Age You Got The Jazz Bug?

[Dave James]

I'm one of the two who have voted so far who got into jazz in my '30's. My story is a lot like the one shared by Morganized. I've been into music of one kind or another for as long as I can remember. I grew up with Elvis and Ricky, moved to the Beach Boys and Beatles and lots of Philadelphia soul music from the '70's...O'Jays, Harold Melvin, Spinners that sort of thing. At some point, I morphed into what we now call smooth jazz, beginning with George Benson's Breezin'. That led me to others of the same ilk and I tested the waters with the likes of, among many others, Bob James, Creed Taylor's CTI recordings, Earl Klugh and a local guy, Tom Grant. The line of demarcation between this kind of music and more serious jazz listening occured when I landed a gig on a local public radio station that played jazz 24/7. KMHD, 89.1 FM. What a learning experience that was. An entire studio filled with LP's and CD's by people I'd never heard or even heard of. It was at that point that I abandoned all pretense and immersed myself in the music that consumes me now.

What's kind of interesting, at least to me, is that I have an identical twin brother who wouldn't listen to jazz if you held a gun to his head. Not that he doesn't like music, but definitely not jazz. I got him to admit once, in what can only be described as a moment of profound weakness, that Miles Davis' KOB was "listenable", but that's as far as he ever went. On the other hand, the music he likes doesn't interest me at all, so I guess you might call ours a musically reciprocal arrangement.

Up over and out.

[catesta]

I first heard the music when I was a youngster. My dad was always playing stuff like Ellington, Parker, Erroll Garner, and Benny Goodman.

My Godfather was also a serious jazz fan so the two of them would tell me the stories of seeing all the greats play live in NYC.

I always liked jazz but aside from having a couple of Ellington records and digging people like Frank Sinatra, my true appreciation didn't start until about 7 or 8 years ago.

I was in a Tower record store with my wife and playing on the store music system was Duke doing In a Sentimental Mood. I was hooked big time and I've never looked back since.

[Brad]

So far, it looks like I'm the one from the forties. I didn't get hit with the bug until 4 years ago. When I was a kid back in the 60s, I listened of course to a lot of Stones, Beatles, etc., anybody who was popular at the time. At the same time, becuase we lived overseas and I didn't have access (or the money) to a lot of records, I listened to a lot of my parent's records, which was lot of Broadway material, tin pan alley and of course classical. I knew the show tunes (Pajama Game, West Side Story) backwards and forwards. Anyways, as the 70s approached and I went to college, I was getting bored with some of the 70s stuff I was hearing. Rock was losing a bit of meaning for me and because I loved some of the early Stones (their later stuff didn't do that much for me), I started looking into the blues. Fast forward into the 80s I was listening more heavily into the blues but by the time the mid 90s came around I was getting bored with its sameness although I still loved Howlin' Wolf. One day I was reading a magazine article about Duke and I had never really listened to jazz and since I was bored with the blues, I bought a couple of things: Duke, Bird and maybe something else. I liked it and one day went to the local record store and picked up the RVG of Moanin'. When I heard Moanin' it was like my head exploded and the rest is history.

[The Mule]

I was in high school and was listening to the Who, the Rolling Stones, Zeppelin, Yes, Springsteen, and Joe Walsh when I picked up KIND OF BLUE....

Which then led to Lester Young's COMPLETE SAVOY SESSIONS, Trane's MY FAVORITE THINGS, a best-of Monk album, a best-of Brubeck album, more Miles...and now I have no more space in my house for one more record or cd!

[.:.impossible]

I grew up around good music. My grandfather, "Sugar" Ralston, has closets lined with shelves of lps. As a kid, I heard the big band stuff he played, but it never really caught my ear. In middle school, I played 1st and 2nd trumpet in the band. Our teacher, Bernadette Spencer, was a lively lady who would always yell from the front of the band "COLTRANE!" or "come on Miles!" Every arrangement we played ended up with her touch of swing and fire. Keep in mind, this is a middle school band

It wasn't until after high school that I decided I was ready to find out what she was yelling about. Around the same time, my grandfather lent me a Sonny Stitt record along with a Johnny Hodges and an Ellington record. Shortly thereafter, I had accumulated a few things. My junior year in college, I took a jazz appreciation course. Although we didn't really cover a lot of the music that I thought was essential, I thought it was a decent overview and a nice approach to critical listening. Most of the students hadn't ever listened to jazz. The professor did a nice job of exploding the jazz diagram I think.

Lots of votes at the younger end of the spectrum. Interesting I think. Maybe the jazz industry has its demographic all wrong!

