Q: As a member of Gen Z who’s completely new to jazz, who should I listen to? What are some famous recordings, albums, artists or compilations?
Glad you asked! I’m an editor on the New York Times Culture desk who listens to (and sometimes writes about) a wide range of music, and I edit the “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love” series covering jazz. Even so, I consider myself more of a jazz enthusiast than an expert, especially compared with the “5 Minutes” writers and contributors, and I totally get how a genre with more than a century of history can be intimidating. With so much variety, though, I think jazz can be a rewarding listen for almost anyone — so let’s talk about how you can find some that you’ll love.
Don’t be afraid of giants
Let’s say you’ve only heard of one jazz musician, and it’s Miles Davis. Perfect — he had a decades-long career that included tons of stylistic shifts, from bebop (1940s) to cool jazz (1950s) to electric fusion (the late 1960s and beyond). If you’re hearing jazz playing in a restaurant or bar, it’s a decent bet that it’s “Kind of Blue,” Davis’s 1959 masterpiece with a sextet that included John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. (Hedge bet: Coltrane’s “Blue Train.”) Simply exploring Davis’s large catalog would be a jazz education, covering multiple milestones like “Birth of the Cool” (1957) and the fusion landmark “Bitches Brew” (1970). The first jazz album I ever bought, somewhat at random, was Davis’s “’Round About Midnight” (1957), and I still love it, especially its brisk take on the Charlie Parker composition “Ah-Leu-Cha.”
So my (not very deep) advice is, start with the canon — but it sounds like you’re looking for guidance on who’s in it. Any list is going to provoke debate, but the soundtrack to Ken Burns’s 10-part documentary “Jazz” seems like as good a place as any to encounter most of the Mount Rushmore names — Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Coltrane, Parker — even if plenty of critics took issue with the series. The former Times critic Ben Ratliff wrote a 2002 book, “The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz,” that attempts to list the 100 most important jazz recordings, and the website for Jazz at Lincoln Center offers a more concise 10, leading with the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Time Out.” (That album’s “Take Five” is on the shortlist of jazz songs that even non-fans recognize.) You can also — plug! — take a spin through the “5 Minutes” archive to find playlists for topics that might interest you.
Follow the players
Once you’ve found a couple of albums you like, the personnel on them can be like branches on a tree. I first encountered the trumpeter Don Cherry on Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (1959); later I made the leap to Cherry’s own albums, like “Brown Rice” (1975), and was blown away by their groove and mystery. The pianist Mal Waldron was an accompanist for Charles Mingus and Billie Holiday, but left behind his own formidable body of work that’s no less rewarding for being lesser-known. Musician credits aren’t easy to come by on streaming services, and it’s a loss; sites like Discogs, with expansive user-generated content focused on record collecting, can be a resource. The catalogs of classic record labels like Blue Note and Impulse are another avenue to explore.
Jazz is still alive
While its time as America’s most popular music has come and gone, jazz remains a vital art form, especially in the last decade or so. Fans of Kendrick Lamar might be interested in Kamasi Washington, who played on Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” before releasing celebrated albums of his own. As an indie-rock fan, I noticed the Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker’s work on labels like International Anthem and Eremite, which clued me in to new favorites like Natural Information Society and Angel Bat Dawid. But maybe your taste is less avant-garde and runs more to jazz-inflected vocal pop like Laufey — there’s a thread to follow back to Norah Jones, farther back to Astrud Gilberto, and on and on. All this is to say that if jazz is vast enough to include mellow standards and wild explorations, no one can hand you a map to it all — but hopefully you have some inspirations for how to start the journey.
David Renard is an editor and writer for the Arts section of The Times.
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