Draining the spit valve

I cannot understand people who dislike jazz enough to make it known how much they dislike it. They have a screw loose. And people who love jazz have a bigger screw loose.

Jazz became big for me back in the 1990s when I was living and working in Los Angeles. Long Beach had a public radio station devoted to jazz which I discovered during the lengthy commutes and I became somewhat addicted to it. Prior to that I never gave jazz much thought other than a shrug of indifference at best. That’s rather odd being a child of the 1960s who was exposed to it in my early years — notably by its use in films and a British television series The Avengers which infatuated me for years.

During the 90s I went on to acquire a rather sizeable collection of jazz CDs. Some of them I still count among my faves regardless of genre while others I may have listened to once or twice. Granted, this was a period in my life where true hi-fi was absent thanks to an electrical storm and would get worse in years to come when my listening device was a desktop Bose radio/CD player. Many of them I acquired from one of those CD club memberships that would send you 13 CDs for a dollar or whatever, and then you were on the hook for another half dozen or so at full retail price.

I’ve never done well by loading up on music all at once. It is too much to absorb. CDs get heard once then moved aside for the next, and the next, and the next. So I’m glad those music clubs have faded into obscurity.  Meanwhile I have sat on this large collection of jazz now for well over 20 years.

About three years ago I finally got a true hi-fidelity sound system re-established with a nice turntable which shifted my attention even farther away from CDs for most of my listening.  Awhile back I started pulling CDs off the shelving with the idea of sorting through them, keeping what I do listen to, and trading in anything I don’t hold dear. For months now the CD collection has been a shambles. Once they were all neatly grouped on shelves with rock in one section, jazz in another, and a few oddball classical pieces stuck at the end. Now they are partially on shelves in the den, more on shelves in the foyer, and several dozen in boxes in the dining room.

As I’ve been sorting through them a number of times trying to make a decision about what to keep it occurred to me that perhaps it would be easier if I could determine why I want to get rid of them. That requires actually listening to them, or at least the first track or two, since many of them have not been played for two decades.

This has resulted in yet another revelation of sorts. I’m looking at all this stuff and realising that I have a huge amount of contemporary artists who were still newbies on the scene in the 1990s. Reading the liner notes I noticed many of them are doing their own versions or interpretations of works by true jazz masters from the past, and I don’t actually own very many of those, and frankly there are many I’m not even familiar with except through the works of others.

Ornette Coleman. There’s one. I find myself really wanting to get my hands on some of his stuff. Maybe even get it on vinyl.

Another thing I have noticed from reading the liner notes is there’s a ridiculous amount of collaboration between these people. Thanks to the CD club membership I have all these CDs by Joshua Redman, Cyrus Chestnut, Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Wynton Marsalis, and more, and you want to hear something funny? They all play on each other’s albums!

Nicholas Peyton with special guests Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman.

Christian McBride’s debut album features Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, and Cyrus Chestnut.

The Roy Hargrove Quintet featuring Branford Marsalis, Joshua Redman, and Cyrus Chestnut!

For fuck’s sake! Can you spell incest?

I’m not knocking it. These are all accomplished musicians in what is apparently a very tight-knit community of jazz lovers often paying homage to compositions of jazz legends I do not own!  At the very least I should probably investigate what all the fuss is about if I’m going to call myself a fan of jazz. To be clear, I’m not completely bereft of exposure. I have some Miles Davis, Coltrane, Basie, and others. But there’s so much more.  And actually a few albums in my collection are by newer original composers I throughly enjoy and those have actually seen multiple playings through the years.

One album I played today totally blew my head off. Jimmy Smith’s Damn from 1995. This was probably one of more than a dozen from the CD club that got lost in the shuffle. Jimmy Smith was old school, born in 1925 and he was one with the Hammond B-3 organ.  Ironically (or not), his 1995 release featured the following:  Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Peyton, and Christian McBride doing songs by Horace Silver, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, James Brown, and more.  But it works and this one is a definite keeper.

I guess my point is that this process is a lot more complex than I imagined and I’m going to need to listen to a lot of jazz before I determine what can actually be sent away.

Eventually I plan to get some shelving for this stuff and get everything back in alphabetical order. Maybe. I think I love jazz so much I might want to have jazz vocals grouped separately from jazz instrumental works. This is going to take longer than I thought. And once I have all the jazz sorted out I'll get going on downsizing the rock CD collection.

Maybe that won't take so long. Will I need to listen to every Marilyn Manson CD to decide which, if any, to keep? One never knows.