History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

A friend recently emailed me to ask about which ten or fifteen jazz albums I would recommend to get his collection started. Actually, he asked me to list "the classics," but if I tried to make a list like that, I'd never finish it. So I'm interpreting the request much more narrowly. Instead of thinking about which albums a collection would have to include, I started to think a bit about which albums I heard early on. If these albums drew me in, then maybe they would work the same way for someone else.

Not necessarily, though. Tastes are different, and I suspect every jazz fan charts a different path into the music. My own entry points clustered around particular decades (the 1950s and the 1960s) and I initially neglected classic big band leaders like Duke Ellington and Count Basie. It also took me a while to branch into more recent artists and more avant-garde music. But I think a lot of people come to jazz through rock-jazz fusion artists like Weather Report or Pat Metheny and then work backwards to the period where I began. Others get introduced to Ellington, Louis Armstrong and the like and work forward to the kinds of albums I've listed below.

Nonetheless, having cleared my throat and aired some qualifiers, here are ten albums that I think serve as a reasonably good Jazz Primer (or at least a reasonably good recollection of some of my earliest finds). It's not a primer in the sense of providing an elementary survey; more of a primer in the sense that it might ignite interest in other albums. (I've cheated a little bit by grafting some of those other albums onto the main ten.) It's lengthy, yes, but let this be a lesson: don't ask a jazz fan to pontificate on jazz unless you want an earful!



At Basin Street / Clifford Brown and Max Roach (Emarcy) - The band that recorded this album (with Brown on trumpet, Roach on drums, and Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone) is a perfect guide to the 1950s, a transitional decade in jazz history. It bridged the genres of bebop and hard bop. In general, the boundaries between "bebop" and "bop" are blurry, but this is an album that at least gives some pretty clear examples from both sides of the divide. For example, if you like tracks such as "What is This Thing Called Love?" and "I'll Remember April," then you're probably going to like classic bepop -- a style pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie that placed a premium on virtuosity, blistering tempos, and technical variations on a standard set of chord changes. On the other hand, tracks like "Step Lightly (Junior's Arrival)" and "Powell's Prances" look ahead to the hard bop of groups like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and artists like Bud Powell (for whom "Powell's Prances" is named). Incidentally, Powell's trio album, The Scene Changes, was also one of my first jazz albums. Hard bop is hard to define: one of those "know it when you hear it" kind of things. Two characteristics leap to mind, though: hard-swinging rhythms (I find myself voluntarily tapping my feet or nodding my head) that often stop and change on a dime, and more complicated harmonies. In other words, groovy.

Saxophone Colossus / Sonny Rollins (Prestige) - An album in the same vein as the first. (Rollins appears on both.) As the title of the album suggests, the man is a giant on tenor saxophone. You can't really go wrong with anything he recorded. (It was hard to choose between this and Freedom Suite, one of the earliest albums I owned.) Rollins is generally renowned for being able to improvise for very long stretches without becoming redundant or losing the melody. "St. Thomas" is also an important track because it mixes Caribbean and Afro-Cuban sounds with traditional jazz instrumentation, thus anticipating Latin Jazz before it had really arrived. (If you like this, you might move on to Joe Henderson's Page One.)



Kind of Blue / Miles Davis (Columbia) - You'll find this album near or at the top of almost every list of Greatest Jazz Albums Ever, but even after listening to it for years, you'll have a hard time quibbling with that choice. It's one of the first widely successful examples of "modal jazz." From what I can gather, with my limited amount of musical training, this means that on each song Miles simply gave his band members a few unconventional chords within which to improvise and set them loose. The result, to an untrained ear like mine, might more appropriately be called "mood-al jazz," since it sets the bar for ambient music and can be a perfect remedy when your mood is "kind of blue." The album also represents a move away from bebop that was fundamentally different from "hard bop." Kind of Blue, in common parlance, is an early example of "post-bop," a style that more radically deconstructs the rhythms and harmonies of swing and bebop music than hard bop did. Whatever you call it, it is luminous, beautiful, and deeply poignant music. (Although Kind of Blue represented a departure for Miles from the band he had been recording with in the early 1950s, the albums produced for Prestige by that earlier quintet are also must haves, especially Relaxin', Workin', and Cookin'. I also highly recommend this box set that collects all of the music recorded for Columbia by Miles and Coltrane together, including Kind of Blue. I would also be deemed a heretic in some circles for saying this, but I think Cannonball Adderley's alto sax fits better on the Kind of Blue session than Coltrane's tenor sax, and Somethin' Else, another collaboration between Adderley and Davis, is something else you should hear.)

Blue Train / John Coltrane (Blue Note) - This is Coltrane's first and only recording as a leader for Blue Note Records (although he appears as a side-man on many other albums for this legendary label). If the Brown / Roach band straddled the bebop and hard bop divide, this is an album that dances around the boundaries between hard bop and "post bop." It is an especially excellent example of Coltrane's early use of a technique he would later become famous (and, to some critics, infamous) for using -- an approach to solo-ing that tried to create cascading "sheets of sound" instead of sticking to a linear melody. Like the best bop albums, Blue Train is drenched in the blues and never stops swinging. [NB: As Dacoit points out in the comments below, I could have listed Coltrane's Giant Steps here instead. Giant Steps was one of several great albums that Coltrane recorded as leader for Atlantic Records, and if you like it, I'd also recommend Coltrane's Sound and Coltrane Plays the Blues.]



