Really enjoying these:
Keep getting this in my youtube recommendations, probably thanks to this thread. I’m not mad about it.
I do love The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I don’t know much about it or Mingus, but I once read that its a ballet and I find that endlessly fascinating to think about while listening to it. Probably a gross oversimplification, and I don’t know anything about ballet either, but yeah its dramatic stuff.
Miles Davis And The Modern Jazz Giants was my bedtime album last night. I don’t really consider myself a jazz head but I do like alot of it and enjoy hearing its influence in other music. This was a new discovery for me. I love Thelonious Monk but I didn’t know he and Miles Davis had done any studio work together. I see several artists in this thread I haven’t heard. Thats what I was hoping for.
I just discovered that. Its really good but I like the original album better. From what I read that one is other takes and songs they didn’t use on Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants. All good stuff imho.
I love Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue, Birth of Cool, and Bitches Brew. Especially Birth of Cool, its a hard pop uptempo kind of sound.
Charlie Parker gets a bunch of play too. Love the Jam album that reissued not so long ago that is just a straight live Jazz jam with a bunch of talented players.
Thelonious Monk is another fun one to put on if you like to hear the piano played in a way not many try to play it.
Hey no one has talked about Let My Children Hear Music by Mingus here
it’s probably my favorite jazz album of all time, absolutely adore it. It also has my favorite jazz song of all time
the whole album is awesomeful, make sure to check it out if you haven’t
I practised piano for around ten years and now have a bit of a funny appreciation for idiosyncratic players. I often enjoy listening to Thelonious Monk, but he played like an absolute psycho. I love this one for how well and truly he goes beyond the deep end, just absolutely over the horizon:
Just came across this Cher Baker album, Ballads for Two. My wife and I were looking for something chill for late at night. This fit perfectly.
Don’t know this one, but I have a soft spot for Chet. Looks cool!
This is very cool. Never heard it before thank you for the recommendation.
Bad typo in my last post: “Cher Baker” - Imagine if Cher and Chet Baker had a baby.
Tremendous record! (I also love their second one, Birds of Fire.)
You might be interested in Shakti, McLaughlin’s “other” band that fused jazz with Indian classical.
His early solo work is also stellar. I happened to pick this one up yesterday. Sounds amazing on wax:
Didn’t know about Shakti, awesome! Yeah I’ve only heard their first 3-4 albums a handful of times but Birds of Fire is my favourite I think.
What I love is finding out about these guys through Miles Davis’ bands, then checking out their own later works and discovering what Miles had them doing was only a flash of brilliance that was better realised without him. Coltrane would be the main example, but Chick Corea is another.
not sure if this is jazz enough for this thread, but chilling to this right now, updating its besteveralbums.com album rating:
live from 1980 with Jaco and Pat in her band, so its as jazz as jazz got in 1980.
Essential live record. One of the best out there.
It’s still amazing to me the sheer amount of talent that passed through Miles’ bands.
Some may consider talking about Tim Buckley sacrilege in here @RattleRattleRattle , but considering he very much dabbled in Jazz I thought I’d respond to your music league comment.
In short no, his music definitely does not all sound like Down By The Borderline. Even the rest of the Starsailor album is nothing like it, but it is what I’d recommend if you’re looking for his weird Jazz stuff.
The next album Greetings From LA very much continues in the vein of crazy funk fusion instrumentals with that full-on vocal delivery (though the vocal performance is dominant in all his music either to his strength or detriment), so if you found it tough I would work backwards. The previous album Lorca is slightly less weird (but still starts bold) and overtly In A Silent Way influenced which he would exclusively listen to for months on end. Working backwards trends toward more of a kind of Joni Mitchell Folk turned Jazz thing.
Eventually you get back to the original NY East Village Folk scene that he started in.
After Greetings From… the Funk really fizzles into like an uninspired Blue-Eyed Soul almost Yacht Rock vibe that was despised by everyone on the planet except Frank Zappa, who published it.
So yeah, some absolutely brilliant moments of Jazz Fusion scattered throughout a fairly challenging career.