--- what are you disagreeing with? are you saying that composers like Gershwin and Porter should not be considered because they didn't write specifically for jazz bands? i was only promoting the idea that they should be considered. what you do after that is a matter of taste. personally, i think Ellington is the more important composer over Monk/Mingus, but Ellington owes a bit to Billy Strayhorn, so i think you have to factor that in. arrangers are an important piece of the puzzle, as well.
--- not technically guilty. not guilty by reason of insanity. look. i'm with you on the Ellington/Mingus rating, but i think we need a separate category for TPA composers whose body of work has been incorporated into jazz playbooks.
How about 2 lists, one for classic jazz and one for modern with Bitches Brew being the arbitrary cut-off line. Top 5 classic jazz Duke Ellington - Piano in the Background Miles Davis - Kind of Blue John Coltrane - Coltrane's Sound Bill Evans - Sunday at the Village Vanguard Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus Top 5 modern jazz John McLaughlin - Extrapolation Dave Holland - Conference of the Birds John Scofield - Quiet Bill Frisell Quartet - (untitled) Ellery Eskelin - The Sun Died
Maybe I shouldn't have used the term "modern". Maybe I should have just called it the "Top 5 Post Bitches Brew." Like I said, I used an arbitrary cut-off line. We could play the top 5 game with the different periods, I suppose. Top 5 dixieland, top 5 swing, top 5 bebop, etc. But that seems a bit much. As to whether Trane and Evans are modern? I'll leave that debate to the scholars.
--- it's a toughy. i think, though, that looking at jazz music as an integrated whole is a dicey proposition. so, look at r'n'r, in which we now have hip-hop, rap, etc, which are modern as opposed to classic. do we evaluate marshall mathers with the same ruler as elvis, costello or presley?
I'm glad you mentioned Extrapolation-one of my favorites. It's a hard list to pin down for me, but I'll add some that I think belong in this group. Jaco Pastorius' first solo album. Of the modern, electric players, you can make a case he is the most influential. "Portrait Of Tracy", a beautiful piece. Although the balance of tunes on the album are not top shelf, "No Mystery" by Return to Forever is a favorite of mine. The title cut, tremendous-worth buyng the disc for this song alone. Clarke can play acoustic well when he chooses-with a nice touch with the bow. Herbie's Headhunter groups had some special moments too. Chameleon, Sly, Butterfly, some standards from that period. His style on the Fender Rhoads, very much copied.
I'm not a big fan of fusion but I dig a lot of Herbie from this era. Absolute Proof from Thrust is awesome with Herbie, Paul Jackson and Mike Clark laying down the funk with the total musicallity of a Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams rythm section from the sixties. The haunting Sextant is my favorite electric Herbie album.
I'm a big jazz enthusiast. I'm an alto and bari sax player and have been playing jazz for 7 years now. I'm a senior in high school and play in my school's jazz ensemble. Last year we came in 2nd place at the Essentially Ellington Festival in New York. We have a great listening lab with hundreds of great CDs. My band director makes sure that we have a recording of every song that we play, so I have about 20+ CDs of just jazz music that I've played. I'm currently working on putting the CDs onto my computer and then burning them to an MP3 player. I'm currently listening to Ellington, Buddy Rich, Parker, Mintzer, Oliver Nelson to name a few. Another great jazz composer (that I feel is over-looked) is Jaco Pastorius. He's one of the best composers I've ever heard. I'd recommend getting his album Word of Mouth (hard to find) if you want to listen to some good stuff. I've also recently been introduced to vocal jazz. I've listened to a bit of Ella Fitzgerald before, but nothing else. Now I'm listening to Sarah Vaughn, Diane Schuur, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Ray Charles, Carmen McRae, and others.
As a die-hard life-long supporter of FC Monk, I can actually follow this logic. Even Monk's orchestral/big band-ish tunes were of a different school than the Mingus and Ellington suites. Monk was bop and stayed bop pretty much throughout his career. Things like Black and Tan, Latin American Suite, East Indian, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady seem somewhat foreign to Monk's sensibility, or my sense of Monk's music more accurately. I'm a huge fan of all three, and while Monk may be my personal favorite there are times when nothing but Duke Ellington will do. Re: the Pop/Tin Pan Alley dichotomy. I like that line. As RoyalS said, it's pretty clear. I can understand thinking that it's not necessary, but there's something extra exciting about hearing great versions of "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Surrey With The Fringe On Top" and knowing that they are being remade into something marvelous and something different. The true Tin Pan Alley stuff, Porter, Hart, Lowe, etc., come from a time when those worlds weren't so far apart as they are now. So there was more of a dialogue or natural progression between the stage, the big band and the combo. But it was still a journey.
