First Jazz you ever listened to?

[Rooster_Ties]

Found this thread searching for something else, and thought I'd give it a bump...

[JSngry]

Could you give me one while you're at it?

[frank m]

I'm older than most of you guys and grew up in the swing era. My friends and I knew the names of the sections of Goodman's band, Ellington's, and Dorsey's and Miller's. But when I heard my first record of Sidney Bechet, "Muskrat Ramble" I was a gonner. From there to Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas and the rest was but a step, as was the transition from swing to jazz. You guys made it over a much wider gulf.

[wolff]

The only time my big sister would let me in her room was to listen to her music.

She often got stuck baby sitting me and hated it, of course.

I really liked her Billie Holiday albums. She also had a lot of Dexter Gordan.

[Jazzmoose]

Pat Metheney's As Falls Witchita, So Falls Witchita Falls. But I didn't know it was jazz. I just thought this guy was taking rock to a whole new level, and was amazed when he didn't become the biggest thing in rock. I mean, he obviously blew away all the rock acts around; what the hell was wrong with people???

[cannonball-addict]

Glenn Miller - Little Brown Jug

[cannonball-addict]

The movie "Bird" and the controversy about it got me interested, though I'd heard a variety of jazz before. My first intense listening was "Giant Steps" and "Kind of Blue" -- can't get much more cliched than that!

Ever since I saw the movie and I think of Bird, I think of this face:

Edited November 20, 2004 by cannonball-addict

[kinuta]

First jazz ever listened to-

Mingus - Oh Yeah , Blues & Roots

Lee Morgan- The Sidewinder

Jimmy Smith The Sermon & Crazy baby

Lou Donaldson - The Natural Soul Of

Cannonball Adderley- Portrait Of Cannonball

Ray - Genius Plus Soul = Jazz

[tooter]

Such a long time ago but could have been "Stan Getz in Retrospect", an Esquire EP with Small Hotel, Too Marvellous for Words, I've Got You Under My Skin and What's New. Played it over an over. But another candidate is also an EP but only two tacks - I Want to be Happy and Way You Look Tonight - Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. That's the kind of Rollins I still like.

[Bill Fenohr]

Before he married my dad was a regular at all of the dance halls in Detroit, so he had a pretty big collection of swing band 78's. Stuff by Goodman, Basie, Dorsey Brothers, Artie Shaw,Harry James ect. I liked most of what he would play on the old phono-radio console that took up most of one wall, but would not go out of my way to ask him to play anything in particular.

Around the time i was in Jr High i had one of the first battery powered portable radio's that weighed only a couple of tons. I used to take it to bed with me and see what far away stations i could pick up. One night i stumbled onto a station from Boston that was playing Jazz. I still remember the dj saying something about the next tune being a new one from Art Blakey recorded at Birdland in N Y. Then on came Split Kick. Well that turned my,at the time, little midwestern ass around.

After hearing that tune, i was a boy on a mission. I had to have that album. It seemed like it took me forever to save the two fifty or three dollars that the 10" cost. Finally when i went to the record store to buy it, imagine my glee to find that there were TWO more volumes of that great music to get,which actually gave me life goals at age 14.

Since then there has been alot of water under the bridge and a whole lot of jazz in my life, but that is how it started for me. I still have that 10" and would not part with it for any price.

[sidewinder]

I think the first great jazz stuff I heard was a bundle of LPs lent by an uncle with a great jazz collection back in the early 70s. There was the 'Wardell Gray Memorial Album Vols 1 and 2, the Miles Davis 3LP French CBS 'Essential Miles Davis' box, a Charlie Parker Verve ('Pick of Parker') and then for Xmas I got the Sonny Rollins twofer on Prestige. It was downhill from there... :rsly:

[DTMX]

Not jazz, but the first instrumental that caught my attention...

[James]

My conversion experience/jazz epiphany was born via Trane's "Giant Steps." In high school I played in a couple of garage rock/fusion bands, (alto) and one day the bass player came in *absolutely foaming* about a jazz LP he had just purchased -- pleading with the entire group to come over to his place to hear it. I was the only one that went and sat transfixed through the entire album as Pete just stared at me with the silly grin of a missionary that knew he had hooked a convert. It wasn't until years later that I realized what got me that afternoon. It was Coltrane's SOUND. I was a *very* serious kid --- and felt that this musician was speaking to me "personally."

I grew up at a great time for a budding young jazz fan --- when you could buy fantastic jazz LP's in the cut-out bin for a buck. I spent every cent I had on jazz recordings, starting with everyone Coltrane recorded with. Since I liked every Blue Note LP I purchased..........well, you know the rest of this sentence!

This is really a fine thread. When I meet a new jazz friend, the very first question I ask them is "How did you fall in love with jazz?" We've all heard some great stories, huh?

[sheldonm]

Boy do I wish i had that one just for hangin on the wall. I remember running around the living room with a little blanket safety pinned around my neck.

