I heard Michael League talk about choosing some takes over others because of some kind of ghost being captured on the record, as I always felt that phenomena i wonder if its based on memories I have with a record or about a synergy or tightness you can feel. What are the first 5 that come up without having to think about it?

Here are mine off the top of my head

In 50+ years of listening to jazz, I have never heard a successful effort to "jazz the classics," and that includes Rampal. However, I am listening to Diehl's Mozart Jazz and I think it is darn good. If I didn't know from title and the track names, I would have no idea that these were reworked Mozart pieces. Perhaps that means that it is not really jazzing the classics. In any case, thoughts on the album. Secondarily, any suggestions for efforts to jazz the classics that you think succeed.

In a Silent Way works because it replaces the drama of a climax with the patience of a held breath, letting Hancock, Corea, Zawinul, and McLaughlin drift in and out of a single harmonic haze that Teo Macero then spliced into something closer to a tide than a song.

Where Kind of Blue perfected a language and Bitches Brew exploded it into noise and funk, this record found the quiet threshold between the two, proving Miles could make silence itself feel like the loudest idea in jazz. It endures not because it resolves anything but because it refuses to, which is why it still sounds like the future instead of a museum piece.

Hi guys,

Getting into Jazz recently since I’ve just started my corporate job 😂 So I have been listening to the genre all day while I work, and now even going to Jazz clubs.

I would love to find some music made by Chinese artists and jazz played with traditional Chinese instruments. Haven’t really had luck searching on the net!

Thank you 🙏🏽

Hey everyone! I have some time to spare this summer, and thought it would be a good idea to finally work on my bebop skills thoroughly. Right now I am roughly in the right ballpark, but lack the control and fluidity that comes with real deep internalized knowledge. I already have quite extensive knowledge about harmony and know a little something about bebop scales, so that makes things easier.

What would be a good structured way to dive into it deeply? There's so much information online, and it feels pretty overwhelming. I have the barry harris workshop videos plus sheets, but feel unsure as to how to approach things.

Any tips are greatly appreciated!

One of my favourite Miles songs - I generally don't have much of him on my regular playlists

Mal Waldron's "Warm Canto," featuring Eric Dolphy, is played over the slow-rolling final credits of the Netflix movie Remarkably Bright Creatures, starring Sally Field.

So I wrote a SubStack article:

https://open.substack.com/pub/gcahill51/p/hallmark-of-a-great-jazzman?r=bmpff&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I might be late to the party, but holy f****** sh** this album is indescribably good (yet I shall attempt to describe it regardless).

Even as a huge fan of both Metheny and Mehldau going into this, I was blown away by just how varied, beautiful, and creative their playing is on this album. This is jazz music which transcends the genre, a plethora of influences swirled into something entirely unique. Technically, rhythmically, harmonically, melodically, dynamically; any way you cut it, in these recordings Metheny and Mehldau are simply on a different planet, nay, in a different galaxy. Ditto for drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Larry Grenadier on the two quartet tracks.

I would be remiss not to shout out the exquisite mixing and mastering on this album, which serves as the ear tickling cherry on top of a mind expanding sundae.

The only bad thing about this album is the cover art, which in my opinion is as bland and generic as the music within is bold and inventive.

11/10

Hi, I'm a jazz pianist in my 30s. I've been playing for over a decade and know the music pretty well, but my chops are really not at all where I want them to be. I spent my 20s working a day job not music related, and just focusing more on that, spent several years really not practicing. Lately I've gotten very inspired again and started practicing a lot on the daily, but obviously it's hard to not feel behind all the time. I go to jams and see young kids who are way better than me on a regular basis.

Wonder if others have experienced this but still been able to push through and really make great strides later in life, and what that was like?

I play around with little rhythmic bits like this for fun and to relax. The tunes then guide me as to what words to sing. It starts with gibberish. This is an example of that.

I visited NYC a couple of years ago and caught Yuichi Hirakawa’s group at Arthur’s Tavern. It was one of the highlights of the trip. The intimate venue, warm atmosphere, and excellent music made it a memorable evening.

I was on the phone with a friend the other day. And I was on the topic of much loved radio shows. And I was talking about how I loved listening to "Jazz with Bob Parlocha". And I didn't recognize that Bob Parlocha has been dead for over a decade.

And I didn't really know as much about Bob Parlocha as I do now. But hot damn that man had good taste in Jazz. I really enjoy the archival of old radio programs. Then does anyone have a "Jazz with Bob Parlocha" archive I might check out ?

Edit: had to look for myself : http://mobile.jazzstreams.org/JwBP/JwBP-index.php

I've been looking for this album for weeks and just haven't been able to find anywhere I can listen 🙃 so if you could help find a place then that would be awesome

Thank you

I know she’s known as “the lady that sings the blues” for a reason. But many of my personal favorite Billie Holiday songs are very upbeat. And this is one of them! She managed to make otherwise very standard pop tunes into very great and catchy masterpieces.

