Rabshakeh

That's basically it - a marketing tag. Exactly like Northern Soul. I understand the term to refer to a point in jazz - somewhere between soul jazz organ records and the more disco/funk oriented fusion - that were favoured by a set of DJs in the 90s, and which went down a treat with the audience's at that point. It's a marketing tag really. I'm slightly too young for it: I'm more Generation Spiritual Jazz. I'm actually not opposed to concepts like "rare groove" and "spiritual jazz". They do help new audiences connect with and rediscover records that are off the beaten narrative track. But that's only been possible because the Gilles Petersons of the world are such keen evangelists.

One that's passed all the tests and received expert level accreditation.

Just finished this: Brother Jug! by Gene Ammons (Prestige, 1970) Now on this: Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley on Polarity (Burning Ambulance, 2021)

But expert level jazz audience. If you can bring yourself to use those terms for Gilles Peterson (not that I am particularly against Mr. Peterson, who I think is a broad force for good in that he really is passionate about getting the word out). I just want it to be a nice big pile of severed heads, so you can choose who you commune with from a basis of real choice. Too many people commune with the same old heads, and they're getting a bit worn and tatty.

I dunno. "Rare groove" always seemed to me to be a DJs category. Unless I have misunderstood you, the others are trends that are over 50 years old, and that notably don't form part of most incoming listener's diets unless they have really made the plunge.

Great record!

Great line

I got that. My concern is that there aren't generational biases in jazz. It is the same thing repeating on loop.

I always end up digging out his records with Marion Brown.

Film is a closer example. But still: most people are film fans, or at least film watchers. You can't say that for jazz.

Weather Report - 8:30 (ARC, 1979)

Absolutely. It is even better than I remember it being.

Alan Braufman - Valley of Search (India Navigation, 1975)

Great record.

Are we talking about now or then (late 70s / early 80s) or both?

The problem is that there aren't enough of you to go around. Your average 15 year old or 21 year old who thinks jazz might be interesting doesn't have you or Chuck as his or her uncle to recommend the good stuff (at least I don't think so). So he or she is pushed back on corporate and institutionally created groupthink in the form of articles like the one in this thread. The consequence is everyone for the last 30 years has started with the same 5-6 records from 80-60 years ago (Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, some Blue Note hard bops starting with Moanin', a Charlie Parker, Monk or Gillespie Verve comp, a singed fingers experiment with Atlantic era Ornette, and a yearning attempt to move beyond the narrative by buying the "recent" Black Codes) and then either gives up, under the impression he or she has exhausted the best the genre has to offer, or rarely ever moves past the above referenced material. We all know music fans (including extremely engaged music fans, and people who consider themselves to love jazz) to whom this has happened. Contrast to the situation with rock, where "I inherited my older brother's / sister's records when he / she went to university" has been a time honoured method of musical education. I don't think the situation is irredeemable. Particularly in the age of the internet, the dominance of narratives and marketing campaigns in music should be quite weak (witness e.g. Led Zeppelin's precipitous crash out of the rock canon and the elevation of acts like Funkadelic into its place). But the fact is that for jazz these sorts of impoverished lists with the same old recommendations keep getting produced and keep getting read (for lack of anything else), and there remains limited access to other lines of thought. This is not the case with other genres, where the larger number of irl peers and the rise of the internet has vastly increased access. If there were two or three reasonably high profile lists of recommendations by people of taste and knowledge, with a proper sweep across time and geography, and with short descriptions, and those lists were available on the internet, I think it would really change matters. The fact is that, ridiculous as the recent JazzTimes by Decade lists were, I did not know half of the albums that were listed - I had missed them at the time and had never heard them mentioned since. Nate Chinen's recent book has a list of his recommendations from the last 20 years - I don't share his taste at all, but again, this list has been invaluable and has introduced players and material of which I had never heard because, in jazz education terms, 2000 - 2015 might as well not exist. Less ridiculous, @HutchFan's blog on the 70s has been an incredible resource. That's an era that is covered a little bit in the core "non-mainstream" jazz narratives (i.e., (I) NY style free jazz on Impulse!, and (ii) "spiritual jazz", also, magically, on Impulse!), and there is a canon of sorts for the biggest fusion acts, but the 70s is otherwise hardly explored. This place is a paradise of recommendations and knowledge. Whilst I only started posting fairly recently, I have been lurking for a long time and picking up what was said. I think I'm probably a bit guilty of excessive demands for recommendations. I've learned a huge amount here. But the fact is that this sort of knowledge is not available elsewhere.