Who doesn't .

[sheldonm]

Not jazz, but the first instrumental that caught my attention...

I was wondering when someone would bring up Boots! I think my dad had that one also; don't know if I ever heard it though.

[jazzman4133]

78 rpm record "Dance Of The Infidels", Bud Powell.

[erwbol]

Ben Webster LPs from my uncle's collection when I was a small child. Later on I would always appreciate it when he put on those LPs when we visited. There must have also been some Oscar Peterson and Count Basie, but what stayed with me was Ben's tenor sound.

[BillF]

There was a great deal of jazz and jazz-influenced music coming out of the radio in my 1940s childhood. For example, Nellie Lutcher's "Hurry on Down to My House" was a chart hit when I was 7. But the first jazz record I deliberately listened to was an EP of Sidney Bechet with Claude Luter's Band, which was lent to me by a schoolmate in 1957 when I was 17. I still remember some of those French track titles: "Le marchand de poissons", "Les oignons".

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Yes, there was a lot of stuff on the BBC in those days. My earliest memory is singing along with my Mum to 'Open the door Richard', when I was three.

A bit later, early fifties, there was the Billy Cotton Band Show, on Sunday lunchtimes (after Family Favourites, and before the Archie Andrews show - a ventriloquist on the goddamn radio) That was a pretty awful show, bad comedy, bad sentimental songs, but a few of the old Londoners Music Hall songs, done well. But at the end, there was this theme; just a simple little riff, led by the guitarist, with the band quietly moaning behind him, then a trumpet solo, then Archie Andrews. I used to wait for the end, because this little riff would be on, and I can still remember it.

In the later fifties, there were interesting instrumentals that were popular: 'Raunchy'; 'Swingin' shepherd blues'; and 'Tom Hark' by Elias & his Zig Zag Jive Flutes, a Kwela band from South Africa.

But all the time, you'd hear Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Fitzgerald, Bechet, Goodman, Shaw, Dorsey, Charlie Barnet ('Skyliner' is one I remember being played often), Miller, Waller, Peggy Lee and British traditional jazz musicians like Chris Barber, Humphrey Lyttleton, Ken Colyer and others on the normal BBC popular music programmes. You didn't have to look for a special channel, it was there, part of the regular programming for everyone. So one absorbed it and was prepared for more, later on.

Market segmentation eventually arrived and killed the general knowledge of jazz (and lots of other kinds of music) that people had. Bad news.

MG

[felser]

'A Love Supreme' by John Coltrane. I was in the library my first semester of college, wanted something to listen to while I wrote a paper, saw that album in the browser, remembered that the Byrds and the Jefferson Airplane had said he influenced them, decided to check it out, and BAM! Elvin Jones had me at hello when he came in during "Acknowledgement", and I was immediately hooked for life.

[Homefromtheforest]

Around 1985 or 1986...so I was 12 or 13...borrowed 3 albums from the

Iibrary... Can't remember the titles but they were 1 each by Monk, Coltrane, and Miles.

[Larry Kart]

"Tiger Rag," with Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band (1942):

I lived to fight another day.

[BillF]

Yes, there was a lot of stuff on the BBC in those days. My earliest memory is singing along with my Mum to 'Open the door Richard', when I was three

MG

Me too. And "The Woody Woodpecker's Song" of much the same time was even more obviously a bebop line!

[jeffcrom]

Really enjoyed reading this old thread. Some of it makes me feel really old. And it's interesting to see some names I've never seen before - folks who dropped off here before I discovered the place.

The first jazz I remember hearing was the Dave Brubeck Quartet on a Timex(?) TV special - I think I was around ten. (I'm 54 now). The music got to me right away - mostly the sound of Desmond's alto and the minor-key theme of what must have been "Take Five."

A few years later, my grandmother gave me a couple of boxes of 78s, which seemed weird and exotic to me in the 1970s. There was all kinds of stuff there - mostly pop, but plenty of big-band swing, and even some small combo jazz. I liked the swinging stuff more than the vocals, but at first I really couldn't distinguish levels of quality - Larry Clinton seemed as good as Benny Carter to me at the time. Gradually, the cream rose to the top. My favorites from that 78 stash were Benny Carter with Coleman Hawkins ("Somebody Loves Me"/"Pardon Me, Pretty Baby"), a Hawk solo disc ("Lost in a Fog"/"I Ain't Got Nobody"), the 1942 Metronome All-Stars disc, and the Benny Goodman Quartet playing "Whispering." I would alternate between playing "Whispering" and Hawk's "Lost in a Fog" before going to bed; sometimes the Hawkins record is still the last thing I play before turning in. I still have three of those 78s - I don't know what happened to the Goodman.

Edit: moved the last paragraph to another thread, where it fits better.

Edited October 15, 2013 by jeffcrom

[Steve Reynolds]

30 years old or so

Kind of Blue and Mingus at Antibes