Rabshakeh

Harry Connick Jr is alright with me. I have been listening to a lot of the commercial stuff recently and Connick is a lot more "real" and less of a studio concoction than the likes of Buble. As someone who got into jazz through the avant garde, the argument that the avant garde scares away fans never made much sense to me. All of the younger jazz fans I know came in via Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and John Coltrane. I do know a few people of my own age who have highlighted an experience with Ornette Coleman as negative, but they are in the minority and tend to be more serious music fans who find the dissonance difficult to cope with. I think that the biggest turn off for casual non-jazz fans is probably the music of Miles Davis' Second Quintet and its followers, which is a lot more abstract than free jazz, but also much more easily accessed by first timers. I have heard several complaints from non jazz fans about jazz being too "freeform" and I think exposure to the still widespread continued legacy of the Second Quintet may be what underlies it. Also, continued weird ideas about Kenny G, jazz flute or Jazz Club (for English speakers outside of the US of a certain age).

I don't think that the late 60s / 70s scene was any more or less indigenous (not a great word in this context) or imitative. Those records mentioned upthread are classic records that sound like their own thing, not like American models. The current London scene is thriving in terms of sheer wealth of young and youngish talent (it's crazy how many players and groups there are suddenly, and how good they are), but I think it underperforms in terms of album quality so far. Leaving aside the avantgarde scenes, out of the London scene stand outs, only Shabaka Hutching's groups' records have so far struck me as "classics". There's a little too much eclecticism and cross-pollination for it's own sake, and possibly not enough cohesion or songwriting. Lots of pretty good records and very promising players, but maybe not a lot of really great records. Yet. The Manchester musicians like Nat Birchall and Matthew Halsall seem to produce much stronger records but are much more imitative. Again, opinion only.

He made a few records. They combine North African influences with hard bop, but much more hard bop. Good, catchy records. I recommend them.

But it does bear considering. Why do Robbie Williams and Michael Bublé flood the charts but Tony Bennett and Linda Ronstadt don't? Another underrated thing is the sheer dominance of Harry Connick Jr at the start of the 80s. It's not quite Kenny G but it is very close. Connick is barely mentioned nowadays.

I guess that this belongs here: Joe Satriani – Surfing With The Alien Apparently he trained with Lennie Tristano and Billie Bauer. Can't say that would have necessarily occured to me unprompted.

90% Ramsey Lewis. All year, every year. Doesn't help that "the new Anthony Braxton album" was 68 different box sets every year.

Salt and vinegar on fries / chips is pretty common over here, too. So common that it was the first ever flavour developed for commercially available crisps / chips (created in Ireland, where it is also common). I'm no Canadian but I am duty bound to ask whether or not it was poutine made with "real curds" and then to cluck under my breath, deeply unimpressed, whatever your answer might be.

I stumbled across this old thread today. An interesting discussion. One possibility that is not considered save for in one aspect* is the problem of a accessibility. British jazz in the 1950s - 1970s is mapped. There is lots of information out there in books and on the internet (listicles etc.). People who are interested in finding out about the era can quickly find out who are the important artists and which are their canonical records, all of which have now been reissued and are mostly streamable. In contrast, British jazz from the 1980s - 1990s is very much unmapped. There is a dearth of good information out there. Courtney Pine is one of the few names that is widely known, with a canonical album attached to his name. But even major groups like the Loose Tubes are rarely discussed, and hard to find and listen to. It is difficult for a younger person to find about their existence. It took me years as a British jazz listener to even hear about them. This is quite a different situation to the US. Although US jazz after the 70s (a few years ago I would have said after the 60s) is less discussed than what went before, it is still comparatively easy to find out information about it. There are plenty of lists / guides etc out there to help you tell your David Murrays from your Terence Blanchards. There are odd gaps, but most of the information is there. Very different for the rest of the world, with some exceptions. * I think that the issue of fragmentation mentioned above is part of the accessibility issue.

I assumed it was a tuning fork. Hence "that's music to your brain". Forks can produce music whereas fucks less so.

