New to Jazz? Start with these Legendary Artists and Recordings

I listen to Jazz every day. It's usually the first thing I hear in a quiet house upon waking, as I open the morning paper and click on my Pandora stations of Cool Jazz, Jazz Piano, or Contemporary Jazz. In the car I also regularly ride along to Denver's KUVO Jazz. Jazz is simply a natural part of my life, of life in general, and I've been grooving on America's original music form since at least my early teens. And  I was fortunate to spend more than twenty years teaching at a high school with one of the country's best music program, and the school featured two complete Jazz bands. When I was an administrator and the team chose supervision assignments, I took every Jazz concert because, "well, I'm gonna be there anyway."

People like to say jazz is "an acquired taste," though I think people know in an instant if Jazz connects with their soul. And if it does, life will always be so much sweeter. Jazz is simple yet complex, fixed but improvisational, clear but esoteric, obvious yet mysterious, and trying to describe the magic of jazz is like trying to grasp a cloud -- you can see it, but it eludes you when you try to corral it. Louis Armstrong is credited with saying about Jazz, "If you have to ask, you're never gonna know."

I love turning people on to the magic of Jazz, and had many signature specialties that I would play in the background whenever my classes were writing or reading. So, I was quite pleased when the New York Times culture critic David Renard recently posted the story, I’m New to Jazz. Where Do I Start? - The New York Times. 

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.