Jazz albums that shook your world ...

[John Litweiler]

Music has improved my moods so many times, in that sense it surely shook my world. Ayler, Graves, etc. were right about its being a healing force. The opposite happened, too: rarely, music has made me unhappy at times when I needed to be unhappy.

[Chuck Nessa]

Louis Armstrong Hot 5 - Columbia

Duke Ellington - In A Mellotone - RCA (title something like that)

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - 2 lps of Dial (and maybe Musicraft) material on Baronet lps

Duke Ellington - Hifi Ellington Uptown - Columbia

Sonny Rollins - Worktime - Prestige

Miles Davis - Cookin' - Prestige

Coleman Hawkins Crown record

Eric Dolphy - Five Spot vol 1 - Prestige

Mingus - Tijuana Moods - RCA

Duke Ellington - Piano in the Background

Dizzy, Rollins & Stitt - Verve

John Coltrane - Africa Brass and "Live" at the Village Vanguard

Paul Bley - Barrage - ESP

Albert Ayler - Spiritual Unity - ESP

Sorry to be late to the party. I might list a different group in the morning.

[marcello]

Coltrane - Live at Birdland

Miles - ESP

Charlie Parker - Royal Roost recordings (ESP)

Mingus - Changes One

Gillespie - The Giant/The Source

Ellington - Paris Concert

Ellington - The Queen Suite

Clifford Jordan - Glass Bead Games

Sonny Rollins - Live in Japan

[jeffcrom]

Okay, I got my list down to a baker's dozen. Like Chuck, several of these might be different tomorrow.

Bix Beiderbecke and the Chicago Cornets (Milestone two-fer)

Charlie Parker - Dial recordings; first on an Everest collection under Miles Davis' name.

Louis Armstrong - "Cornet Chop Suey," "Struttin' With Some Bar-B-Q," "Potato Head Blues," "Beau Koo Jack," "Weather Bird," "West End Blues," "That's My Home," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "I've Got the World on a String," and others - all late 20s - early 30s on Okeh/Victor; reissued on various albums.

Miles Davis - Miles Smiles

Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come

Art Ensemble of Chicago - People in Sorrow

Olympia/Eureka Brass Bands - Music of New Orleans: The Brass Bands (Jazzology)

Duke Ellington - "Concerto for Cootie," "Mood Indigo," "Never No Lament," "Ko Ko," "Blue Serge," "The Mystery Song," "Merry-Go-Round," "Cottontail," "I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I Got," and others from the 30s - 40s.

Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch

John Coltrane - Crescent

Sidney Bechet - Victor sessions

George Adams/Don Pullen - Don't Lose Control

Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus

I guess the brass band album and the Adams/Pullen are the only really eccentric choices here, but both of them were very important to me, and shook my world. Folks who know me might be surprised not to see any Steve Lacy on my list, but there was not one Lacy album that changed my life - the value of his work revealed itself to me gradually.

Gil Evans, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton might be next on the list, but I've got to stop somewhere.

Oh, and Albert Ayler - Witches and Devils (aka Spirits). OK, I'll really stop now.

Edited October 17, 2013 by jeffcrom

[colinmce]

I understand re: Lacy. He's one of my favorites, too, but there was no flashpoint.

[Larry Kart]

Maybe I'm taking "shook your world" a bit too literally, but there are lots of recordings I love that didn't shake my world because they didn't radically alter (i.e. shake) my expectations of how music was and could be (either, or both, in terms of how it went about its business language-wise or in what it expressed) but more or less confirmed and fulfilled a somewhat pre-existing sense of what in those realms might be possible.

