I agree. I like jazz, but not all jazz is what I consider jazz. By definition they may be, but some sub genres aren’t enjoyable to us ….
There’s over 50 sub genres of what is considered jazz.
Why do I hate jazz ??
- Thread starter Jean de la croix
- Start date
I agree. I like jazz, but not all jazz is what I consider jazz. By definition they may be, but some sub genres aren’t enjoyable to us ….
There’s over 50 sub genres of what is considered jazz.
Rather then mention things we don't like, why not provide examples of what we do like ?
This one blows my mind
I don't expect others to feel the same way about it! But it is interesting to listen to, IMO.
This one blows my mind
I don't expect others to feel the same way about it! But it is interesting to listen to, IMO. 
Groovy! I keep annotations (generally not mine, but by critics I appreciate) and in this case I put Jan Evensmo's comments on the version of that album I have. He's written comprehensive "solographies" of both Gene Ammons and Howard McGhee, who play here.
How can anybody hate Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole...?
Don't get me wrong I love Free Jazz, Impressions by Coltrane is my favourite album (on vinyl). Most Coltrane etc I find unlistenable on digital so I was questioning do you need a SOTA digital rig to enjoy Free Jazz. Though I did find this the other day that I find sounds good on Tidal:
Attachments
If you still hate Jazz after watching this, then Jazz is definitely not your thing:
Being a tradesman I was exposed to plenty of new country. Want to start a fight, turn on new country.
You don't need to have listened to any of this live (none of us here could have, and none of the jazz music you can hear live today comes remotely close to any of this) or to have a great system to appreciate and love this music:
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In my view, one likes certain types of music later in life than earlier. I spent the first 20+ years of my life not knowing anything about classical music or jazz. As an undergrad, I used to listen solely to rock (Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, CSNY et al. — late 70s rock that was popular when I was an undergrad). Then when I started grad school, I began to like classical music. One of my most intelligent decisions was buying a year’s subscription to the Pittsburgh Symphony (then I was attending Carnegie Mellon University), at a massively discounted student rate (like $5 per concert, sitting 5 rows from the orchestra!). It was an eye opener, not just into classical music, but becoming an audiophile. It began a hugely expensive 30+ year (mostly futile) quest to acquire stereo equipment that can match the beauty of live orchestral or chamber music or opera. It’s been an exercise in frustration — no equipment I’ve heard comes close to the sound of a live orchestra, but it does make you a lot poorer and it’s a lot of fun. Finally, when I turned 60 and became a grizzled old audio veteran, I became much more interested in jazz. Hard to believe, but I now listen more to jazz than classical (perhaps it’s because over 30 years, I’ve heard almost every major piece by every major composer many times?). I also started listening more to popular music (like Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole etc.). Perhaps it’s a sign of senility? Who knows, but I really do love jazz now. It takes a long time to learn to enjoy certain types of music, music that cannot be “hummed”. Jazz is intellectual music, music for the mind. It’s not boom boom boom rock and roll or disco. I like the improvisational character of jazz as well in the hands of a master like Coltrane. Classical music is of course always something I will listen to, but it lacks the improvisational character where a performer just plays the notes as it comes to his or her mind. One of the greatest jazz recordings — Kind of Blue — was mostly done as an improv session, where the sketches of each piece was written out by Miles Davis, and the rest of the band just grooved one evening.
I think if you’d been around the time when Beethoven or Mozart were around, classical music must have been a lot more like jazz. These guys did a lot of improvisation. But, the written scores are now played as historical relics, immutable, and classical music has lost its improvisational nature. There are certain pieces where performers are allowed to do their variations, like a cadenza to a violin concerto, but these are rare. Most improv in classical music is the tempo of how fast or slow you play a piece. Heavens forbid if you change a single note in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony! That would be a scandal!
I think if you’d been around the time when Beethoven or Mozart were around, classical music must have been a lot more like jazz. These guys did a lot of improvisation. But, the written scores are now played as historical relics, immutable, and classical music has lost its improvisational nature. There are certain pieces where performers are allowed to do their variations, like a cadenza to a violin concerto, but these are rare. Most improv in classical music is the tempo of how fast or slow you play a piece. Heavens forbid if you change a single note in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony! That would be a scandal!
My listening to jazz coincided with my discovery of the joy of listening to vinyl in mono. Once you hear a great mono record on a true mono cartridge — such as the great Miyajima Zero Infinity — there’s no going back. Stereo seems such a letdown. The very best source in my house is a fully restored Garrard 301 turntable with a 12” SME mounted with the Miyajima. You can keep your stereo. Mono vinyl is so breathtakingly real and vibrant. It’s the closest I’ve heard to live music in my 35+ years of being an audiophile. My fancy Lampizator Pacific seems such a letdown in comparison ??
