Jazz listening: Is it about the music? Or is it about the sound?

The thread title says it all. I can listen to jazz recordings for hours on end but can scarcely name a dozen tunes.  My jazz collection is small but still growing.  Most recordings sound great.  On the other hand, I have a substantial rock, pop and country collection and like most of us, have a near encyclopedic knowledge of it.

We remember the rock, pop and country collections because this is what was played back in the days of no format FM radio stations.

To my ears acoustic music almost invariably sounds better than electronic on a high-quality system, and I suspect that the recording engineers (e.g. Rudy Van Gelder) who focussed on jazz were among the very best.

IMHO, with jazz you get both – good music and good sound. Like @whipsaw mentioned, Rudy Van Gelder (Blue Note) engineered tons of material from the bebop/hard bop/post-bop eras. Several other labels had good production quality as well, like Prestige, Riverside, Columbia, Verve, and Impulse.

@strateahed,

I noticed you left out the Rudy Van Gelder post strateahead CTI years! ☺
Which are some of my favorites to this day, but I do also love the above!

Off the top of my head I can't remember some of the Bill Evans session engineers but they were some of the sharpest ever!

Does anybody really listen to pure jazz with bad sound quality?

Thing is these days the most interesting music to me is that which cross or defy traditional genres, including traditional "Jazz", which alone is very wide and varied in styles to the point that "Jazz" has become almost a useless label except in the historical sense. That all started with fusion Jazz back in the late Miles Davis era. Most of what happened with Jazz as we traditionally know it in the modern recording era happened as a result of Miles Davis.

Even Ken Burns Jazz miniseries did not quite know what to say about Jazz as it had been traditionally defined anymore once they got past the fusion jazz era that Miles Davis started back in the latter sixties and after Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, the key figures that helped form, popularize and evolve traditional Jazz, had passed, which is a long time ago already baby, yeah!

I guess if there is a lot of group improvisation and extended solos going on, that is still the "essence" of Jazz. I know it when I hear it, especially when listening to an actual live performance. Oh and yes the sound quality better be good, right?

Having played professionally, it’s the quality of the recording AND the composition.  I never listen to some of my favorite rock recordings due to poor recording sq.  Jazz musicians know a lot of their commercial success is in the equipment/method of the recording, not mass appeal.

@mijostyn

sound quality and the music itself are both examples of the aesthetic and become purely a matter of taste.

Excellent point. I do think taste is more objective than that famous quote intends, as we have so many points on which we agree and even have reasons and arguments about taste. Then again, I don't think objectivity means what most think it means. [Tables topic.]

I’m sorry the Kierkegaard quote mentioned "ethics." Misplaced word in this discussion.

The better contrast is between the Apollonian preference for rational order, patterns, objectivity and Dionysian for feeling and spontaneous abandon. They’re both tastes.

I can lose myself more easily with jazz these days, especially with recordings from ECM and just about everything by Bill Evans (the Complete Village Vanguard sounds brilliant on cd; a great vinyl pressing of the full set would be apocalyptic). Listening to "Trio '64" yesterday was mesmerizing. Piano in the center of the living room, drums off to the right, bass over to the left. I almost looked for a waiter to order a drink from. 

No, I couldn't name a single title on that disc, while I can tell you stories about most U2 songs. But when I was in my 20's music meant something very different than it does now. It was much more social, whereas jazz and classical are today much more solitary pleasures for me. And the (generally poor) SQ of most U2 recordings in the '80's and '90's was irrelevant then. I suspect the pleasures I derive from music have changed as a result of age. Not in the sense of "growing up" or maturing, but simply changing. Evans, Miles, Trane, Jarrett, Jamal, the contemporary Scandinavian stuff on ECM: it all sounds great, but I listen to all of it alone. And I expect the very best SQ. But when I put on "Achtung Baby" or "War," or most of the rock I grew up with, I'm looking for someone to share it with, and SQ isn't nearly as important.

Except with "Quadrophenia" and "Who's Next." Go figure. . .