by David Smith (Professional Jazz Trumpeter & Educator in NYC, TISJA Faculty)
Hello to students of TISJA! I'm looking forward to working with all of you in a couple of months and wanted to write you about something you can be doing between now and then to prepare, and this goes equally whether you are a new student this year or If you have been coming to TISJA for several years. One of the most important things you can do to learn how to play jazz (and continue to develop) is to listen!
Jazz is a language and we use it exactly as we use other languages, and so we also learn it as we learn other languages. While textbooks can give us some very useful information and make learning quicker, it is when we surround ourselves with the new language and listen to how it is used that we really start to be able to use it with meaning.
Fortunately for jazz students there are thousands of recordings available and it has never been easier to have access to them. This actually presents us with a problem, though, and it is important to think about how to listen to jazz. I think it is useful to pretend for a moment that it is fifty years ago and the music was not so easily available. Back then there were no 4TB hard drives with every known recording and to purchase a single album was a significant purchase. People would tend to buy one album, and for several weeks until they had money to purchase another they would listen to that album over and over. Eventually they would get the next one and do the same.
This is a very different experience than having Pandora on in the background or browsing through YouTube videos, as useful as those resources are. With so much at our fingertips the temptation today is to listen to whatever we feel like at a given moment, because we can. While it is great to have the access, that is not the type of listening that will develop your understanding of the jazz language.
Most of you have probably had the experience of hearing a popular song that is being played very frequently on the radio, maybe in a taxi and a shopping mall too. Eventually you find yourself lying in bed, trying to go to sleep, but the song is stuck in your head keeping you up at night because you’ve heard it so many times. That is because you have internalized it, whether you wanted to or not. We do want to (need to) do that with jazz, and so by listening to one recording over and over eventually we internalize it and become familiar with the specific language on that recording.
Now that we have discussed how to listen, I will attempt to make a list of some important jazz recordings that you might familiarize yourself with. In the interest of encouraging you to get to know recordings well I won’t give you too many options, just one or two from some of the most important artists, which means I'm leaving out most of the great albums out there.
This is also mostly limited to the "classic" recordings, which I think are a good place to start, but by all means feel free to check out more recent recordings as well. Please note that (except for pre-1950s recordings) these are albums, and it is really valuable to listen to the entire album rather than just a song or two, for the same reason that you get more out of the experience of watching an entire film than you do from watching a couple of scenes from it.
Also for the same reason it's very important to spend some of your listening time focused on the music, not doing something else with the music in the background. If you are very new to jazz, just pick one (maybe one led by someone on your instrument) to start with, they're all great. If you have done some listening, maybe there's something there you're not familiar with. In any case, the point is not to listen to everything below in a couple of months, it is to start now immersing yourself in this music to internalize it, and I'm giving you what I think are some good choices to choose from.
Louis Armstrong – Hot Fives & Sevens
Cannonball Adderley – Somethin’ Else
Count Basie – Basie Straight Ahead
Chet Baker – It Could Happen To You
Art Blakey – Moanin’
Art Blakey – A Night at Birdland
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – At Basin Street
John Coltrane – Blue Trane
John Coltrane – My Favorite Things
John Coltrane – Crescent
Miles Davis – Cookin’
Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
Miles Davis – Complete Concert 1964
Duke Ellington - Ellington Uptown
Duke Ellington - Far East Suite
Bill Evans – Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Bill Evans – Sunday at the Village Vanguard
Ella Fitzgerald – Ella in Berlin
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella and Louis
Dizzy Gillespie/Sonny Rollins/Sonny Stitt – Sunny Side Up
Dexter Gordon – Homecoming
Herbie Hancock – Maiden Voyage
Herbie Hancock – Empyrean Isles
Herbie Hancock - Headhunters
Joe Henderson - Page One
Billie Holiday – Lady in Satin
Freddie Hubbard – Hub-Tones
J.J. Johnson - Blue Trombone
Lee Konitz – Motion
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
Thelonius Monk – Monk’s Dream
Lee Morgan - Cornbread
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie – Bird and Diz
Charlie Parker – The Complete Charlie Parker on Dial
Chalier Parker With Strings
Oscar Peterson - Night Train
Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus
Sonny Rollins – A Night at the Village Vanguard
Horace Silver - Song For My Father
Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil
Art Tatum - Solo Piano
McCoy Tyner - The Real McCoy
Sarah Vaughan - Sarah Vaughan
Lester Young - Lester Young Trio
Larry Young - Unity
Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley
So happy listening, feel free to ask any of us at TISJA (or Chi-pin and Kai-ya before then) for other suggestions for listening, but I think if you do immerse yourself it will help you get the most out of TISJA and your playing!
See you soon!
Dave
Note from TIJEPA:
1. It's important to know that learning Jazz is a bit different than learning Classical or Pop music that most (local) students tend to listen to the instruments that they are playing (and only that), in these classic jazz albums those jazz greats are vocabulary initiators & style establishers, that's why we all should listen closely to them.
2. Most Classic Jazz albums on the list, you can find Introductions in Chinese on Chipin & Kaiya's Jazzsite, or in the Book "Jazz DNA" by Chi-pin Hsieh
3. TISJA (Taipei International Summer Jazz Academy, 2013 the 10th Anniversary) / The Official Site of TIJEPA
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