The premiere post for Skeleton Crew Quarterly’s jazz foray dealt with discovery, not necessarily
finding one’s genre but music as a general hobby. Breaking into the world of
jazz has required those same hesitant steps that instigated my first pop/rock
purchases: find a group of artists you enjoy, take a look at the company they
keep (their band-mates, labels), and then refine your tastes ad nauseum.
I’ve taken to these
steps with an obsessive’s dedication, sampling artists I’ve only recognized by
name and compiling extensive lists of promising releases worth looking into.
Most interestingly, however, I’ve immersed myself in jazz’s labyrinthine
name-game. A cursory glance upon bassist Dave Holland led me from his key
session work on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew to his
barrier-pushing solo catalog (from which his 1990 highlight, Extensions, now
sits in my collection). Or take Terje Rypdal, the Scandinavian guitarist I
first heard in the soundtrack to Michael Mann’s Heat, whose work I’ve become an
avid collector of. That both of these chosen-at-whim artists belong to the ECM
label is also no fluke; the Munich-based imprint, known for releasing some of
the most progressive modern classical and jazz, has introduced a bottomless pit
of pivotal musicians for my perusal. And through each bandleader’s palette and take
on improvisation, my tastes have begun to refine indeed.
Funny thing about
tastes, though; you can’t necessarily share them with all of your closest
friends. Our earliest refinements in taste endured this same phenomenon – the
“guilty pleasures” – where we’d fear being judged for enjoying something
outside of the norm. Even though I’m no longer the bashful teenager hiding Bjork
CDs behind my Sublime catalog, jazz remains an impossible divide when
entertaining friends. Not to say I haven’t tried: I scored a friend’s study
session with Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua and played the icy thaw of Rypdal/Vitous/DeJohnette
for an open-minded visitor. Both were polite in their indifference. It was me
who couldn’t handle it, the whole time listening not only through their ears
(and any assumptions I had grabbed from their mute reactions) but through my own
past preferences, with ears that would’ve balked over these records even two
years ago.
As you might imagine
then, jazz has remained a personal hobby for me but an obsessive one too.
And with that in mind – not to mention the approaching one-year anniversary of
my first jazz purchase – I thought I’d kick-start the January blahs with
Skeleton Crew Quarterly’s Top Ten Jazz Albums of 2011. What makes this list
particularly off the cuff is that it pulls from nearly a century of jazz I
happened upon over the past twelve months, so only a few of these titles will
actually be from 2011. Test some of these out...
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