As I.go through life, I go through musical stages. Heck, last night I was playing Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Celo, Dua Lipa. I started life with Barry Manilow and Kizz. Then Disco. Then punk and Reggae. Then rock. Lately a lot of Jazz and classical. But hey, now I'm trying to sort through 12 years of pop. I think I have found about 10 good songs in it!!!
Beautiful ‘table and great album. I agree about mono recording’s especially with the Miyajima mono cartridges. I’ve got the Miyajima Spirit. It brings out the best in the mono recordings. Love it.
Very cool, must sound great.
That Ben Webster album contains several lovely sessions with strings recorded in 1954 and 1955. The last four tracks are a quartet session recorded in 1954 with Teddy Wilson on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Jo Jones on drums. For everyone's benefit, here is an outstanding track from that session:
Available on Qobuz in several releases, including this one: https://open.qobuz.com/track/4350165
The Internet Archive contains different versions of those albums, and you can read the liner notes: https://archive.org/details/cd_music-for-loving-ben-webster-with-strings_ben-webster
Here is a portrait of Webster by Loren Schoenberg:
In the first part, Schoenberg shows a video of the "Sound of Jazz" show, in which you have an all-star cast: Webster, Hawkins, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickenson, Doc Cheatham, accompanying Billie Holiday. A rare opportunity to compare the styles on tenor of Young, Webster and Hawkins at the time:
Billie Holiday : Fine and mellow (1957)
in this video: Billie Holiday singing with Ben Webster -- tenor saxophone, Lester Young -- tenor saxophone, Vic Dickenson -- trombone, Gerry Mulligan -- bari...
www.youtube.com
It is nice to see how Billie Holiday reacts so sympathetically to the different soloists. Look at the young Gerry Mulligan smiling as he watches Coleman Hawkins.
In his book "Early Jazz", Gunther Schuller writes about Lester Young's performance that day:
"I cannot, of course, pretend to know intimately all the live performing of Lester’s final years; and perhaps amidst the pitifully groping, floundering attempts to somehow keep going, there were moments when the light of Lester’s art again shone brightly. I do know that one such moment occurred on the December 1957 telecast The Sound of Jazz, unquestionably the finest hour jazz has ever had on television. How fortunate we are that one of Lester’s final and most glorious moments was thus captured on electronic media: his heart-rending twelve bars on Fine and Mellow. Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, co-producers of the program, have both spoken eloquently of Lester’s sad condition during the rehearsals and performance. Lester was so totally remote and uncommunicative, as well as physically incapacitated, that at one point it was thought necessary to cut him out of the show altogether. But that seemed too cruel, so it was finally decided to limit his involvement to one chorus on Billie Holiday’s slow blues, Fine and Mellow, in the hope that she, his long-time friend, would provide the one possible stimulus for a reasonable musical participation.
The document of that television show demonstrates the triumph of soul over matter. For Lester, so sick that he could hardly stand, barely able to draw enough breath to sustain even a short phrase, nonetheless rose to the occasion and played a canticle of such overwhelming expressiveness as to put all the other playing into distant perspective. I think that Lester was dimly yet deeply aware of the fact that even some of his best friends and colleagues in the studio had given up on him. But he was to teach them all a lesson— a lesson particularly in economy and what he meant by “telling a story.” In his twelve halting, recitative-like bars he played a bare forty-five notes (not counting another eighteen embellishmental or passing tones), this about half of Webster’s majestic and ornate solo and one-third of Gerry Mulligan’s double-time chorus. This was, of course, not some statistical game to see who could play the fewest notes. But Lester showed them, and showed for all times— as he had so often done in the past— that sometimes one single deeply expressed note could say more than a hundred skillfully executed others. Lester was undoubtedly also expressing his feelings for Billie— perhaps he sensed it would be his last chance to do so— and kept his solo, like her singing, pared-down to essentials."
I read somewhere else that his solo brought the recording engineers to tears...
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This thread started off on such a dodgy ‘hater kind’ of premise. Music genre hating itself is such a weird kind of behaviour… and I’m not talking about jazz either.
Great music abounds in all eras right up to today. I’ve been listening to jazz and classical and contemporary music my entire life (well 5 decades of it at least), music has been such a cultural treasure house for millenia and it’s just as alive and well today regardless of the (at times) boxed in preferences of a few… yeah sure jazz in the 50’s and 60’s was awesome, it was amazing and the easily digestible stuff like the more popular well known albums are still absolutely brilliant but there’s just so much, much more to jazz than just the easy to listen to titles. The same with classical and with RnB, rock, electronic music, etc, etc etc. great music was there way before us and making it will very likely outlast most of the traces of this hobby as well.
When it comes to jazz and classical I’m not sure too many classical musicians or jazz musicians are likely to slag off at either genre or at any particular period… sure there’ll always be some who don’t get other forms but ultimately great music across time and the genres is simply too alive to be dead. I think sometimes old folks like us just like to think of the golden eras as somehow wonderfully exclusive… but it’s just way too early for music and musicians to shuffle off and move towards that dying light I figure we’ll be dead and our hobby may be long gone before great music making and music performing even begins to slow down… thank the heavens for such mercies.