[GA Russell]

I have a vague recollection of when I was 8 or 9 of the beatniks, hipsters wearing black turtlenecks in Greenwich Village, seeming cool.

It was also about that time (late '50s) that Peter Gunn (which was on after my bedtime) was written of as being cool because of its jazz soundtrack. Maybe my older sisters spoke of it as being cool.

I started buying jazz records when I was fifteen. But even before then I was buying the rock instrumentalists like The Ventures.

I suspect that I was predisposed to liking jazz because of the cool association I had with the beatniks.

[JSngry]

Lots of votes at the younger end of the spectrum. Interesting I think. Maybe the jazz industry has its demographic all wrong!

Nah. They don't want people who will like the music but can't afford it.

[couw]

yeah, they'll only will be trying to deceive their copy-protection schemes and trade MP3s of the music. :rsly:

[Little High People]

i've always, as long as i can remember, been into music. mainly rock, but as i got older, all kinds.

the first big thing for me, as a toddler, was KISS!! hell yeah!! still a big kiss fan to this day ... being a little kid, i was of course, attracted to the look, but i really liked the music as well ... and re-discovered my love for it in a big way a couple of years ago ....

after that, i just remember listening to top 40 radio all the time. the next big thing was the beatles when i was in middle school ... that was around the same time i started playing the drums in band in school. beatles naturally progressed to led zeppelin (still my fave rock band, and probably my fave band, PERIOD) and all the major classic rock acts. by junior high i was in the school jazz band ... i think that was my real exposure to the music. my first jazz album was a cassette (all we played back then!) of columbia's first volume of it's sampler series for their mid 80's reissue campaign. "so what" was the first track. even that early i knew i was listening to something special.

i got into it more later in high school (parallel to really getting obsessive about frank zappa!) ... and then in a big way in college as i was playing in the college jazz band and exposed to "real" jazz musicians for the first time. great days of listening hangs and jamming and the like.

being a fan of all music, i really can't say that i like jazz over any other genre. it's just one of the many that i dig ... but i do listen to it, along with rock, way more than other things ..... except maybe KISS!!!! ( ) ... (just kidding!!)

[undergroundagent]

Since I'm only 24, it wasn't all that long ago. But I do believe I started getting into jazz when I worked at a used cd store here in the city and my first disc was Adderley's "Somethin' else". That was approximately 5 years ago.

[connoisseur series500]

love that avatar, Couw, hehe

[BruceH]

I first started listening to jazz at about 18/19----had a half-dozen jazz albums (including KoB, of course) then bought a few per year for a while, and listened to some from libraries too. It wasn't until the age of 24/25 that I REALLY got heavily, deeply, fully committed to the music----in other words, bit by the bug, bigtime. So I checked 20's. Perhaps going through a lengthy blues and r&b phase in the meantime helped set the stage. When jazz became a passion, I recall three things in particular helping to set it off: I got intensely into Ellington, really into Basie, and bigtime into Parker, almost simultaneously. Duke, the Count, & Bird---that'll do it folks!

[jacman]

i caught the bug a couple of years ago, 41 or 42 i think. Jazz was always played in my house when i was a kid, as my dad is a jazz musician (drums). as a teenager i lived next door to Rufus 'Speedy' Jones, but never took advantage of either's knowledge (tho i did study drums with Rufus for a while). i was mainly into Soul and R&B. spent the bulk of my 20's listening to Punk, 30's was Blues and Bluegrass, 40's Jazz.

[SEK]

By the time JFK was assassinated (I was 9½ and in 4th grade), jazz was part of the mix. My uncle who lived with us, off and on, had been into Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Sinatra since he was a teenager, and he played all that a lot. But I first got into bop, hard bop, soul jazz, and Trane from older siblings of my friends and from the older guys' in the neighborhood car radios and record players that you could hear from the street. This was while I was also picking up on R&B (mostly Stax, Atlantic, and Motown) and the various "British Invasions". It was all just music that fed my hungry and developing personal and social aesthetic/sense.

Change and progress were in the air... I'm very glad I grew up back then.

[ghost of miles]

My discovery of the RVG series came this summer at the Jamey Aebersold camp. I wanted to add to my collection, so I purchased eight of those, not really knowing the details of the series, or much at all about Blue Note in general.

Hey, I've seen Aebersold play a few times at Bear's Place here in Bloomington--they do a series called "Jazz Fables" every Thursday night.

Heard it for the first time (as in purchased an LP & listened to it) when I was 19. Got religion around age 26. Still in the church & ain't leavin'.

