionel Hampton (Silver Vibes),  Mingus Ah Um and Ellington Indigos.   Good year to join.   

For reasons I've never understood my oldest sister gave me The Hawk in Hi Fi for my birthday when I was 14.  I still love it, but I have no idea why she got it for me. I'd never heard of Hawkins at the time and I'm sure she hadn't either.  

Edited by medjuck
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For me, it was Bitches Brew.  That's a great one for a start.  I pretty much followed the Miles tree, both the fusion end (such as the Inner Mounting Flame and his own In a Silent Way), but also moving on to Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, etc.  Also soon began to listen to Bird and Dizzy to hear the start of the music that has influenced so much of jazz that has existed since then. 

Fusion had an important role in the early days, but soon became a minor interest...and remains so.

 

 

 

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TTK,

I'm almost amazed by the similarities of our early purchases.  I had some Brubeck in there, but not much.  I went heavy on Miles, Trane, McLaughlin, Mingus, Hancock, Wes, Monk (but different titles from yours).  I didn't discover Randy Weston, a big favorite, until about 1990--and his early stuff quite a bit later.

We are probably about the same age (I was born in 1960), or maybe you are a bit younger.  But I didn't develop my interest in jazz until my third year of college.

 

 

Edited by Milestones
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