Recommended music - other than classical and pop



Show first post
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

333 replies

All I see is a black rectangle.

No, I had to set my browser, it works fine now! Music always sounds better when the singer is beautiful!
Testing YouTube link. It won't accept m.youtube.com links from my iPad, has to be the PC link, apparently.

My favorite of the Novo Fadistas

I find that my preferences in jazz seem to cycle through piano trios through small jazz combos with horns and then to guitar led trios/quartets. Currently I have piano trios in heavy circulation and recent excellent discoveries:
1. Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell - Azure and Amaryllis
2. Gary Peacock led trio - Now This
3. Giovanni Guidi - City of Broken Dreams
4. Jarrett/Peacock/De Johnette - Somewhere
Largely quiet and contemplative music, that works equally well for ambient, but good for attentive listening as well. All ECM records, and to their usual standard of mastering quality. Recommended.
First listen of Kurt Elling's new album tonight. Excellent, recommended to any jazz vocal fan. Here's Will Friedwald's review: http://kurtelling.com/news/press_article_948.php
Badge
Only read part of the thread, but for my diverse taste I can recommend best of Stan Getz the Verve Years and any 1985 or prior Dead Kennedy's.
And as part of a Quartet. He was a longtime member of Charlie Haden's Quartet West. Listening to their Haunted Heart album now, in fact.
Broadbent is also good in jazz piano trio format - I have his Gianelli Square and Pacific Standard Time. Both very good efforts.
Yes, it's one of the best ballads album out there, IMO. Alan Broadbent provides the perfect accompaniment, another jazz treasure. Tessa had several gigs with him in Manhattan last month; wish it wasn't 3,000 miles distant! A Broadbent/Souter album would be fascinating.
Irene Kral, a superb ballad singer well known only to other jazz artists.
Very good, that singer. New find, thank you!
I was reading up about her and she could have used kickstarter as evidenced by this quote:
"Kral paid for the Where is Love? session out of her own pocket and shopped the tape everywhere. The few interested labels all wanted to 'sweeten' the material by heaping string tracks onto the songs. Kral's uniform response — as her friend Lee Wilder told me — was a curt "**** you."
Lol. And that album, it appears, was her summit.
Interesting concept, and she has certainly been creative with the rewards.
It's very expensive to pay for the studio time, the recording engineers, the musicians, etc. She details all that on the Kickstarter site.

If you are a jazz artist, no matter how superb an artist you are, and you don't stoop to "smooth jazz" and the like to get airtime, it's very difficult to get backing, since your album sales will be small. Therefore, you either front the money yourself, or get creative.

Tessa, IMO, is right up there with Irene Kral, a superb ballad singer well known only to other jazz artists.
I don't understand. Would one not just buy/stream the CD/music if one likes it? Like that of every other artiste since the recording era began?

And with self publishing, I think it isn't as expensive to do this as in the past.
Here's an opportunity to help keep jazz alive. Help fund Tessa Souter's next album. She's not well known outside the Manhattan jazz clubs (where she performs with greats like Alan Broadbent), but is widely respected by fellow jazz musicians. Trained under the great Mark Murphy, who asked her to help lead his singing workshops. Her last album, Beyond the Blue, is a fav of mine.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tessasouter/help-make-tessa-souters-next-cd
I also found his first CD released just this year. I haven't heard all of it, but it sound very promising.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Favorite-Things-Joey-Alexander/dp/B00TZE3W0C/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1435542754&sr=1-1&keywords=joey+alexander


Yep, been listening to it via Sonos and Rdio. Have to wonder where he'll be in 10 years...
I also found his first CD released just this year. I haven't heard all of it, but it sound very promising.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Favorite-Things-Joey-Alexander/dp/B00TZE3W0C/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1435542754&sr=1-1&keywords=joey+alexander
Check out this phenomenal 11 year old jazz pianist from Indonesia, who is taking the jazz world by storm.

Thank you, that is a great video. I had no idea that Indonesia had a jazz scene, leave along jazz prodigies like Joey. Remarkable. I wonder if he also improvises such that the song sounds different but the same each time he plays.
I found another good video with him that is long, but seems just as good. A little wordy in the beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOV2mONU8a0

Check out his LP’s with Larry Young on organ (‘Talkin’ About’ and ‘Street of Dreams’.

I will, thank you.
Badge +1
His Idle Moments album has been in my collection for a long time [...] and I am looking to see what else of his I can find that is just as good.
Idle Moment is one of my all time favourites.
But you can’t go wrong with any of his LP’s he made up to 1965.
Check out his LP’s with Larry Young on organ (‘Talkin’ About’ and ‘Street of Dreams’.
Check out this phenomenal 11 year old jazz pianist from Indonesia, who is taking the jazz world by storm.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f4V_uaxBVOw
Not surprisingly, there are more great guitar jazz albums from Grant Green. One of these that I can recommend is with Sonny Clark on piano in the mix as well - A 2 CD 19 track set, The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark.

The fifties seem to have been golden years for jazz and it is not surprising that in some places jazz is considered to be the music of the 1950s.
His Idle Moments album has been in my collection for a long time, but I recently discovered another album of his - the Rudy van Gelder remastered version of Green Street, another 1950s album.

Excellent straight ahead jazz guitar with just bass and drums. Many of the tracks are standards, but sound fresh on this guitar led trio. Highly recommended for listening at quiet times, and I am looking to see what else of his I can find that is just as good.
The music sounds like it was recorded yesterday!
Ah, but he has the kids discovering the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer... Nothing wrong with that!
I got that quite some time ago, and discovered that Bennett was a very good jazz singer too. Doesn't do much in that vein now though.
Check out The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album for a really fine collaboration between the two masters.
I discovered three great Benny Golson albums, recorded in the late fifties, which still sound great for listening as well as background for dinner or working.

Grooving with Golson, Gone with Golson and Getting with it.

Three excellent recordings, listen to any one or all three. It isn't easy to find music of this quality these days, even though this comment dates me.

Another recent find via Golson is Art Farmer. His Modern Art is a great trumpet record, and one of the best of Bill Evans on piano as well. Recorded in - when else - late fifties.
Been chillin' with a couple of Eddie Higgins Trio albums from Venus label lately. Standards and Ballads.

Pretty easy to see why he was loved by Japanese and Korean jazz fans back in the day (while being virtually unknown at home, except in his hometown Chicago). Great stuff.