Stuff about Jazz

 

BBC 4 did one of its intermittent Jazz evenings last Friday. A repeat of the excellent Miles Davis documentary 'Birth of the Cool' and a revival of the Jazz 625 concert series featuring Sons of Kemet, Nubya Garcia and the rest of what I'm sure will be called the New Wave of British Jazz at some point (NWOBJ?). There was also a history of Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, and the man himself. You can find the programmes here and they are all worth a watch.

Back in the summer I bought a collection of Jazz CDs, about 400 of them. I bought this on the strength of a pile of Blue Note and similar discs. I'm writing up a longer price about this collection and collecting in general, but for now one of the areas that I knew relatively little about was British Jazz of the 50s and 60s. I had always had this down as very much a copy of American music of the period, and hadn't explored names like Tubby Hayes, Peter King, Tony Kinsey, and Ronnie Scott himself. Wrong. One of the interesting things about British Jazz of the time is that it didn't reject earlier forms of the music quite as completely as the Americans did. Ronnie Scott kept the lyrical tone of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins adding it to Be Bop rather than subtracting it in favour of a full-on Parker style note storm. So, I’ve been listening to it, and a lot more of the British Jazz has ended up on the iPod than I thought might.

To connect back to the BBC4 evening, the original creator of this collection had some clear preferences, piano trios, Stan Getz, the West Coast “cool” Jazz of the mid 50s, and trumpeters. Lee Morgan was clearly a favourite and you can’t fault him for that, Donald Byrd, Humphrey Lyttleton, and many others. One name is strikingly absent from the list, apart from one ropey compilation. Miles. Given the breadth of the dark magus’ work surely there must be something that appealed. Anything recorded after about 1970, or sounding like it had at any rate, is missing from the collection. But that leaves the Prestige albums and the early Columbia records all of which he would surely have enjoyed?

Anyway, all this will prompt a few more posts about Jazz, simply because I’m listening to a fair bit of it at present, and this is after all a blog about what I’m playing on the iPod…