Just the year end charts. From the late 1970s it is the two jazz genres for albums, but they do have sections for labels and artists too. With time it is quite sad to see jazz shrink from a major position in the year end lists to one that is far smaller than even subgenres of country and hip hop. Eventually there isn't even any jazz on the jazz charts. I've been thinking about that last point a bit further. From around 1985, the likes of Linda Ronstadt or Tony Bennett become mainstays of the jazz charts. But it is always just one or two records in the top ten, with the rest of the charts being quite healthy with records that we now regard as classics (surprisingly few that are not still well known). It is only really from the late 1990s that the top 20 best-selling albums section gets completely crowded out with the Christmas records and the likes of Michael Bublé. I had expected to see the 90s and 00s jazz charts full of Jarrett, Garbarek, Redman and Mehldau and other records of that (in my opinion) rather underwhelming period for jazz, but they are (comparatively) barely present. @Teasing the Koreanbrought up the traditional pop and GAR phenomenon of the late 90s and early 00s in a recent thread. But I hadn't really realized the scale of it. What was it about GAR / pop star goes swing thing that allowed it to drown out the jazz charts so completely? Did Bennett sell less well than Bublé? Or was it more that jazz albums were selling comparatively less well in 2003 than in the 1980s? Was it because jazz fans were buying more diverse types of jazz, or buying more historic reissues? Or was it that jazz fans were buying Bublé that hadn't bought Bennett?

Jimmy Dorsey And His Orchestra Featuring Maynard Ferguson – Diz Does Everything

No problem. It's a great resource. Very strange / sad to see such a collapse in terms of what people were buying, though. From the 1990s it is all Pop Star Does Sinatra stuff and Christmas records. Probably those are not 'jazz people' buying those records, and the effect is really that of a relatively enormous section of senile pop consumers drowning out the jazz charts. But, even then, it is not clear what happened to the 'smooth jazz people'. Funky lite fusion is a pretty plastic musical style that should have survived the G-pocalypse.

The "only covers up to 1986" is a reference to the blog on jazz charts up to 1986, rather than to the World Radio History archive, which as you mention goes right up to present, and which was exactly what I was looking for.

Lewis / Ewell Big 4 is the only New Age we need.

Amazon is really declining in usability. It's not the only giant of the tech world that is.

Thanks again. I've been through them. Interestingly, the Cashbox lists are far superior to Billboard's. Billboard splits out "Traditional Jazz" (i.e., the critically approved stuff in an historical mode) from Contemporary Jazz (fusion, pop pretending to be jazz, and smooth, i.e., the stuff that people actually bought). Cashbox dumps everything in together so there's nowhere to hide. Kenny G really does take over from the late-80s. It's weird to see it. Until then the charts are a fun mix of late fusion, smooth and a bit of young lion hard bop (the Harpers did better than i'd assumed). Then Kenny Bruce Gorelick's shadow is cast upon it and the whole thing shrivels. Once G disappears in the mid to late 90s, what's left is actually, if anything, bleaker. It is just pop does big band stuff and Christmas albums until the publishers mercifully gave up the whole charade.

Paul Winter – Callings Being a child of the digital age means that it is only today that I noticed that the cover of this record has Paul Winter lurking sinisterly behind the rainbow. I had naively assumed it was another sea lion, perhaps part of a mutually supportive three lion pride of sea lions.

Ahmed Abdul-Malik - Sounds of Africa

That's really funny. Sorry for the shelves.

Your answer was sarcastic and useless. Strangely enough, I had already tried your helpful suggestion of googling the answer. Unfortunately, as you would know if you had actually tried it for yourself, your suggestion did not give the results I was looking for. Next time it occurs to you to be a smart aleck please consider whether you are actually right, or just wasting everyone's time. It is a good blog. Reading it is what led me to ask the question. But it only covers up to 1986.

Thanks. That link to the Billboards is exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you for that helpful and useful answer. Correct the decade, give it a go and see whether it works. If anyone does know the answer to the original question and isn’t just trying to be clever, I’d appreciate the input.

Frisque Concordance - Spellings John Butcher and Georg Grawe at their absolute best.

Ronnie Laws - Every Generation

That was a really useful list from a time when this music was much more obscure than it is now. Shame about the hipster verbiage.