What was the first jazz you heard that really fascinated you?

[mikeweil]

I remember two or three instances when I heard some jazz that kind of got me hooked - the sound lingered in my mind, I wanted to know more, get more etc.

There was an EP with the first four Prestige tracks of the Modern Jazz Quartet in my sister-in-law's collection - I put it on, didn't understand a note but was fascinated and listened to it again and again (and as a consequence, confiscated the record. I still have it.).

https://www.discogs.com/de/The-Modern-Jazz-Quartet-All-The-Things-You-Are/release/3796575

Another track was the Atlantic recording of Equinox by John Coltrane which I heard at a party, which was an otherwise unpleasant experience for me, but that music haunted me.

I'd be delighted to read similar experiences from other board members ...

Edited November 4, 2016 by mikeweil

[jazztrain]

I've probably posted this on another thread before, but my interest was piqued by viewing the film "On the Road with Duke Ellington" at a local library when I was in high school.  That plus some exposure to Ed Beach on WRVR-FM in New York.

That all started a long journey of musical exploration which still continues.

[mjazzg]

1982 at university, summer's afternoon,  listening to music in a friends room and we just finished listening to some of Nick Drake's Fruit Tree boxset when someone put on Liberation Music Orchestra's Ballad Of The Fallen. The sheer emotional heft of the music, its rootedness (Charlie's bass I realise now) and the tunes were like nothing I'd heard before ( Haden's writing/Carla's arrangements) - all that marvellous brass.

Upon reading the sleeve and recognising the political content - we were very aware of the situation in El Salvador and Nicaragua at the time - it all fell into place. Songs from the Spanish Civil war resonated with recent readings of Orwell and Laurie Lee .Until then Jazz had meant little to me, a few Ben Webster and Art Tatum records of a friend's father. Ballad Of the Fallen opened up so many new avenues down which I continue to roam inquisitively

[Scott Dolan]

Ah, too busy now, but I definitely want to comment later. 

[BillF]

In the mid-50s when I was in my mid-teens I used to make regular visits to my aunt's home in Cardiff (MG please note ). Her son, who would have been in his 20s, had been into jazz in previous years and the spare room contained a trombone, a wind-up gramophone and a few dozen 78s. The ones that caught my youthful ear were Meade Lux Lewis's "Honky Tonk Train Blues" and Bob Haggart's "The Big Noise from Winnetka". At that stage it was more curiosity than love of the music, which didn't happen till I was 17 in 1957.

Edited November 4, 2016 by BillF

[JSngry]

It was some dime store bargain label compilation that had a track listed as Basie's "Let him Have A Taste" but in actuality was Duke's "Stomp, Look, & Listen", the rowdy Bethlehem one with Cat Anderson screeching like hell at the end, that noise hit a nerve that linked all the horn band, Hendrix, Zappafreakouts that I had been incubating over the last few years...and then once into jazz, screeching big band trumpets soon linked to screeching saxophones like Trane/Ayler/Shepp, and oh hell yeah, I can do this!

Parallel to this was a few vintage Mulligan/Brubeck things. Where the sound of the screech linked to previous tendencies, this stuff was dark in tone, quieter, a whole new consideration. And then, Ellington Indigos & Kind Of Blue, Columbia penetrations.

This all happened really, really fast, like in about 6 months I was obsessed with all of it, any of it, known or unknown, didn't matter. And I pretty much dropped the "popular" musical interests I had had up until then, just stopped caring any more. To this day, most Rock past 1970 or so is of at best secondary, usually tertiary or less, interest to me. R&B, different story, because that link was already there, deeply, and never went away.

I pretty much, to use the vernacular, got turned out by the jazz.

[Al in NYC]

"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac".  I was 7.

[kh1958]

It was Miles Davis on TV, circa  1973--I don't recall the show, but it was out there electric Miles.

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, kh1958 said:

It was Miles Davis on TV, circa  1973--I don't recall the show, but it was out there electric Miles.

Perhaps Don Kirshner's Rock Concert? Friday night?

[soulpope]

Having been fond of Spanish tinged music John Coltrane's "Ole" did the trick ....

[kh1958]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Perhaps Don Kirshner's Rock Concert? Friday night?

Possibly, I used to watch that show sometimes.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I don't think I know. Or I can't remember. I think it was different in Britain in the forties and fifties from what it was like in the USA. The BBC Light programme in those days had EVERYTHING on it. So you got a bit of everything. By the time the family actually owned TV (summer 1957) and a record player (Xmas 1958), I knew what jazz was and had heard a VERY wide bunch of it. So wide that a lot of us here wouldn't call a lot of it jazz.