New York Times 2004 Top Ten I thought all of you jazz fans would be interested in the New York Times top ten of 2004: THE TEN DEEPEST GROOVES by Ben Ratliff 1. JOE LOVANO: 'I'M ALL FOR YOU' (Blue Note). On paper, the quartet of Mr. Lovano on saxophone, Hank Jones on piano, George Mraz on bass and Paul Motian on drums neatly entwines the classicist and experimentalist streams in postwar jazz. But I doubt they gave that a second's thought. Here they play only ballads, knocking them out of the park with a grace that seems effortless. The rhythm is wickedly self-edited and deeply behind the beat; the saxophone playing is billowing, smeared and full of Ben Websteresque caresses; Mr. Jones's clarion bebop piano runs through it all. 2. THE GREAT JAZZ TRIO: 'SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME' (Eighty-Eights/Columbia). It's the last session Hank Jones recorded with his brother Elvin, the incomparable improvising drummer of modern music. (Elvin Jones died on May 18.) The program is all standards, and the star is Elvin, playing superbly, with the great depth of his sound accurately recorded. 3. BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO: 'ANYTHING GOES' (Warner Brothers). Mr. Mehldau works hard as a composer, but here his decade-old trio plays only other people's music, and rather brilliantly; it's the best of the band's studio recordings. 4. SOWETO KINCH: 'CONVERSATIONS WITH THE UNSEEN' (Dune). A young English saxophonist and part-time rapper, Mr. Kinch comes loaded with energy and ideas. His first album's dominant style relates to the American hardcore-jazz mainstream of Greg Osby and Branford Marsalis, but in his mid-20's he really knows his Parker, Tristano and Coltrane, as well as hip-hop and West Indian rhythm. 5. ERIC ALEXANDER: 'DEAD CENTER' (High Note). The tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander plays with a broad, lovely, careful sound; studying the music of the hard-bop era as a rigorous, complex language, and staying within its parameters, he has become an impressive craftsman. 6. FLY: 'FLY' (Savoy Jazz). This is the first album by a cooperative band (Mark Turner, tenor saxophone; Larry Grenadier, bass; Jeff Ballard, drums), which, in its own boiled-down, open and gently melodic way, presents a fairly radical revision of the basic jazz-trio idea. 7. GERI ALLEN TRIO: 'THE LIFE OF A SONG' (Telarc). This feels like a return: it has been a long time since the standard-bearing jazz pianist Ms. Allen made a straightforward trio record as strong as this one, with some rich writing and a first-rate band, including Dave Holland on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. 8. BEBO VALDÉS: 'BEBO DE CUBA' (BMG Spain). After last year's "Lagrimas Negras," more from Mr. Valdés's burst of late-life creativity: a stunning Latin jazz big-band recorded with New York's A-list players. 9. WYNTON MARSALIS: 'THE MAGIC HOUR' (Blue Note). These tunes are some of the simplest you'll hear a major jazz musician put on record, but here Mr. Marsalis stresses the interplay of his excellent new band, with the pianist Eric Lewis making especially powerful disruptions, over the written material. 10. CHARLES LLOYD/BILLY HIGGINS: 'WHICH WAY IS EAST' (ECM). It's not without longueurs, but the two hours of home-studio jam sessions between the jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd and the drummer Billy Higgins, recorded shortly before the great Higgins's death, are explosions of on-the-spot creativity: each musician also sings, plays half a dozen other instruments and journeys into traditions far outside jazz.
How come Django Reinhard hasn't been mentioned yet? IMO he's one of the greatest jazz guitar players ever.
If you dig the chick singers, check out Nina Simone. Imagine a Black, female Mel Torme with a deeper voice . She does a version of Don't Smoke in Bed that will melt your speakers. I think the album is I Loves you Porgy. Miss Ella stands out head and shoulders above the rest though -- from vocal quality to musicianship, she blows away every other jazz vocalist out there, ever. Yup, that includes Sinatra. Bennett, too. And they'd be two of the first in line to agree with me. I've heard there are complete transcriptions of Charlie Parker's major solos for saxophonists to study. A transcription of Ella's St Louis Blues or her Stompin' at the Savoy would be fascinating to look at. Wonderful thread to read . In addition to the singers, I'm very much into the small combos of the Bebop / Hard Bop eras. Cannonball Adderly is one of my absolute favorite artists. Not the most technically gifted, but the sonority of the tone that he gets out of an alto saxophone is amazing, and the soulfulness of his repetoire and his individual soloing is equally awe-inspiring.
Re: New York Times 2004 Top Ten Thanks for the list. I only have the Mehldau and Lovano discs and they're both great. I've been meaning to get that "Fly" album -- they do a sizzling version of Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic". I love Grenadier's bass playing in the Brad Mehldau Trio.
Re: New York Times 2004 Top Ten That whole group is quality. I saw them play earlier this year. Mehldau is about the most reserved groupleader I've ever seen.
Not too much his solo stuff, but as sideman, he's done some stuff that I like. Some very nice playing on Keith Jarrett's, My Song album.
So I want to buy some Thelonious Monk CDs. Who can give me some recommendations among these selections: Straight No Chaser It's Monk's Time Underground Monk's Dream Monk at Newport 1963 & 1965 Solo Monk Criss-Cross Misterioso Brilliant Corners Sadly, the only Monk I have in my collection of jazz is this:
I like Brilliant Corners, another good one is Monk's Music. Both should be pretty easy to find at a reasonable price. Off topic, but have you ever checked out Sangha in Takoma Park? They have jazz or jazz-like musicians perform there every so often. The cover charge is only $10-15, all money goes directly to the artists.