(2015-09-30) Muehlhauser A Beginners Guide To Modern Art Jazz

Luke Muehlhauser: A beginner’s guide to modern art jazz. (Highlights below are focused on his 'top' choices, so I can work my way through them; also incl some non-'top' choices that I wanted linked.) There are few guides to modern art jazz that are aimed at the beginner. The best guide I know of is by Piero Scaruffi, who rightly complains...

the greatest contributions of jazz to the history of humankind came in the second half of the century, for example with composers (repeat: composers) such as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane.…It is hard to name [Louis] Armstrong in the same sentence with Mozart or Stravinsky, but not difficult at all to mention Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton with those heavy-weights of classical music.

Scaruffi’s history of jazz thus focuses on the development of art jazz since ~1960. My contribution here is to focus on an even smaller set of pieces: art jazz since 1960 that is plausibly accessible to many new listeners. (So, no Anthony Braxton or Borbetomagus.)

I should also mention that while most jazz fans think mostly about jazz performers, I think mostly about jazz composers

A quick review of jazz up to ~1960

Bebop (aka bop) dropped the emphasis on danceability in favor of more complex structures, an often faster-than-danceable pace, and an existential mood, e.g. in Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” (1942), Monk’s “Round about Midnight” (1944), Parker’s “Ko ko” (1945), and Tristano’s “Spontaneous Combustion” (1947).

Cool jazz focused even less than bebop on rhythm and melody, and had a more relaxed tone, e.g. in MacGregor’s “Moon Dreams” (1948), Getz’s “Early Autumn” (1948), Mulligan’s “Venus de Milo” (1949), Konitz’s “Subconscious-Lee” (1949), and Modern Jazz Quartet’s “Vendôme” (1952).

Hard Bop was an outgrowth of bebop with simpler melodies and a more energetic sound

Free jazz discarded fixed chord progressions and tempos, e.g. in Tristano’s “Intuition” (1949) and “Descent into the Maelstrom” (1953), Giuffre’s “Fugue” (1953), Taylor’s “Toll” (1958), and Coleman’s “Peace” (1959).

Classic albums

In search of relatively accessible art jazz from ~1960 onward, let’s start with the most-played art jazz tracks that were released from 1959-1970.

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959, hard bop)
Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” and Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk” & “Strange Meadow Lark” & “Kathy’s Waltz” from Time Out (1959, cool jazz)
Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” & “Fables of Faubus” & “Boogie Stop Shuffle” & “Better Git it in Your Soul” & “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” from Mingus Ah Um (post-bop)
Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” from Empyrean Isles (1964, post-bop).
Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” from Takin’ Off (1962, hard bop).
John Coltrane’s “Naima,” “Giant Steps,” “Cousin Mary,” and “Countdown” from Giant Steps (1960, hard bop)
Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” from My Favorite Things (1961, post-bop)

If you find yourself liking the bebop, cool jazz, and hard bop selections above, there’s a good chance you’ll like nearly all of the well-reviewed albums from those genres, and you can just listen to all the best albums from those genres on lists compiled elsewhere, including... (see linked other people's lists)

Post-bop

The way I’m using the term, “post-bop” is a catch-all term for jazz music that is heavily influenced by bebop and/or hard bop, but which either “moves beyond

without being primarily free jazz, avant-garde jazz, jazz-rock, or some other major jazz genre.

Because post-bop is so varied, some varieties of it are a lot more accessible than other varieties, so I can’t as easily say “If you like these 5 examples of post-bop, you’ll probably like all the best-reviewed albums in the genre,” as I did with bebop, hard bop, and cool jazz. So, this is where I start providing some real value, since I’m not aware of anyone else who has tried to make a long list of the most accessible good albums of post-bop.

