L. Grey

Fabulous article by J. Michael Osborne. Love him!

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So: let’s say you found a really cool poster of Miles Davis that would look super-badass in your dorm room, but you wouldn’t know what to say if someone asks what he actually plays. Or let’s say you’ve started dating someone who wears glasses and only smokes American Spirits, and you want to invite him or her back to your apartment just to drink Yellow Tail wine and “listen to a couple jazz records,” because you’re lazy and, let’s be honest, jazz music can do all that tedious romancing by itself.

The truth is that people are often impressed with a knowledge of jazz because it’s a genuinely daunting and diverse genre to find your way around. Especially following the wildly improvisational bebop era of the ’40s and early ’50s, jazz recordings have usually been very of-the-moment—meaning someone like Charlie Parker would learn a harmonic structure, teach it to a trio of fellow experts, cut side A of another historic record in one or two takes, and all of side B the next afternoon with a hangover. The point is: a whole lot of great jazz musicians record a discography three times that of U2’s and in a third of the time, and that can make it awfully difficult, even with an Internet connection, to figure out the wheat from the chaff—and, yes, despite what your freshman English professor might’ve told you, jazz has a whole lot of chaff. 

 
To speak horribly generally, one thing that makes this daunting task less so is that—where any old-school hip-hop fan worth their ill, ill salt will tell you that the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique is way better than their still-top-selling Licensed to Ill, or some indie band’s new stuff that’s on car commercials is way worse than their old, recorded-on-cassette-tapes stuff—the great landmark jazz records are landmark jazz record, because they’re actually really good albums. So, while it might not razzle-dazzle that cutie with the glasses and American Spirits too much, the place to start is with the clichés: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It’s been said so many times that it’s not worth anything to say it anymore, but these albums are hugely influential and crazy amounts of awesome from beginning to end.

  
If those interest you, or perhaps your attractive next-door neighbor, you can hop to Miles’ ’Round About Midnight, Relaxin’ or Birth of the Cool (the latter of which absolutely needs to be on every stereotype of a college kid’s iTunes), or Coltrane’s Giant Steps or My Favorite Things. After this, you are now allowed to start referring to them as “Miles” and “Coltrane,” because that’s just what people do.

  
Beyond simply Miles and simply Coltrane, though, these records represent a quintet and quartet, respectively, of some of the best players of their instruments on the planet at the peaks of their prowess, and that may provide you with an easy jumping-off point from there, depending on what sticks out to you in Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. If Cannonball Adderley’s cool, elegant alto-sax solo in Kind of Blue’s “Flamenco Sketches” seems to be your thing, his 1958 album Somethin’ Else is incredible. If McCoy Tyner on piano on A Love Supreme (or, in particular, My Favorite Things) is your proverbial speed, The Real McCoy or, another very rhythmic pianist (read: uses his fingers like whack-a-mole mallets), Thelonious Monk may be good places to start. Similarly, if the killer Bill Evans piano on Kind of Blue’s “Blue in Green” stops your heart at all like it does mine, The Bill Evans Trio’s Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Trio ’65 are must-haves—and, if we’re still being banal at this point, Evans can charm the skinny jeans off anyone.

We’ve yet to hit other black-and-white-poster-loving collegiate favorites like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Charles Mingus (though, on that front, start with Mingus Ah Um), and we only got to touch on Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, without so much as a nod to Bitches Brew (see what I did there?). But the reality is that getting into jazz takes time, effort and a wide-open mind—or, if you’re into doing yourself favors, do what I did and take two semesters of FSU professor and badass drummer Leon Anderson’s “Jazz History 1890-Present” classes (MUH 4801 and 4802). You can tell someone how historic Kind of Blue was, but you can’t really tell someone how great it is; most of all, understanding jazz just takes listening to it. Pseudo-intellectuals and big Jack Kerouac fans have been blowing jazz up to be a quasi-religion for decades, and now learning your way around it can feel more like trying to read the King James Bible every day, but the honest truth is that all these recordings I’ve mentioned are simply of incredibly talented people having an incredible amount of fun together, not heady messages handed down from on high. Sure: more exploration will lead you to more unwelcoming music that may push your earballs’ tolerance for displeasure to its limits, but you’ve got time for that. And, hey, if you don’t have time for that, many will be impressed if you at least know the difference between an alto and a tenor saxophone, and then we can all go back to listening to The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill rager “No Sleep till Brooklyn.”

Yours,

J. Michael Osborne