What was the first Jazz Lp you bought?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

2 hours ago, ornette said:

 

John Coltrane: Live at Birdland.

I was about 16 (born in 1949), lying in bed, listening to a foreign radio station and it came on. Instantly hooked.

 

 

Yeah, that, I think, was the second Trane I bought. If I'd heard it first, I'd have got it first. Instant and wild communication.

MG

[soulpope]

9 hours ago, ornette said:

 

John Coltrane: Live at Birdland.

I was about 16 (born in 1949), lying in bed, listening to a foreign radio station and it came on. Instantly hooked.

 

 

Amazing experience for sure .... 

[optatio]

 

 

I´ve bought this 7" LP in 1955 by post from Frankfurt after reading Charlie Parker's death in the newspaper. I was 16.

[rostasi]

This topic got me thinking...

If you wanted to suggest a recent jazz album to a young person - 
one that 30 years later they could proudly say that they bought,
which would you choose? "Recent" is kinda open, but maybe
a 21st Century album (?)

Edited October 25, 2016 by rostasi

[danasgoodstuff]

1 hour ago, rostasi said:

This topic got me thinking...

If you wanted to suggest a recent jazz album to a young person - 
one that 30 years later they could proudly say that they bought,
which would you choose? "Recent" is kinda open, but maybe
a 21st Century album (?)

JD Allen, Grafitti or Derek Bailey, Ballads; depends on where the're coming from...

[paul secor]

1 hour ago, rostasi said:

This topic got me thinking...

If you wanted to suggest a recent jazz album to a young person - 
one that 30 years later they could proudly say that they bought,
which would you choose? "Recent" is kinda open, but maybe
a 21st Century album (?)

This possibly deserves a thread of its own.

[BillF]

2 hours ago, optatio said:

 

 

I´ve bought this 7" LP in 1955 by post from Frankfurt after reading Charlie Parker's death in the newspaper. I was 16.

The first Parker Dial tracks I owned were on a similar looking Guilde du Jazz 10" in 1959. The sound quality was appalling.

[jeffcrom]

  

I am one of those who explored jazz more or less chronologically. It's going to make me seem even  older than I am (57), but my first two jazz purchases were The Essential Charlie Parker on Verve and Bix Beiderbecke and the Chicago Cornets on Milestone - I think in that order, although I can't be sure now. Around the same time I was exploring more older jazz though a box of 78s my grandmother gave me and then-contemporary jazz through the public library.

[corto maltese]

14 hours ago, rostasi said:

This topic got me thinking...

If you wanted to suggest a recent jazz album to a young person - 
one that 30 years later they could proudly say that they bought,
which would you choose? "Recent" is kinda open, but maybe
a 21st Century album (?)

Actually, I don't think "albums" are still particularly relevant to young listeners (or musicians)  today.

[BillF]

On 10/25/2016 at 11:47 AM, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

Yeah, that, I think, was the second Trane I bought. If I'd heard it first, I'd have got it first. Instant and wild communication.

MG

The first Coltrane I heard was the track "Bakai" played on a Radio Luxembourg show called Jamboree Jazz Time in 1959 when I was 19 and had been listening to jazz for 2 years. The show roared from my speakers every week with its theme tune, Shorty Rogers' "Sweetheart of Sigmund Freud". I first heard Ornette on the same show and, thinking it crazy music, wondered if Bird had sounded like that inside Camarillo.  Within months of that I saw the very late Billie Holiday on television. Wikipedia says, "When Holiday returned to Europe almost five years later in 1959, she made one of her last television appearances for Granada's Chelsea at Nine in London."

[JSngry]

First Trane I heard was also on the radio. KNUS FM out of Dallas, one of the old "underground" free-form stations, picked it up in the AM while getting dressed for school, kinda faded in and out, but mostly in. It was something with Elvin, couldn't tell you exactly, they didn't back-announce, but I immediately felt what it had to be. Funny how occasionally you can hear something and just KNOW who/what it is, all the descriptions you've been hearing perfectly match up with the music you finally are hearing. It was like that.

In retrospect it was something from 1965.

End result, a week later I picked up Transistion, so that would have been in the first 10 or so jazz records I bought. That's one that engendered both an immediate and lasting love.