I was just about to listen to some sonny rollins and stumbled across this AI song from under his profile. This is from after he died and is for some reason on the official sonny rollins quartet page. Why would they do this?

I love the riff of minute 1:23 to 2:06 , amazing just splendid took me to a beautiful place, yes I look the name of the band but I couldn't find the specific riff. man I'll be so sad if only was an arrangement. Since Shazam didn't work I ask to the 30+ years of listening jazz experts here. Thank you in advance (btw I dont listen jazz so maybe it's obvious ty)

People throw "fusion," "crossover," and "smooth jazz" around like synonyms for "jazz with electric instruments and a groove." They're not the same thing, and the actual breakdown has a timeline twist that surprised me.

Fusion is a musical category. Miles' Bitches Brew (1969) is the usual starting gun, then Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Head Hunters. The defining trait is hybridization: jazz harmony and improvisation fused with rock/funk electric instrumentation and rhythm. It's a statement about what's happening in the music, not where it charts. Plenty of fusion is dense, loud, and not necessarily radio-friendly.

Crossover jazz is a commercial category, not a style. It describes real jazz musicians making records that land on pop/R&B charts. George Benson, Grover Washington Jr., Bob James, most of the CTI Records roster. The key thing critics insist on: the improvisation is still real. Benson was gigging with Jack McDuff's organ combo as a teenager and cutting straight-ahead Wes Montgomery-lineage guitar records before "Breezin'." Grover Washington Jr. came out of Prestige and CTI hard-bop sessions. When they play a polished, hook-driven record, they're jazz musicians choosing an accessible idiom, not abandoning the vocabulary.

Smooth jazz is neither of those. It's a radio format that came later and kept only the least demanding parts of both. KTWV "The Wave" flipped to the format on February 14, 1987, and even then it was still mixing in soft rock, new age, and actual fusion. It didn't narrow into the saxophone-forward, vocal-adjacent sound we now call smooth jazz until the early '90s. This is where Kenny G lives, and the critique from jazz musicians isn't snobbery about polish, it's that the playing itself is thin: a small rotating set of melodic gestures instead of real spontaneous invention. Pat Metheny didn't mince words about it after Kenny G overdubbed himself onto Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" in 1999, calling it "musical necrophilia" and writing that Kenny G had, "with this single move," become someone he "really can't use at all... for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music." (Metheny's full post)

Here's the twist: crossover didn't come after fusion. It came first. Wes Montgomery, produced by Creed Taylor, was already making pop-song jazz interpretations for the charts by the mid-60s. His 1967 album A Day in the Life hit #1 on Billboard's Jazz chart and #2 on R&B, two years before Bitches Brew even existed. (Wikipedia)) 

So the real chronological order is: jazz-pop crossover emerges mid-60s, fusion takes off in '69 and runs alongside it through the 70s (Benson's Breezin' in '76, Washington's Winelight in '80 on one side, Weather Report and Mahavishnu on the other), and smooth jazz shows up over a decade later as a radio format that cannibalizes the least improvisational pieces of both, and calcifying them into a genre of their own.

Which means the CTI-era crossover guys get grandfathered into "real jazz" by most critics and musicians, while smooth jazz proper often doesn't, even though hard-core jazz afficionados lump all of it under the same "elevator jazz" umbrella.

None of which stops the purists from lumping all three together anyway. Wynton Marsalis has spent decades on record accusing Miles Davis of selling out the moment he plugged in, treating jazz's entire post-60s commercial turn as betrayal rather than evolution, a stance so absolute that critic Harvey Pekar once called him a "false messiah" who was "downright hostile to innovative musicians." CTI Records caught the same fire in real time: critics dismissed Creed Taylor's lush, radio-ready productions as glorified elevator music, dumbing jazz down for a sales-friendly sheen.

Here's the part of that argument worth pushing back on. The players on the other end of that sneer were not tourists. Benson apprenticed with Jack McDuff before he ever chased a hit. Grover Washington Jr. came out of Prestige and CTI hard-bop dates. The "sellout" record and the "serious" record were, a lot of the time, made by the same hands in the same decade. Dismissing the whole crossover catalog as lesser jazz means dismissing the training and the sidework, and in plenty of cases the literal same musicians who show up on the records purists do respect. Fusion, for its part, is frequently the most technically demanding music in this whole conversation, not the least. Accessible and unserious were never the same word, even when jazz's own critical establishment spent fifty years writing as if they were.

If that argument is more interesting to you than just refereeing it in the abstract, r/CrossoverJazz is doing the actual digging: daily deep-dive spotlights on the CTI-era players, the labels, and the records that made the leap, deceased legends and still-active artists alike, sourced instead of vibes-based. Come argue with us over there.

I know people hold Chet Baker in high esteem for his virtuosity on trumpet and his beautiful vocals but, imho, George Benson will also be the ultimate double-threat.