Yeah, getting my memories into gear, every Sunday, around lunchtime, for decade upon decade, you'd have the Billy Cotton Band Show. Cotton had a swing band in the thirties at least, maybe earlier, and the radio show had a mixture of big band pieces, comic songs, sentimental ballads, both sung by the lugubrious Alan Breeze, but always ended up with 'Somebody stole my gal' which had an extended half speed tag riff featuring a guitar solo by, I think, Judd Proctor. The idea that a band would or could end a tune, at a different tempo, and just repeating this quiet riff (though I'm sure I didn't know that word then) while a guitar player rambled on out into the universe seemed very odd, and I purposely listened for it at the end of every show.

Well, YouTube hasn't got the tail end of the radio show but here's Cotton's 1933 recording of the song, which is NOTHING like the end of the radio show from two decades later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQinqnJz42Q

But the band was not too bad for a British Band.

MG

[Homefromtheforest]

The classic Ornette Coleman quartet

[sidewinder]

A couple of 45s played on a portable gramophone - one was Monk's quartet on U.K. CBS doing 'Hackensack' and 'Bye-Ya'. The other was Wardell Gray with Art Farmer and Hampton Hawes which must have been on Esquire.

2 hours ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

you'd have the Billy Cotton Band Show..

I can remember seeing that on the TV - and his 'Wakey Wakey' catchphrase.

[mikeweil]

Thanks all - reading your memories brings up some more of my own:

- a TV documentary on the river Nile, which had an African teacher going to Southern Sudan playing Ray Charles' Hit TheRoad Jack on a cane flute - I happened to have  a similar model and tried to play it myself ...

- a TV live recording of German scat singer Willi Johanns with Jon Hendricks as a guest which lead to my ongoing fandom of scat vocals.

- a TV broadcast of the Don Ellis Orchestra at Monterey - three bassists, three drummers, strange, exciting rhythms etc. - unforgettable. 

[Larry Kart]

Roy Eldridge's solo on "Let Me off Uptown" with Krupa -- blew the top of my head off, as it was designed to do -- and Pee Wee Russell's hoarse-toned, baring-the-soul solo on Max Kaminsky's "Stuyvesant Blues." Joe Sullivan's second chorus too. And Max as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0e_YBcsFYI

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT2u3kda2eI&list=PLCIrQRWQ2D28y08OmrPBZLTfSib-7eahT

[Peter Friedman]

I went to the Michigan State Fair when I was about 15 years old and living in Detroit. They had free musical shows and I went in the tent with a friend and heard the Louis Armstrong group. As I recall he had Barney Bigard, Trummy Young, and Velma Middleton.We loved the show and stayed for the second show.

A year or two before that my aunt and uncle took me to see a movie at a downtown theatre that also had a floor show. It turned out to be the Lionel Hampton Big Band.  I still remember the band members walking up and down the aisles while playing and Lionel doing one of his famous jumping on the drums thing. As a young kid that all knocked me out.

[paul secor]

Hearing Mingus Ah Um when I was 17 gave me a sense of what music could convey. Then, a few months later, I heard a recording of Louis Armstrong's "Skid-Dat-De-Dat" (with Louis commenting on it) on Ralph Gleason's Jazz Casual TV show and that introduced me to another side of the music that I'd never heard. After that, I was hooked.

[A Lark Ascending]

15 hours ago, mjazzg said:

1982 at university, summer's afternoon,  listening to music in a friends room and we just finished listening to some of Nick Drake's Fruit Tree boxset when someone put on Liberation Music Orchestra's Ballad Of The Fallen. The sheer emotional heft of the music, its rootedness (Charlie's bass I realise now) and the tunes were like nothing I'd heard before ( Haden's writing/Carla's arrangements) - all that marvellous brass.

Upon reading the sleeve and recognising the political content - we were very aware of the situation in El Salvador and Nicaragua at the time - it all fell into place. Songs from the Spanish Civil war resonated with recent readings of Orwell and Laurie Lee .Until then Jazz had meant little to me, a few Ben Webster and Art Tatum records of a friend's father. Ballad Of the Fallen opened up so many new avenues down which I continue to roam inquisitively

I had a similar experience with 'Escalator over the Hill' around 1974/5 (similar musicians!). A mate bought it and we sat one Saturday afternoon listening to it - initially bemused but gradually drawn in. For some reason (the 'eastern' scales used in places?) it gave me flashbacks to when I'd lived in Singapore ten years before (no, we were only on PG Tips). The soloing really intrigued me. 