Songs for Distingue Lovers / Billie Holiday (Verve) - It's nearly impossible to recommend a single album by Billie Holiday without recommending the whole oeuvre. But if you can find it, this underrated album is as good an introduction as any single CD. It also features musicians like Roy Eldridge and Ben Webster who were the heroes of the swing era before bebop exploded on the scene. So the album is a good way to whet your appetite for classic Ellington and Basie albums. It doesn't really include Bille Holiday's most legendary performances (on songs like "God Bless the Child" and "Strange Fruit"), but there are numerous "greatest hits" albums that collect tracks like these. The best that I've found, if you have the money to spend, is the two-disc Ultimate Billie Holiday Collection, which also includes a DVD of live performances and radio interviews with Lady Day.

Song for My Father / Horace Silver (Blue Note) - Another of the earliest albums I owned, this is a hard bop classic that showcases Joe Henderson on tenor sax. Silver is an infectious pianist, and I could easily have listed his other quintet albums for Blue Note here, especially Blowin' the Blues Away and Finger Poppin'. If you like one of these three albums, you'll like them all.



The Sidewinder / Lee Morgan (Blue Note) - Not generally listed as one of the classic hard bop albums, but it makes the list again because it is one of the earliest jazz albums I owned. Again, it features Joe Henderson (if the title of my blog didn't clue you in, I'm a big fan) and also a young Billy Higgins, one of my favorite drummers. A Blue Note album with Lee Morgan on trumpet is pretty much a safe bet anytime, and if you like this album, then you'll want to start exploring Morgan's larger body of work, along with similar albums recorded by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers(especially The Big Beat and Moanin') or Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon, each of whom recorded a string of classic bop albums for Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard / Bill Evans (Riverside) - This is the first half of a two-album recording of a classic live concert by Evans' trio at the Village Vanguard. (The other is the equally excellent Waltz for Debby.) Evans was the moody, melancholy pianist who helped make Kind of Blue a classic (and also contributed to the more obscure but also wonderful Oliver Nelson album, The Blues and the Abstract Truth, which was cast in a similar mold). But in my mind, Evans is at his best in a trio setting, and particular with this trio of Paul Motian on drums and Scott LeFaro on bass. LeFaro was killed in a tragic car accident shortly after this album was made, and IMHO, Evans never found a better trio, although he recorded some excellent albums in the 1970s and 1980s. LeFaro's bass work is sui generis in many ways, and these albums are worth having just to hear his interaction with Evans' piano.



Crescent / John Coltrane (Impulse) - One of the albums recorded by Coltrane with the trinity of McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison -- the Classic Quartet. A Love Supreme is rightly regarded as this group's masterpiece, but I actually like Crescent, which was recorded just before Love Supreme, nearly as much. I heard them in the order they were recorded, and in some ways I also think Crescent is more accessible at first listen then Love Supreme because so many of the tracks are grounded in the blues. The middle three songs alone would stand together as a better album than many other artists could ever hope to record. Coltrane's late body of work, which was inaugurated by his albums with this quartet, is controversial and tends to inspire either love or hate. But Crescent is a good litmus test, I think, for whether you'll be interested in hearing more.

Miles Smiles / Miles Davis (Columbia) - Post-bop par excellence. Davis is generally thought to have recorded with two great quintets -- the one featuring John Coltrane that recorded the albums leading up to Kind of Blue, and the one that recorded this album, with Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums, and Wayne Shorter as tenor saxophonist. The quintet is highly regarded partly because it had, in Hancock and Shorter, two of the most intriguing composers of their generation. The presence of Tony Williams also proved to be fateful for Miles, since Tony's influence interested Miles in the intersection between jazz and rock and roll. Their collaboration paved the way for the next phase of Davis's career, which experimented with electronic instruments and rock-like rhythms. (Exhibit A: In a Silent Way.) Miles Smiles is one of a quartet of albums that really go together: I could just as easily have listed E.S.P., Sorceror or Nefertiti. This band also launched Hancock, Shorter, and Carter into spectacular solo careers. Two of my "what would you take to a desert island?" albums are probably Maiden Voyage by Hancock and Speak No Evil by Shorter.

Well, it's a start, even though I'm horrified by some of the omissions here -- Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk to name only two. But there's much, much more advice for new jazz listeners on this page at All About Jazz. After making my list, I checked it against some of the lists and guides over there and think mine stands up reasonably well.

I'd also add two pieces of buying advice for starting a collection, based on my experience rather than on any expertise. First, one of my surefire habits early on was to acquire albums released in the Rudy Van Gelder Series by Blue Note. (The albums are prominently marked "RVG" on the cover and spine.) Van Gelder was a legendary recording engineer who manned the booth for the label's most famous albums, and this series (which is remastered, very reasonably priced, and often on sale at places like Borders) is a veritable hall of fame. I would recommend, in general, starting with the albums released early in the series, since Blue Note made sure to start with the truly great albums. Lately, they seem to be scraping the back of the vault, and whereas RVG releases used to be marketed as a kind of Blue Ribbon series, now the series includes virtually every re-release by Blue Note. Second, early on I often consulted The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD before buying albums. The authors can be pretty stingy with stars for albums that I love, and they also bestow a lot of praise on some albums that I don't. But in general, their advice can help steer someone just starting a collection, particularly because they mark a handful of especially essential albums with a "crown" symbol. All Music Guide is also generally reliable for jazz reviews.

Happy listening!