Grupo Niche - No Hay Quinto Malo (Codiscos, 1984) Classic Colombian salsa from the 80s. I've been looking for this for years and was even thinking of importing it, then found it for £15 this afternoon in Spitalfields Market. It comes in a weird plastic coat. No inner sleeve, just plastic coated. I'm not sure whether that's a Columbian thing. The outer plastic has been pricked with incredibly neat cursive writing in Spanish - presumably an import notice, but I have no idea how you could make marks like that - and they are clearly by hand - on loose sticky plastic. I also got this one for £5: Phil Woods / Lew Tabackin (Omni Sound, 1981) Overall, I am pleased with myself.

Certainly. This place is great. What I meant is that there's no critical mass of older listeners. No older siblings or uncles who were there at the time who are there to guide people taking first steps, or at least only if you're lucky.

The Narrative Industry (good phrase) is a weird one. I don't get the sense that other genres of music have anything like as much of a dominant shaping narrative as jazz has. Genres like rock or rap have a pretty multifaceted audience who are generally aware (if they're paying attention) of developments since the 50s or 80s (respectively). I don't think it is anything sinister. I think it is a combination of various factors: a small base of listeners; few dedicated, the rest drawn by a wider culture industry representation of jazz as 'sophisticated adult music'; mostly people who are coming to the genre fresh and often as a second favourite genre or out.of a sense of obligation to self educate; no critical base of older listeners to pass on knowledge (compare again to e.g. hip hop or rock); a small group of record labels with marketing clout and money dedicated to their legacy catalogue, with the rest of the market basically left fallow; an institutional bias in some specific academic and non-academic institutions that leads them to favour specific styles over others; and a presently dominant strain of not very well informed journalism that essentially exists to summarise the views of the above two groups (true everywhere, but noticeably dominant in jazz). The result is a situation where a few pockets of history are privileged and marketed whereas nothing else gets time. We all know the pockets: Blue Note and Columbia (plus a tiny bit of Riverside); pre-1970; white middle class customer as target consumer; New York; hard bop or the Minton's moment of bebop. Then there are some scattered names from the Before - Armstrong primarily - and the After - Ornette, the Spiritual Jazz set that is now retrospectively popular, Zorn & Co; and then whatever contemporary act is trendy NOW (to be instantly forgotten in three years). But everything else, from 1970 to immediately before whatever time is NOW; anything not on a label that is promoted (witness Clifford Brown's utter lack of name recognition!); anything not from New York. All in all, you end up with lists like this. If you were to Google "greatest reggae geniuses ever" you would not just get a list of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster. Likewise, a rock fan would know acts like My Bloody Valentine, Prince, REM or the Replacements - these being regarded as a key part of a long and rich history, despite not being part of a key "moment" in rock's history. I do think that is really just a jazz story.

Might still be Reading, then.

Yes, but what did it mean to him?

I've seen it. It is just a list of his own name written ten times, but with hundreds of pages of text about what his own work means to him in each case. Blurrrgh.

Maybe we should have Manfred Eicher on the list.

The music is very different. As to who altered it, that's a different debate. But it isn't all Armstrong, Parker, absent Ellington and Coltrane. The list includes players like Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie. Great musicians who produced great albums. But it is pretty easy to think of jazz musicians since then who have been their equal, had as much influence and/or sold as many albums. Their inclusion on the above list is just down to the gravitational force that previous lists of jazz geniuses have exerted on this list of jazz geniuses: must be bop (save for a few chosen names), must be pre-70s.

I think it just speaks to the general view that "jazz" is bop music from before 1969, plus some agreed earlier musicians whose music isn't too associated with "Swing" or "Dixieland". Someone somewhere decided that the canon of who is a "genius" in jazz closed with Coltrane, so that tends to be the position taken in these lists. We could all easily think of best selling and/or very influential jazz musicians since then (Hancock? Jarrett? Metheny?).