Kind of Blue

Surprised that great Oliver Nelson record isn’t mentioned. A warhorse to be sure, but to me, at the level of Kind of Blue.

I think the reason that the old recordings can sound so good is manifold:

• the studio equipment was far more primitive, less outboard gear, less fiddling with tracks;
• the musicians were extremely capable- they could play the whole song in a single take, even stuff that had orchestrated parts; no "oh, we’ll fix it later" mentality.

I do have a lot of the warhorses, but lost interest. My interest was renewed a little over a decade ago. I got into so-called "spiritual" and "soul" jazz through the recommendation of someone I knew. There were a few labels that concentrated on this-- mostly top notch sidemen who had no work on mainstream records in the post-Monterrey "youth" explosion. Perry Como was out; new sounds were in, thanks to people like Chris Blackwell at Island who signed an amazing roster of talent (Traffic, Crimson, Free, Tull, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, eventually Bob Marley, etc.)

Meanwhile, in the "jazz" world, it became much more local, community oriented stuff- in NY, Detroit (Motown moved to the West Coast), the West Coast sound, including all the acolytes of Horace Tapscott. Nate Morgan was a killer pianist who did stuff for Chaka Khan when he wasn’t doing deep jazz.

I’m only scratching the surface here, but to paraphrase David Lindley (RIP), the brilliant string player, you can make almost any song "jazz" (Lindley said "reggae" but I think it’s all the same).

If you like straight ahead stuff, check Art Pepper’s last recording of Patricia (he released it three times), this last version, with Cecil McBee (one of the most tuneful bassists I’ve ever heard), Roy Haynes and the recently departed Stanley Cowell (co-founder of Strata-East, one of the wellsprings of spiritual jazz). It is accessible and McBee’s bass work is classic, as is Cowell’s piano work. Pepper was a great altoist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKUz2763fDo

@tylermunns

Actually, I haven’t had the experience you describe.

And, as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years, has a studio art degree in drawing/printmaking and enjoys photography and writing poetry, implying I'm  someone who disrespects/devalues the arts or artists is absurd,

As you sound emotionally triggered by this topic, I don’t see much possibility for rational conversation.

@mahgister

I’m speaking purely in practical terms, not in terms of "pigeonholing " or otherwise restricting artists. Would you also reject the use of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries?

Do Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, and Rush all sound the same? Of course not. Why should Tubular Bells be any different? Prog rock covers a lot of territory.

@stuartk Having a system that allows customers or patrons to efficiently locate a thing (dedicated aisles in a grocery store, Dewey Decibel system in a library, etc.) is helpful.  
Describing music to another person is different.  
Conflating the two things is false equivalence.

“And, as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years, has a studio art degree in drawing/printmaking and enjoys photography and writing poetry, implying I'm  someone who disrespects/devalues the arts or artists is absurd
As you sound emotionally triggered by this topic, I don’t see much possibility for rational conversation.”

After you said such qualms were “extreme” and “getting undies in a twist,” I went on to further clarify why I took issue with label/genre-mongering. You took it personally (i.e. ‘…as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years…’).  
I’m the “triggered” one, the one with comprised rationality.
Sure. You bet.  
The ol’ “you’re emotional/irrational” dismissal bit. An oldie-but-goodie.

Instead of saying an artist is (blank), what if we…Egads! Heaven forbid!…described the music?  You know, with words.  
That’s an option.  
Is I already said, applying some generic label contrived by record companies/radio stations/Rolling-frickin’-Stone magazine God-knows-how-many-years, labels invented to make it easier for them to become more rich, labels that rarely, if ever, provide an accurate/useful description, we could just use our words to describe something.  
Just a thought.

@mahgister

I’m speaking purely in practical terms, not in terms of "pigeonholing " or otherwise restricting artists. Would you also reject the use of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries?

I already admitted that this is practical... Labels are inevitable...😁

I class my music by names of composers and very large denomination : classical and Jazz and Arabic , Persian And Indian and South America and chinese and others ...

I never proposed to trash Dewey... 😊

I only said that labels with too much sub-sub-sub labellings  too much details like the 60 possible  jazz  genre distinctions are less useful than names of musicians for me and in a way restricting passed some  threshold ... General classification of jazz by years and era are enough for me ...

Once this is said i can understand why some musician can hate labelling ...

No poet like to be put in a drawer...