Rabshakeh

There's gaudy, and there's pandashirt gaudy.

Dirty Old Men is the only one I really know well. Are there any others that you’d recommend?

You saw him? and Yes, those toupees: Industrial strength,

It's an unbelievable record. Featuring what may be the worst shirt choice in jazz on the front cover.

I don't fully understand this as a series of connected statements. Either there is a natural separation between genres (not necessarily the music industry's), with spaces in between on a Venn diagram, or is there is no real separation and it is artificial. I don't think it's possible to reach an answer since both views are wrong and right. Clearly music is neither a monolithic thing nor is it cleanly divided among any generic lines, let alone those used by mainstream vendors in the 1990s. I personally favour your Venn diagram analogy. That fits how I personally listen. The old record store division into genres, whilst based on something that did exist somewhere, is clearly too artificial to reflect reality. But my main issue with it is that so much is lost in this cut up approach. Precisely those Venn diagram overlap areas. This thread is aimed at precisely that: there are so many records that your average Muddy Waters fan would love but which he/she will not hear, because they are presented as forming part of esoteric, difficult, jazz.

This one sounds so fresh and ahead of its time it’s unbelievable. I can’t quite believe it wasn’t recorded in 2019 by a 16 year old auteur on a laptop. Those strings sound so up to date. This one, on the other hand, is definitely old, but evergreen in its own way, still inspired by your recent Hines/Rushing post: Earl Hines and Budd Johnson - The Dirty Old Men (Black and Blues, 1974)

Thinking about it, a lot of the categorisation was so basic that it was almost entirely down to instrumentation: Guitar? Blues. Piano? Hmmm. Saxophone? Probably jazz if it's not rocky enough. Trumpet? Jazz. Big band? Scarily jazz. I could have titled this "Great Blues LPs backed by big bands". Anyway, some really great recommendations above.

Oh yeah. Another good one. I haven't listened to Phillips in a while. I was thinking more about the LP era. I agree with you on these artists being from a place where the borderline really can get meaningless - what even were blues and jazz at that point?

I am a big Steve Kuhn evangelist, but agree with you.

I mean, that Cleanhead record's definitely what I was talking about. I'm imagining the old multistorey megastore record shops of my CD buying youth (those blue remembered 1990s hills...). Often jazz and blues were sharply delineated in terms of physical space. Typically jazz was in a basement next to the classical section. Blues was next to the folk and/or rock 'n' roll sections, maybe on an entirely different floor. For whatever reason, Rushing singing with Basie would be in the Jazz section and not in the Blues section. If you were a Blues fan who wasn't into Jazz, you would never know about it. That's the past now, and as you say vendors on the internet tend to use as many tags as its necessary to flog the product. But the delineation does still exist: I don't think I have ever seen Rushing mentioned by a journalist or interviewee in an article suggesting blues recommendations ("Top Ten Blues Deep Cuts" etc), despite him being, very obviously, one of the great blues singers. As noted above, the line seems slightly more permeable for R&B and Soul). Got this on now. It is really good.

I never know with r&b vs blues, which really does seem quite case by case. I think that journalists and record shops do seem a little better at thinking across the imaginary boundaries in that case.

Thank you.

Inspired by a post by @jazzbo in the Listening to Thread. Due to industry norms that assume that "Blues" is a thing played by a man with a guitar, possibly backed by bass and drums, some of the greatest Blues LPs are found not in the Blues section of your hypothetical local record shop, but hidden in the Jazz section. Obviously, the dividing line between what is Blues and what is Jazz is nebulous and sometimes it is a pointless distinction. What I am looking for are (i) records that feature Blues singers, (ii) singing with groups of any size, (iii) playing compact Blues tunes without much in the way of expansive Jazz song structures, (iv) which are classed as "Jazz" by the music industry, but (v) which any Blues fan of taste would immediately recognise as being within the wider Blues "genre" that he/she loves. This is a different thing from a jazz musician who "plays the blues" or is a Blues specialist. I am thinking about records that would appeal to a lover of Muddy Waters who is not interested in Charlie Parker, Jimmy Smith, or the 3 Sounds. Some examples: Earl Hines & Jimmie Rushing - Blues & Things Eddie Cleanhead Vinson - You Can't Make Love Alone Count Basie - At Newport What other examples of classic blues records (LPs only, no compilations) can you think of that hide out in the jazz section?

Which do you recommend?

I put this on when my parents are around. They hate music but this is something they'll tolerate for some reason. Just a great vibe. Another of those fantastic albums that shows just how arbitrary the dividing line between jazz and blues can be sometimes.

Roy Campbell - Ethnic Stew and Brew (Delmark, 2000)

Herbie Mann - Flautista! I find that Herbie Mann records have a roughly 20% hit rate, but the ones I like, I really like.

Bheki Mseleku - Star Seeding (Verve, 1995)

Charles Mingus - Mingus Plays Piano (Impulse!, 1964) This is a really good record.

Caldera - Sky Island (Capitol, 1977)

Chance would be a fine thing. The vinyl revival has yet to land. Tape revival, maybe.

Interesting. I don't know this one. In SA at the moment.

Anat Cohen Tentet - Triple Helix (Anzic, 2019)

I was also a big hip hop fan before becoming a jazz fan. That's one of the main reasons I took against OH. To my ears, the hip hop elements on that record are a complete joke. The problem is jazz / hip hop cross over attempts is that you need to attract decent talent from the hip hop end too. Otherwise you just get a wretched semi-jazz mess, with C level talent. Perhaps I am missing something.

I rate him as a trumpet player. The earlier and simpler his records are, the more I like them (a point that was made to me on this board a year or two ago). I really do think he's best when he sticks to the basics and doesn't dabble with sad attempts at expansive crossover music. When The Heart Emerges is a great record. Origami Harvest, on the other hand, is, to my ears, everything wrong with modern major label jazz at the moment: serious; genre crossover in place of fresh ideas; high gloss; big, crap, concepts that lead to nothing; dreadful raps by cancelled former hipster rapper who can't get any other gigs and clearly isn't bothered; marketed squarely at the middle aged Pitchfork reader; etc. etc.