Ones that did shake me in the sense I've mentioned, in addition to Roscoe Mitchell's "Sound" (a new language, new forms of order), were Serge Chaloff's "Boston Blow Up" for Chaloff's nakedly intimate performance of "Body and Soul," and, for the same reason, Pee Wee Russell's muttered out, then virtually screamed solo on "Stuyvesant Blues" from a Max Kaminsky album on the Jazztone label. Also, Ornette's "The Shape of Jazz To Come" (the sense of a new language was overwhelming), Jackie McLean's "New Soil" (the transformation into an almost incredibly planed-down fierce austerity of McLean's style and voice on "Hip Strut" was startling, in part because I already had so much invested emotionally in prior McLean, and this change seemed such a breakthrough), Wilbur Harden's "Mainstream '58" (my first encounter with "sheets of sound" Coltrane, here at its most astounding). No doubt there are more, but those are the ones that come to mind. Why, I wonder, didn't Monk ever hit me that way -- say, his great and arguably quite radical solo on "Bag's Groove" with Miles? I think because, once you climb on board, the logic of Monk's thinking always explains itself as it goes along, at once creates and satisfies expectations. By contrast, McLean's "Hip Strut" solo is like having a bandage ripped off your chest in slow motion -- you feel what's happening but while it's going on you pretty much can't believe that it's going to continue this way.

[felser]

Coltrane - 'A Love Supreme', 'Transition'

McCoy Tyner - 'Sahara', 'Extensions'

Gato Barbieri - 'El Pampero'

Charles Tolliver - 'Live at Slugs, Vol. 1'

Art Blakey - Jazz Messengers (the first one, with "Nica's Dream"), 'Ugetsu'

'Jazz at Massey Hall'

Miles Davis - 'Kind of Blue', 'Four and More'

Jackie McLean - 'One Step Beyond'

Mahavishnu Orchestra - 'The Inner-Mounting Flame'

Return to Forever - 'Light As A Feather'

Leon Thomas - 'Live in Berlin'

Santana - 'Caravanserai' (really)

Lloyd McNeil - 'Washington Suite'

Doug and Jean Carn - 'Infant Eyes'

Lee Morgan - 'Live at the Lighthouse', 'The Gigolo', 'Lee Morgan' (the last one, on Blue Note)

Charles Mingus - 'The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady', 'The Great Concert of'

Chico Hamilton - 'Passin Thru'

Herbie Hancock - 'The Prisoner'

[TedR]

I'll add Art Blakey's Free For All. Up until I heard that album (and specifically that tune) studio recording didn't seem to capture the fire of live performance. This was the most intense studio recording I had heard. So much so that it seemed the recording equipment couldn't quite handle the group's intensity that day.

Edited October 17, 2013 by TedR

[John L]

Back in the mid-70s, a few albums and concerts shook my world so hard that I became a hard core jazz fan. A couple of the first were the Lester Young 1950 live date released on Savoy and Louis Armstrong's RCA recordings. Back then, the packagings were:

[paul secor]

Since it doesn't cost anything (except a little time and maybe my credibility), I'll add more recordings that perhaps weren't of earthquake quality, but shook me in different ways just the same:

Eric Dolphy: Far Cry

Miles: Someday My Prince Will Come; Four and More

Roy Eldridge: Rockin' Chair

Trane: Meditations

Archie Shepp: Four for Trane, On This Night

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Reese and the Smooth Ones - the first time I heard the AEC as the AEC.

Duke Ellington: "...And His Mother Called Him Bill."

Horace Silver: Cape Verdean Blues

Cecil Taylor: Looking Ahead

George Russell: Ezz-thetics

An Electrifying Evening with Dizzy Gillespie

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

Charlie Parker: One Night at Birdland

Ornette Coleman: Golden Circle Vol. 1

Don Cherry: Symphony for Improvisers

Pee Wee Russell: Ask Me Now

Steve Lacy with Don Cherry: Evidence

Roswell Rudd: Everywhere

Duke Ellington: The Queen's Suite

Charlie Parker: Complete Savoy Recordings

Billie Holiday: Lady in Satin

[Utevsky]

John Coltrane: Ascension

[Hoppy T. Frog]

Nessa's Art Ensemble box set.