Great music abounds in all eras right up to today. I’ve been listening to jazz and classical and contemporary music my entire life (well 5 decades of it at least), music has been such a cultural treasure house for millenia and it’s just as alive and well today regardless of the (at times) boxed in preferences of a few… yeah sure jazz in the 50’s and 60’s was awesome, it was amazing and the easily digestible stuff like the more popular well known albums are still absolutely brilliant but there’s just so much, much more to jazz than just the easy to listen to titles. The same with classical and with RnB, rock, electronic music, etc, etc etc. great music was there way before us and making it will very likely outlast most of the traces of this hobby as well.
When it comes to jazz and classical I’m not sure too many classical musicians or jazz musicians are likely to slag off at either genre or at any particular period… sure there’ll always be some who don’t get other forms but ultimately great music across time and the genres is simply too alive to be dead. I think sometimes old folks like us just like to think of the golden eras as somehow wonderfully exclusive… but it’s just way too early for music and musicians to shuffle off and move towards that dying light
I figure we’ll be dead and our hobby may be long gone before great music making and music performing even begins to slow down… thank the heavens for such mercies.
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This thread started off on such a dodgy ‘hater kind’ of premise. Music genre hating itself is such a weird kind of behaviour… and I’m not talking about jazz either.
Great music abounds in all eras right up to today. I’ve been listening to jazz and classical and contemporary music my entire life (well 5 decades of it at least), music has been such a cultural treasure house for millenia and it’s just as alive and well today regardless of the (at times) boxed in preferences of a few… yeah sure jazz in the 50’s and 60’s was awesome, it was amazing and the easily digestible stuff like the more popular well known albums are still absolutely brilliant but there’s just so much, much more to jazz than just the easy to listen to titles. The same with classical and with RnB, rock, electronic music, etc, etc etc. great music was there way before us and making it will very likely outlast most of the traces of this hobby as well.
When it comes to jazz and classical I’m not sure too many classical musicians or jazz musicians are likely to slag off at either genre or at any particular period… sure there’ll always be some who don’t get other forms but ultimately great music across time and the genres is simply too alive to be dead. I think sometimes old folks like us just like to think of the golden eras as somehow wonderfully exclusive… but it’s just way too early for music and musicians to shuffle off and move towards that dying light
Easily to listen to ? That could apply to practically all jazz from the 1920s to the late 1950s (regardless of styles). It is not a question of "popularity". "Easy listening" also implies some level of superficiality, which is really not an attribute of any specific style. Sure, Ben Webster is probably easier to listen to than Charles Mingus or Sun Ra, for some, but they all emerged from the same "fertile grounds". The foundations are the same.
Most contemporary jazz musicians would recognize the importance of preserving this cultural heritage (as does Christian McBride in that video, as he would since he is, after all, artistic director at the Jazz Museum) which is at risk of being forgotten.
Regardless of all this, it is a fact that the pool of jazz musicians is much smaller today. Naturally, great talents could still emerge.
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Every generation stands on the shoulders of those that came before them… the 21st century artist stands on the shoulders of those of 20th century which in turn stood on the shoulders of the 19th century and they all stood up on the shoulders of the artists of the 18th century… music is an inherited tradition that began well before the start of any recorded music… it evolved as a reflection of culture and also as a response to the context of the environment in which it developed. This won’t stop regardless of any individual or the romantic illusions about any particular generation, and human creative drives and the variable individual brilliance will continue… perhaps at times for both good and for bad.
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Romantic illusions of what ? It remains a fact that the "jazz scene" today is nothing like it was then. A young musician learning jazz today may have access to the best music schools, and may possess impeccable technique, but the opportunities to play and record are simply much more limited than they were back then. The level of inspiration, cross-fertilization with fellow musicians, is obviously smaller than it was back then. That is not being romantic, and it does not mean you can't appreciate what you hear today - overall it is just not really on the same level, but there are always exceptions.
I like to make the parallel with sports, and boxing in particular. In the "golden age" of boxing, there were more people holding a boxing license in NY state than there are in the entire world today. Boxers used to fight much more regularly, the level of competition was much higher than it is today, were a professional boxer will now have one or two bouts per year, and the game is all about preserving an undefeated record, to attract the public. That does not mean a Terence Crawford can't still emerge today with a skill set that would match some of the greatest of the past - it is just much more unlikely, because teenagers are attracted to other things - MMA for example. In any category, the gap between the top 2 or 3 boxers, and the rest, is much wider than it was before, just because the talent pool is much smaller.
Throughout time new musicians that challenge and open up new perceptions get crapped on by the more conservative of the older gen within an audience… it’s nothing new, it even happened to Beethoven with the first performances of his late string quartets. Truer perspectives and a better appreciation of the lasting impacts of new music tends to come through more with time. I’m not sure how much you know about jazz but very few musos have been in the MMA.
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