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How Long Has Jazz Been In Your Ears?


Jazz Has Been The Focal Point of My Listening  

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I heard it around the house all my life, but only started to really appreciate the music myself during my fourth year of college in the Fall of 1987 when my then girlfriend was doing a semester abroad in Spain. Since she was not around I had a lot of free time on my hands and spent a lot of time in the music library listening to old LPs and reading old Down Beat magazines.

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32 years ago at age 17. Jazz has been my only real musical interest since then. I have probably bought 500 jazz recordings for every one of any other style since then, and since I have 5,000+ jazz recordings, you can figue out how much "else" I have. My wife and daughter buy the "other" stuff around our house.

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More than 21 years ago I briefly thought Louis & Neil Armstrong were one & the same person. I thought it was really cool that an astronaut would get to play trumpet on the moon. My parents helped straighten me that they were different people.

I've owned some Miles and a token Coltrane & Monk for 11 to 20. And 6 to 10 years ago I had stretches where I'd go months playing Miles and little else.

For it to be more than Miles, and seriously so, I'd say fewer than 3 years. Though I'm so bad about judging the passage of time it might be 3 to 5 years. As far as spending a lot more money, about as long as I've been reading this board. :)

So I answered 3 to 5. What was the question again?

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Either 49 or 50 years ago at age 12 or 13; can't say for sure because my birthday is in mid-May, and it hit me at some point in the spring of seventh grade in 1955. Very fortunately, my eighth grade teacher was a jazz fan, and he took me and a friend to a JATP concert and suggested that I buy a Charlie Parker record. Bless you, Bob Zwetz.

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I was 13 years old back in '58 when my father brought home two LPs, one by Benny Goodman, the other by Artie Shaw. I was hooked, especially on Shaw whom I still love to this very day. Stopped listening to Elvis et al, although I did a brief stop with doo wop R&B. (Wish I still had those original label '45s, they go for a mint). Anyway, by my late teens, I was stretching out into Bird, Miles, Monk (the latter I caught at the Newport JF in '64 when they allowed we teens back then to camp out on the beach).

Soon thereafter, some pressure to leave home as my dad couldn't really take bebop and "modern" sounds as he was into the pop music of his day, i.e., swing. He never was able to see, or more properly, hear, the connection between swing and bop, the evolution of it all having totally escaped him. So I guess that makes 40+ years.

One question, how do I take my collection with me? Tempus does fugit. B)

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A possible sidebar to this question is that for a few year after jazz hit me on the head, I contineed to think of all classical music as a form of Mantovani, nothing but soupy violins and guys with long white hair waving a baton -- yuck! Then I began playing a Vox Box of the Mozart String Quintets that my Mom had around, and another door suddenly swung wide open.

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The first albums I remember buying were Frank Zappa, Barney Kessel, MC5, Herb Ellis, King Crimson, George Shearing, Iggy Pop, John Mayall, Yes, Vanilla Fudge and The Frost.

So, I've loved Jazz since about 1967 (14 years old). I've been totally obsessed by it for about 10 years after about 5 years of classical music snobbery and 10 of nuttin' but the Blues.

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I'm overwhelmed by all the music to check out. Thanks to WKCR and their broadcasts, I can check out the older material.

Looking forward to these this summer:

Louis Armstrong

(b. August 4, 1901; d. July 6, 1971)

(he believed his birthdate to be July 4th 1900, so we celebrate both birthdays.)

Lester Young

(b. August 27, 1909; d. March 15, 1959)

Charlie Parker

(b. August 29, 1920; d. March 12, 1955)

(combines with Lester Young to form a three-day broadcast)

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Poll looks like a big insult to people discovering jazz before 1993. I beat that by almost 40 years.

Way to go.

Geez - might there be sumpin' you don't know? Probably not.

I started in to the jazz world in December of '87, so I guess the poll was meant to insult myself? :rolleyes:

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I started in to the jazz world in December of '87, so I guess the poll was meant to insult  myself?  :rolleyes:

Good to know you can insult yourself. Saves some of us time! I guess you are smarter than I thought.

Yes, and you're more of an ornery asshole each day.

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