A bit hard to place the 'first jazz' - I initially heard jazz-ish things in rock music. Chicago, Keith Tippett and Mark Charig etc on King Crimson records, Elton Dean in the Soft Machine, fragments of Lol Coxhill, that lovely bit of cocktail jazz on the outro of Buffalo Springfield's 'Bluebird'. 

I know exactly when I decided 'I'm going to pursue this music more fully' - listening to Keith Jarrett's 'Death and the Flower' (Haden and Redman again) one evening in '76. I suddenly sound myself enthralled by music without the frequent harmonic or structural change of rock music; I could lose myself in the essentially cyclical nature of the structures and start listening to what the musicians were doing with them. Lots of jazz buying from there onward.   

The thing that initially distanced me from jazz (apart from it seeming very old fashioned to an 18 year old in 1976) was that sense of it being the same 32 bars coming round again and again. I still find that a bit wearing with less imaginative bands - here's the sax, now the trumpet, o.k, piano's turn, then the drums (audience claps much louder...they've woken up) and now they are trading fourzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....... 

Edited November 5, 2016 by A Lark Ascending

[JohnS]

Around mid fifties. I can recall hearing the Gerry Mulligan Quartet on the radio before I knew what jazz was and being struck by how different it was from the popular music of the day.   Soon after a friend had a 78 of Stan Getz playing These Foolish Things.   Loved that one too.  Within a year or so I was totally hooked.   Perhaps not too bad an introduction.

[Big Beat Steve]

16 hours ago, mikeweil said:

I remember two or three instances when I heard some jazz that kind of got me hooked - the sound lingered in my mind, I wanted to know more, get more etc.

There was an EP with the first four Prestige tracks of the Modern Jazz Quartet in my sister-in-law's collection - I put it on, didn't understand a note but was fascinated and listened to it again and again (and as a consequence, confiscated the record. I still have it.).

https://www.discogs.com/de/The-Modern-Jazz-Quartet-All-The-Things-You-Are/release/3796575

 

 

Ha, this record certainly was not the one that fascinated me when I got into jazz at not quite 15 years of age. My mother had this and a couple of other Metronome EPs by the MJQ plus the Fontessa LP on Atlantic and when she noticed I was getting into jazz she tried to make me listen to these as "this being what jazz is all about" (like I metioned on the other thread, "Third Stream" was as far as she ever got into jazz). That sounded extremely odd to me and it took me a while to appreciate the MJQ, though their early recordings are less third-stream-ish but if you get into jazz via swing and oldtime jazz this DOES sound strange to you at that age. I eventually confiscated her EPs too (and still have them, including the above one ).

Of the many recordings that fascinated me at that very early stage of getting into jazz I only can single out a few anymore, including the well-known version of Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" (for the dynamics - which probably had something to do with the way I regularly came to listen to it; IIRC it was the signature tune of the "Fitch Bandwagon" that aired via AFN at that time). Others were Django Reinhardt's early Quintette du Hot Club de France recordings, and Eubie Blake's "Sounds of Africa" on a CBS piano compilation some friends of my parents had (I only got that record secondhand for myself many years later).

As I expanded my record buying chronologically (from what I had heard on radio early on, modern jazz "at large" initially still was a bit weird to me), the first modern jazz record I ever bought obviously was some of the very first recordings in that vein - the Dizzy Gillespie "In The Beginning" twofer on Prerstige festuring his Guild and Musicraft recordings. This received countless spins and really had me fascinated as from the beginning it felt like a totally natural extension of the swing-era small combos to me - in marked contrast with the upheaval this caused at the time according to what I had read in Berendt's "Jazz Book" (which provided valuable guidance to me as a newbie and when re-reading that edition today I can still sense what I felt some 40 years ago).

 

[mikeweil]

This is great, Steve ....

[brownie]

That was Armstrong's  'Cornet  Chop  Suey' which was the theme song that introduced the weekly  radio show Jazz Panorama by Hugues Panassie on national radio in thé earl'y 50's!

[jcam_44]

 

Was looking for something new to listen to as I was losing interest in the direction hip hop was going. This cover intrigued me, still think its such a powerful image, and it ended up being the perfect bridge into "jazz" for me.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Er... Who is it, please?

It IS a compelling image.

MG