[jacknife]

For me it was a 30's vote. Up till I was about 35, I had no clue about jazz. The term jazz to me meant that schlocky crap thats played on the Smoooth jazz stations. I was mainly a rock fan in some form or another. In high school all I knew was "classic rock" then college I was into the "alternative" scene. From there I went to "heavy metal". For all those years music for me was just party music. Then one day I was in front of my stereo and whatever I put in just sounded like distortion and not music. I decided that I wanted to find some music that had real instruments (piano, sax, trumpet etc.) not just some electrical device that you plug in and start pounding on. I went to my local borders and blindly picked up a couple rvg's which I believe were Art Blakey - Moanin and Cannonball Adderley - Something Else. I was instantly hooked, I could now sit back and enjoy the music instead of banging my head against the wall!

[Jazzmoose]

I picked 40's, although I've been dabbling in jazz for far longer. Dad had a few jazz records (Sarah, Ella, and a bunch of dixieland revival; the last ones never appealed, though), so I've heard some jazz all my life. I made early jazz purchases in my twenties (Pat Metheny, an unknown Dizzy Gillespie cassette), and then bought around twenty LPs in '86 in an effort to expose myself to more. But the bug didn't explode until early '99 while, as Rooster did, I took a jazz class at the local college. Most expensive course I ever took!

[Morganized]

I took a jazz class at the local college. Most expensive course I ever took!

Jazzmoose,

Love the new avatar! Hey, I know what you mean about the course. Sometimes when I look in my wallet I regret the jazz addiction myself!

[skeith]

I got interested in my middle to late teens and my first jazz album was "The Inner Mounting Flame" by the Mahavishnu Orchestra which I got right when it was released and this led me to Miles and Trane etc. and within about a year I was getting a lot of the nonfusion classic jazz stuff. I think that my prior interest in rock groups that used a lot of improvisation(Cream, etc.) and my interest in the blues prepared my way for liking jazz.

[AfricaBrass]

It's great to read your stories!

I got bit when I was 18. I was a huge fan of sixties rock music. I was really into the Byrds and I when I read in David Crosby's biography that the song "Eight Miles High" was influenced by John Coltrane, I went out and bought the cd of Africa Brass that day. I started off with Coltrane, Mingus, and Miles Davis and then I branched off from there.

[davef]

For me, the 20's. Got my first LP that was really a jazz one - the Blow-Up soundtrack - in 1985 at around 20.

Loved 60's music at the time - and still do - and knew that and the progressive rock of the 70's had been influenced by jazz... bought a few pure jazz CD's at 22, then started collecting in earnest in 1991 at age 26... at the time it was more fusion, Bitches Brew and Emergency by the Tony Williams Lifetime, and then started listening to Herbie Hancock and Jimmy Smith - 1000 or so jazz CD's later and still growing, here I am!

[Free For All]

Finally, an easy poll.

I was a discouraged and uninterested trombonist in jr. high, about ready to quit. My jr. high band director had sent word ahead to the high school band director that this kid was not salvageable. Rightly so, too- I screwed around in band and forged my practice card- band director's worst nightmare. When I hit high school I started to hang out w/some of the jazz band crowd, and baby, that was it. They introduced me to the music- I wish I could relive that rush of hearing great recordings for the first time (the closest thing is watching students go through the same experience). I started practicing like a demon, and have been obsessed ever since. I'm not rich, but I'm doing something I truly love, and I'm grateful for that.

Plus I get to hang out w/you losers! B)

[Jazzmoose]

Man, I envy you. Sure wish I'd discovered jazz before I gave up on the 'bone...

On the other hand, sixth grade might have been a bit early to appreciate Teagarden and Johnson.

[Free For All]

Trombone can be a pretty discouraging instrument for beginners. It takes longer to develop proficiency and in the meantime the trumpet and clarinet beginners are improving quickly and playing hipper material. In most beginner bands the bones get whole notes while the button-pushers get the fun. I often refer to the trombone

section as the "offensive line" of the big band- lots of dues,not much glory.

The problem is that most writers don't challenge the bones much, so they don't have much initiative to improve. A vicious circle.

I initially got interested in jazz trombone through the horn bands of the 70s- Chicago, BS+T, Tower of Power, Crusaders. The next step was the big bands, and then small group jazz followed.

I think the key of enlightenment for me was not to constantly compare trombone to sax/trumpet, but instead to deal with it on its own terms, kind of "differently enabled" as opposed to "disadvantaged loser". If I could go back and do it differently I'd choose the same axe, no question about it. It's my voice.

Edited November 2, 2003 by Free For All

[marcoliv]

i can say that i love jazz since i was born. thanks Dad!!

Marcus Oliveira