[HutchFan]

Wow. My first record wasn't nearly as hip as most of these. Also, I didn't begin listening to jazz until the 1980s, right around the time that I graduated from high school.  So my first purchases were CDs, not LPs.

The first jazz that I recall buying was Four Corners by the Yellowjackets.

My best friend and I were both Genesis fanatics. Somehow, we discovered that David Hentschel was producing the Yellowjackets. (Earlier, Hentschel had produced both Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering, and those two particular albums were our favorite Genesis records.)

A couple years later while I was a college student, I joined the Columbia House CD Club. Remember how you got a bunch of "free" CDs up front?  My first order included Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, Concert by the Sea, and Ellington at Newport.  Shortly thereafter, I bought and was blown away by Mingus at Antibes. That particular recording REALLY flung the door open. At that point, I was off and running.

I still have that Yellowjackets CD. I bet I haven't played it in 20 years! I should pull it out and give it a spin.

[gmonahan]

I was into the white dance bands when I was young. Yes, I was weird. This was the first:

 

[six string]

My first jazz album was either Weather Report's I Sing The Body Electric or Miles' Bitches Brew.  They were the first two, I can't remember at the moment which came first.  Both were difficult for me to absorb but I persevered because I could tell this was some deep shit.  It sure wasn't Suite:Judy Blue Eyes.  . This was circa 1972.  

[jeffcrom]

On 10/26/2016 at 6:13 PM, gmonahan said:

I was into the white dance bands when I was young. Yes, I was weird. This was the first:

 

I, for one, love that this was your first jazz album. I can't read the titles, but I hope one of the tracks was "Well, Git It!"

Edited November 4, 2016 by jeffcrom

[robertoart]

On 10/24/2016 at 0:58 AM, corto maltese said:

Well, it was released on the Rough Trade label, home for a lot of my favourite post-punk/diy/experimental... bands at that time (early Cabaret Voltaire, Raincoats, Swell Maps, Red Crayola, This Heat, etc.). I probably didn't even realize I was buying a "jazz record".

I could have picked this one too:

 

Not a "jazz record", obviously, but bands like The Pop Group were very important in showing (the young and impressionable) me the way to a whole new world of avant-garde jazz and free improv.

And yes, sure, I still like those records; especially The Pop Group.

Sorry for late acknowledgement. That's very interesting Corto. I came to the Album through an older guitar player at the time who gave me some of my first lessons. He had been over and studied at a place called GIT in LA, which focussed on training guitarists to be Studio aces. Anyway, he lent me a mix tape that someone gave him over there, which contained as I remember it, some Santana, Miles Fat Time featuring Mike Stern and some other Fusionesque things. One night, i was lying in bed listening (I was about 17 and first hearing Bird and Wes Montgomery), and there was a thing on the tape I fell in love with, and on the tape it said James Blood Ulmer, with no other information....I moved to the city soon after, and I saw a record in a used bin that said James Blood...and it was Are You Glad. I bought it hoping to hear whatever I heard on the cassette  But what I heard instead, was a maelstrom of (what sounded like) discordant improv. I wanted to know everything about the guitar in Jazz at the time, so I played the record everyday for about a week. Suddenly it just clicked, and I heard it for all its power and beauty. I ended up buying every second hand Ulmer l could find, trying to find the song I heard originally on the mix tape. After about a year, of hearing, and inadvertently absorbing everything Ulmer had done up to that point (the year was 85), I finally found the song I was looking for was off Arthur Blythe's Lennox Avenue Breakdown. But by that time I was naively trying to incorporate Blood's approach into my limited Jazz and Blues vocabulary, and found myself being asked to play with lots of Post Punk players (many horn and reeds players and drummers), who were listening to similar stuff to what you were into as well. They loved those early Blood albums, and they dug what I was doing even if I wasn't coming from where they were. These guys were serious musicians, some of whom had played with, or would go on to play with Nick Cave and others (this was in Melbourne). If I hadn't have been listening to those Blood albums, and then Ornette, I doubt I would have got the chance to play with so many great musicians at such a young age (although they used to make fun of me because I could play ACDC songs) 

[gmonahan]

On 11/4/2016 at 6:19 PM, jeffcrom said:

I, for one, love that this was your first jazz album. I can't read the titles, but I hope one of the tracks was "Well, Git It!"