I would trace the origins of post-bop much further back, at least to Charles Mingus. To my ears, the most accessible of his many great albums are

Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956)

Tijuana Moods (rec. 1957, rel. 1962

Mingus Ah Um (1959)

Oh Yeah (1962), The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)

Here are some other good and (relatively) accessible post-bop albums, grouped by artist I highlighted only his top choices, article lists many more

Sun Ra:

Jazz in Silhouette (1959)

George Russell: Jazz Workshop (1957), New York, N.Y. (1959), Jazz in the Space Age (1961),

Bill Evans:

Explorations (1961)

John Coltrane:

Impressions (1963)

, A Love Supreme (1965)

Max Roach: We Insist! — Freedom Now Suite (1960

McCoy Tyner

Extensions (1972), Sahara (1972)

Andrew Hill: Black Fire (1963), Point of Departure (1964),

Sam Rivers: Fuchsia Swing Song (1964), Contours (1965)

Herbie Hancock

Empyrean Isles (1964)

Wayne Shorter:

Speak No Evil (1964)

Carla Bley:

Appearing Nightly (2008)

Wynton Marsalis:

Citi Movement (1992)

Either/Orchestra: Live in Addis (2004) He didn't bold this

Third stream

Gunther Schuller coined the term “third stream” in 1957 to refer “a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz and classical music.”

third stream music is compositionally inspired by classical and jazz music roughly equally, although Schuller stressed that improvisation must be important in third stream music as it is in jazz

On this page, I’m going to be less strict than Schuller was about the improvisation rule, and I’ll “compensate” for that by preferring composers who came primarily from the jazz world

Modern Jazz Quartet:

“Fontessa” (1956)

Charles Mingus:

Epitaph (written by 1962, rel. 1990), Let My Children Hear Music (1972)

Turtle Island String Quartet: Turtle Island String Quartet (1988)

For a while, it looked like third stream music might be the future of jazz. Instead, free jazz came along and crushed it.

Free jazz

it requires serious effort to find true examples of free jazz that are at least somewhat “accessible.” As such, my standards for what counts as “accessible” are even looser for this section than they are for most other sections.

the genre is usually considered to have been launched in the late 1950s, by Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman

Coleman also produced a few of the most melodic and accessible albums of free jazz: The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959),

Joe Harriott:

Abstract (1962), Movement (1963)

Don Cherry: Complete Communion (1965

Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch (1964)

Creative jazz

In 1965, Muhal Richard Abrams co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a non-profit devoted to “nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original [jazz] music.” The style of AACM composers, or thoroughly AACM-influenced composers, was most often a blend of free jazz and the classical avantgarde

Creative jazz is home to many of the most complicated, intellectually challenging compositions of jazz, comparable to e.g. the works of Babbitt, Stockhausen, or Ferneyhough from the classical tradition

most of the albums listed below are not very representative of “creative jazz,” because the albums accessible enough to make this list tended to be “on the border” with other genres, but that happened to be composed by a musician associated with the creative school.

Hamiet Bluiett:

Libation for the Baritone Saxophone Nation (1998) Not bolded

Henry Threadgill: When Was That? (1982), 80 Degrees Below ’82 (1982),

Jazz fusion

Below, I focus on fusion artists who primarily trace their lineage to jazz rather than rock

Unsurprisingly, jazz fusion is often the genre of jazz most accessible to those raised on rock and pop music, so this section contains a lot of recommended “accessible” albums. It is also probably the jazz genre with the highest number of popular but artistically dubious/worthless albums

Miles Davis

Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968), In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970)

Weather Report

Sing the Body Electric (1972)

Chick Corea: Return to Forever (1972) Not bold

Pat Metheny:

Watercolors (1977)

James Ulmer: Revealing (1977),

Steve Coleman’s

The Sonic Language of Myth (1999)

Medeski Martin & Wood:

Notes from the Underground (1995)

Acoustic Ladyland

Skinny Grin (2006)

Too Many Zooz: Subway Gawdz (2016) Not bold

ECM style jazz

combines several elements: free jazz’s willingness to abandon structure for lengthy periods of total improvisation; cool jazz’s relatively subdued aesthetic (not free jazz’s violent, dissonant aesthetic); third stream’s interest in classical forms

Keith Jarrett:

The Köln Concert (1975)

Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (1975),

Jan Garbarek

Dis (1976)

Pat Metheny: As Falls Wichita So Falls Wichita Falls (1981)

Other avant-garde jazz

Most albums in this category are too inaccessible for this list, even given more relaxed standards for what counts as “accessible” (as I did for the free jazz and creative jazz categories). But here are some (highly diverse) exceptions

George Russell:

The African Game (1985)

Keith Jarrett:

The Survivor’s Suite (1976)

Bill Frisell

Before We Were Born (1988)

Marty Ehrlich:

The Traveller’s Tale (1990)

The Long View (2003)

Bobby Previte: Bump the Renaissance (1985),

Fred Ho:

The Sweet Science Suite (2011)