When did you start to dig jazz, and what caused it?

And I bet I'm not the only one.

(NB it didn't really work.)

I pour scorn on not only your inability to detect humour, your use of "coloured" in 2005, but also your failuire to correctly spell "racist". Geir-jazzer.

And people have the nerve to accuse me of manic delusional hysteria?

It didn't completely not work Tuomas, I do enjoy those albums a lot, and the other jazz I own (all very canonical). But I wouldn't say I was 'into' it and I don't often use it as foreground music.

Only if you discover irony while developing the other essential life skills I outlined for you.

b) being taken to "jazz clubs" (nb, the local civic centre with some tables and chairs in) as a small kid, seeing michael and christian garrick at said "jazz club", listening to my dads jazz records. (my favourite), seeing milt jackson in er....2000? with ed.

The next year I ended up moving in with a bunch of jazz musicians in Rome for a year, something I would previously never have countenanced as I would have thought of jazz as tuneless twaddle. What I didn’t really understand before they tried to explain (emphasis on tried!) and introduce me to new people and styles. They also removed my belief that only America had jazz and had me listen to other nationalities, Italian mainly. From then on I’ve just loved to listen to jazz in pretty much every shape and form irregardless of instrument. It’s not my favourite genre (truth be told that changes hourly) but it is special to me if only because of the great people I met and got to know through it. That and the feelings it stirs up when I listen to an entire album and haven’t noticed the time go by. It can be incredibly evocative as well as the perfect music to move around to.

I still listen to “Kind of Blue” every now and then if only I could meet her again and say thanks, I think it genuinely changed my life! Thanks pretty lady, wherever you are…

If you play any Miles record made between 1965 and 1981 to someone you are guaranteed it will not lead to sex, except maybe with yourself when the woman has fled your house in terror.

its certainly very geriatric now if you ignore jazz artists who have come to prominence in recent years, such as Jamie Callum, KT Melua and Nora Jones.. whether they are jazz artists or not, they seem far more to appeal to 20 somethings, not teenagers! mercuries, not brits!

We should start invading countries to inbue them with Western structures of harmony, melody AND democracy from now on.

This guy is prick.

These people needs to move on - it is not 1862 any more!

Coming from a guy called 'Comstock'. Oh the irony!

anyway, i think it was when a friend of my sister's stuck coltrane's "my favorite things" (the original recording, not one of the later, free-r ones) on a mixtape that i had nicked from her filled with mostly punk and some random oddities and it turned out to be the thing i listened to most on it.

And yes, I am a white person. A VERY white person.

(there was a side note where a few years earlier I saw Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter while on vacation with my parents and bought Miles Davis' Sorcerer the same day. The concert was waaaay abstract and I didn't understand it at all, and Sorcerer sat under my bed for the next five years or so)

While I appreciate your silly antics on this thread, if you cannot hear the melody in "Lonely Woman" "Peace" "Focus on Sanity" "Joy of a Toy" blah blah blah, then you are trule a pitiable specimen, and missing out on some of the greatest pleasures in music. Also, Coleman.

oh yeah one listen to Birds of Fire or Romantic Warrior and I'm just HUMMING those irresistible melodies the rest of the day!

Actually mid 70s electric fusion was my gateway to jazz. But as soon as I heard Miles Davis' 60s quintet and some Blue Note hard bop the appeal of Stanley Clarke's finger-popping etc faded pretty fast.

Unless you are a put on, as I (and others) seem to suspect. In which case, bravo! I bit your troll hook like a hungry catfish.

I still don't really like most of it, and no longer like some of what I liked in high school (including cool stuff you are supposed to like, like Ayler and Coleman). Sun Ra is my favorite, but I like a fair amount of what I'm hearing from the current downtown New York jazz avant-garde.

This is all rehash, but we did this before anyway didn't we? (Ah, right, Stewart has the link.)

x-post: Oh, definitely a put-on. What other zany personae does he have up his sleeves?

I agree that some of the fusion stuff isn't exactly what most people would call "jazz". If I were to define "Musicmagic", I'd call it semi-classical chamber prog-jazz, or something like that. But that doesn't mean it's "smooth"; it's far too complicated and hyperactive for that. And it does have the improvisational quality usually applied to define what is jazz. Admittedly, you have to be able to love excess and pomposity to dig "Musicmagic" (that's basically what Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke trade in) - but if you do, it's a fine, fine LP.

I'll bet you wish it was.
(Assuming you even exist.)

Well, we didn't know each other as well back then as we do now, did we?

If I'm absolutely honest however, the real reason I started to get into jazz back in 1986 was an almost overwhelming desire to inveigle my way into the charming and delectable Joanna Parsons' knickers.

I'm very much afraid to say that, despite all my very best efforts, I was ultimately (OK, repeatedly) unsucessful in my attempts to achieve this goal - even after I took up to the Royal Festival Hall in London to see Miles Davis in concert - however this did lead me to the revalation that actually I really did quite like some of this jazz stuff....

You're right, but he argues essentially the same line. Probably a parody of Geir. Regardless, it's still rather pointless to argue IMO. To each his/her own of course.

xpost

Edwina Currie appeared in jazz mags?!?

I don't think it has anything to do with age or class--it's all about exposure. I think little kids can get into jazz better than adults because they don't have all the preconceptions of how jazz is 'art' or whatever. I remember my 6th grade music teacher played us "Take Five" and I really dug it. It sounded like music from outer space.

Anyway, complicated hyperactive excessive pomposity sounds like I might be able to dig it on some level or another. I've mentioned before my current (actually by now long-time) favorite is Henry Threadgill, right?

But exposure can depend on class, no? At least in Finland jazz is mainly a middle to upper class interest. In the working class environment I grew up in there was no exposure to jazz whatsoever. On a related note, I remember a Mos Def interview where he said that in general white folks know more about the history of black music than black folks do, because they have more time, money, and "cultural assets" to delve into that. So it can be very much a class issue.

I'm so alone in this world it's not rational.

"What is this crap?"

Would Marcello rebuff a "chick" for this evident breach of good taste too, I wonder?

"So What" by The Anti Nowhere League just bangs away ferociously for 3 minutes before ending suddenly and abruptly with a deep groaning sound.

How did I start to dig jazz? I was another one of those specimens (like Mr. Cole) who attempted to "get into jazz" after repeatedly reading 'Trane-testimonials from the likes of L.Bangs, Iggy, Lou Reed and all the other usual suspects (my heroes at the time.) Plus, I was then way-into certain prog-rockers (Zappa, King Crimson, etc.) who specialized in saxophone-noise, so that was kind of a gateway. Borrowed Meditations and a Charlie Mingus comp from the library, and that was that. (It's worth noting that my jazz-appreciation coincided with my first purchase of a CD player, and the concurrent appearance of CD reissues of Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Tony Williams and other folks with long-gone albums that I'd heard of but had virtually no chance of ever finding/hearing.)

Oh, and I also liked Mahavishnu and Return To Forever, but didn't consider 'em jazz - more like prog without lyrics/singing.

Clarified butter?

If the members of the Anti Nowhere League used any lubricant at all, I'd imagine it was probably castrol GTX.

http://www.lamette.it/lamette/fototeca/punk/0003.jpg

Haha, I never thought of it that way, but I guess you're right; the climax lasts waaay longer than average male orgasm though, so maybe they're designed especially for the ladeez.

I have absolutely no idea; but when we went to see The Charles Mingus Orchestra last year, George Alagiah was in the next seat directly across the aisle from us.

Just saying.

No, I think when it comes to right-wing jazz fans, we're lumbered with KEN CLARKE'S JAZZ GREATS!

Are you saying you do fancy Amanda Platell?

What if you invited her 'round one evening; plied her with flowers, good food, fine wine, belgian chocolates; generally gave her a load of old flannel and managed to convince her what a fine, noble, sensitive human being you are; and you were just staring to get intimate when she suddenly stopped, looked deep into your eyes and breathed huskily "Oh Marcello! I want you understand that I don't usually do this sort of thing on a first date, but I can already feel a very special bond and connection between the two of us that I'm poweless to resist and.... well..... I don't suppose you've a copy of Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis about the place anywhere, have you...?"

But the reality is that if I ever met her in the street, instead of suddenly grabbing me, bundling me over her shoulder and taking me back to her penthouse, whereupon she would fling me brutally onto her four-poster bed, all the while quoting Ayn Rand and Thomas Carlyle on the French Revolution, before whipping out her

*this section of the post has been censored in the public interest*

she would actually screw up her face in disgust and tell me to "get out of my way, you sordid little urchin."

The soundtrack I imagine to accompany my Platell kinky abduction fantasy is "Machine Gun" by the Peter Brotzmann Octet.

In middle-class America kids don't hear much jazz at all (or at least they didn't when I was growing up), so for me it was almost like embracing punk rock or something like that. Nobody I knew listened to jazz, nor did anyone's parents--to me, it was truly outsider music. Contrast that to a friend of mine in college who went to a very prestigious private high school school and had Wynton Marsalis play in his auditorium. And none of his HS friends that I met had any interest in jazz, but they all had definitely been exposed to it more than the kids who grew up in my town.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that even if you are exposed to it, that doesn't mean you're going to embrace it. Maybe the *kind* of exposure is more important than the actual exposure itself. In fact, I think any time jazz is presented as 'art' or 'learning' people (and kids) are automatically going to be turned off (same goes for classical). All of the people I know who are really into jazz didn't pick it up from their parents, or schools, or anything like that. They just heard it through friends or sought it out themselves (and coincidentially most of them are musicians, which is another important angle).

In the UK I think expressing a liking jazz is frequently viewed as an indicator of solid respectability second only (in terms of musical taste) to expressing a liking for classical music or opera.

But at the time, as a 15 or 16 year old or whatever I was, It blew my mind. I had to have it. So, I asked that record counter guy at Boogie Records in Toledo, Ohio in 1988 or whenever it was : "what is this??" He told me it was the Columbia Jazz sampler, and I bought a copy. And I've been hooked on jazz ever since. Just the greatest music ever. Billie doing "You've Changed", "Saeta" from Sketches of Spain, "so WHat", the two Louis cuts from his Fats and Handy tribute records ... "Lullaby of the Leaves" .. "Take" fuckin "Five" !! Gene Krupa bashing away on "Sing Sing Sing"!!

wow, what a great sampler, what a way to get my ass-kicked, what a way to fall in love with this wonderful, strange, continually stimulating music. sorry for the long-winded response. I didn't actually read the whole thread. I've got work commitments these days. Is there race-baiting stuff? are musically illiterate goth-music fucknuts showing up spouting inanities? I'll probably read the whole thing on the weekend, I guess, if I have time. but yeah, jazz pretty much rules. Was just at Fred Anderson's tonight!! Nice little Wednesday jam session they have going... the kids cooked tonight on "Footprints", "Cherokee", couple of spontaneous improvs, etc. ... good time on a wednesday..

i dont really like bebop, or anything before, and i really dont like the neotradtionalism of people like marsalais--but free jazz fuck yeah

Fascinating: I appreciate it's not going to be possible to answer this empirically, but do you believe you find it less "difficult" or "challenging" than most people; who didn't have that sort of early exposure; do to listen to and enjoy music that doesn't conform to the prevalent "norms"?

I knew it, I bloody knew it: being a music obsessive does make you more attractive to women!