Oh, would that were true!  I didn't get "Well, Git It!" on a reissue until many years later, but I had it on a 78!!  This one just had the usual suspects. I played trombone, and I wanted to hear Dorsey. Thought I could play along with "Gettin' Sentimental" until I realized the genius SOB was starting it on C sharp!!!

 

 

gregmo

[corto maltese]

On 7-11-2016 at 6:04 PM, robertoart said:

Sorry for late acknowledgement. That's very interesting Corto. I came to the Album through an older guitar player at the time who gave me some of my first lessons. He had been over and studied at a place called GIT in LA, which focussed on training guitarists to be Studio aces. Anyway, he lent me a mix tape that someone gave him over there, which contained as I remember it, some Santana, Miles Fat Time featuring Mike Stern and some other Fusionesque things. One night, i was lying in bed listening (I was about 17 and first hearing Bird and Wes Montgomery), and there was a thing on the tape I fell in love with, and on the tape it said James Blood Ulmer, with no other information....I moved to the city soon after, and I saw a record in a used bin that said James Blood...and it was Are You Glad. I bought it hoping to hear whatever I heard on the cassette  But what I heard instead, was a maelstrom of (what sounded like) discordant improv. I wanted to know everything about the guitar in Jazz at the time, so I played the record everyday for about a week. Suddenly it just clicked, and I heard it for all its power and beauty. I ended up buying every second hand Ulmer l could find, trying to find the song I heard originally on the mix tape. After about a year, of hearing, and inadvertently absorbing everything Ulmer had done up to that point (the year was 85), I finally found the song I was looking for was off Arthur Blythe's Lennox Avenue Breakdown. But by that time I was naively trying to incorporate Blood's approach into my limited Jazz and Blues vocabulary, and found myself being asked to play with lots of Post Punk players (many horn and reeds players and drummers), who were listening to similar stuff to what you were into as well. They loved those early Blood albums, and they dug what I was doing even if I wasn't coming from where they were. These guys were serious musicians, some of whom had played with, or would go on to play with Nick Cave and others (this was in Melbourne). If I hadn't have been listening to those Blood albums, and then Ornette, I doubt I would have got the chance to play with so many great musicians at such a young age (although they used to make fun of me because I could play ACDC songs) 

Nice story.

It brings back memories of my fondness for the (I suppose small, but apparently vibrant) experimental post-punk scene from Australia and New Zealand at that time: stuff on labels like M-Squared, Flying Nun (the early years)...

 

[Misterioso]

The Complete Thelonious Monk at the It Club (Mosaic)

[clifford_thornton]

There were four, all purchased within about a week in 1997:

Joe Henderson "Page One," John Coltrane "Expression," Albert Ayler "Bells," and Eric Dolphy "Out To Lunch." 

Needless to say, I was absolutely off the deep end from the word 'go.' Ayler and Dolphy hit me the hardest at that time. That is probably no surprise.

[Larry Kart]

Probably bought it in the spring of 1954. Didn't really know what I was doing and never liked the album that much and/or I just didn't get that particular style at  that time. Soon moved on to other things -- e.g. Norman Granz jam sessions, a Krupa-Roy Eldridge-Anita O'Day reunion with Roy's still scarifying recreation of his solo on "Let Me Off Uptown," Roy's own quartet album "Little Jazz" (a great one), a great Ellington 10-incher of the '40-'41 band, etc.

[sidewinder]

9 hours ago, Misterioso said:

The Complete Thelonious Monk at the It Club (Mosaic)

Bulls-eye with the first dart !!

[mjazzg]

My first LP by a Jazz artist was David Sanborn's Hideaway, not much of a Jazz album from memory (I may still have it somewhere). Purchased off the back of this and also his playing on Young Americans

and to think I could've bought a Michael Brecker or Jon Faddis album instead...next up was Weather Report's "Heavy Weather" 

[Clunky]

King Oliver------Okeh sessions------(EMI) 

this was the first jazz LP ( other than a multi artist compilation) . I found these poor transfers pretty hard to listen to.

[felser]

Bought two at once ca 1972: