The 42 Greatest Jazz Albums On The Floor By My Coffee Table

People in the U.S. are really into hat­ing jazz.

Remember when a bunch of us got really cranky about that Buzzfeed “What’s the deal with jazz?” thing? (Yeah, no, I’m not gonna link to it.) Then just a couple of weeks ago on the Twitter a high-profile pro­file writer recoun­ted how Billy Bob Thornton once told her that jazz was a long con and that any­one who said they liked it was just doing a long con themselves.

That hurt my feel­ings and made me mad. The state­ment comes from a guy who, when I hung out with him, owned five dis­crete phys­ic­al cop­ies of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, a record highly informed by jazz, and not the easy kind.

If there’s ever a record that people get accused of just pre­tend­ing to like so they look cool, it’s Trout Mask Replica. So you’d think Billy Bob, or as I’m going to call him from now on out of spite, William Robert, would know bet­ter. This shit takes work, wheth­er you’re pulling the long con or not. I’ve been up to it for so long I can’t even tell the dif­fer­ence anymore.

I got into jazz for the same reas­on every oth­er white male in America in the 1960s got into jazz: so I could look like a beat­nik. I had a high school teach­er who loaned me his copy of John Coltrane’s free jazz blo­wout Ascension, and it was excit­ing to dis­cov­er that I could piss off my par­ents with a record­ing of unamp­li­fied instru­ments as eas­ily, maybe even more eas­ily, than I could with the first side of Led Zeppelin II or the title track of John Cale’s Fear. About five years later at Dover’s Show Place, after a Richard Hell and the Voidoids show there, I met gui­tar­ist Robert Quine, who really looked like a beat­nik, and who told me about Impulse acci­dent­ally press­ing up the wrong take of the piece and put­ting out the right take with a dif­fer­ent seri­al num­ber, the kind of arcana that really enhances record col­lect­ing. (The even­tu­al com­pact disc edi­tions would throw on both takes because why not, bonus track baby!)

Anyway, if you want to start a jazz col­lec­tion, you could do a lot worse than pick­ing up any one of the 42 com­pact discs roost­ing on my liv­ing room floor, near my cof­fee table. I work from home and I don’t need com­plete silence to func­tion. While our apart­ment has a study, I like to work in the liv­ing room so I can listen to my tunes on a medium-snazzy hi-fi sys­tem. I listen a lot and I’m a phys­ic­al media per­son so the space is in a con­stant cycle of tidy­ing and untidy­ing, which my part­ner some­times finds frus­trat­ing. But we can hug it out.

 

There’s no rank­ing, it’s just by whatever I picked up first. And, as always, pur­ists beware, you may be alarmed or offen­ded. Actually prob­ably not, I’m sorry.

42) Tina Brooks, Back to the Tracks (Blue Note, recor­ded 1960)

Once you got through all the MAJOR guys in bop and post bop (most hip­ster jazz afi­cion­ados of the ‘70s didn’t know from swing/big band and didn’t want to, really) you then got into the major minors or the minors. This is not to make qual­it­at­ive dis­tinc­tions as such, just to recog­nize a peck­ing order with respect to, I don’t know, either innov­a­tion or prom­in­ence. John Zorn formed the trio News For Lulu with trom­bon­ist George Lewis and gui­tar­ist Bill Frisell (hey, I just spoke with him today after hear­ing him play live!) to cel­eb­rate com­pos­i­tions by lesser-known Blue Note stal­warts like Sonny Clark (of whom it has been said, very unfor­tu­nately, “Clark’s death, at 31, was down to both alco­hol abuse and heroin depend­ency. How very jazz.”), Freddie Redd, Hank Mobley, and more. Tina Brooks, a ten­or sax guy (yes, guy; Fats Navarro was nick­named “Fat Girl” des­pite being neither fat nor a girl; jazz people, what can you do with them?) was not quite a major minor but he had a good feel for blues forms and a coher­ent sound and here he’s backed by a murderer’s row of sidemen (that’s a viable cliché, right?) includ­ing horn men Blue Mitchell and Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew, Paul fuck­ing Chambers and Art Taylor as the rhythm sec­tion. Solid!

41) Lee Konitz, Brad Meldau, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Live At Birdland (ECM 2011)

Lee’s too cool for some, or for school, or for some­thing, But he lays out acerbic but dreamy alto very gen­er­ously here. It’s like he’s tak­ing his idol Lester Young out to lunch with Wittgenstein. (That sounds pretty good, right?) Charlie and Paul are dreamy as usual.

40) Cedar Walton, Bob Berg, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins, Eastern Rebellion 2 (Ti, 1977)

Walton’s a fab­ulous post-bop pian­ist and a flat-out great writer and this is one of the nicest quar­tet dates of his I’ve man­aged to rustle up, not that I’ve been able to rustle up too many. What do you want from me. Billy Higgins is unim­peach­able as always.

39) Sonny Stitt Sits In With The Oscar Peterson Trio (Verve, 1959)

Pretty much as advertised.

38) Sounds of Liberation (Corbett Versus Dempsey, 2019)

An exuber­ant politically-resonant burn­er led by Byard Lancaster, here on alto. Funky as hell. But also cheer­ful and relaxed at times. Recorded at Columbia University in 1973 and nev­er released until now, which as a res­ult meant the revolu­tion didn’t hap­pen. Damn it.

37) Harold Land, The Fox, (Contemporary, 1958)

I saw Land, with Billy Higgins drum­ming and grin­ning, and some oth­er great sidemen, at the Jazz Standard in the early 2000s, maybe, and he blew me away. I’ve nev­er found a record of his that does the same, as admir­able as I’ve found many. You know when Chuck Berry said “I got no kick against mod­ern jazz/‘cept when they try and play it too darn fast?” Sometimes I’ll hear Harold Land and it reminds me of that. This one has the great and under-sung Monk-extrapolation pian­ist Elmo Hope on it so I need to check it again.

36) Paul Motian box set (ECM, 2013)

Six discs of Armenian Psychedelic Jazz, explor­at­ory but superbly dis­cip­lined trio workouts, advents of Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell, all anchored by a revolu­tion­ary per­cus­sion­ist who defined human­ist drum­ming. Great book­let essay by Ethan Iverson, the won­der­ful pian­ist with whom I’ve become friendly in the past year (I hope he doesn’t mind me say­ing so, and par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of what’s at least one-quarter a piss­take) and whose writ­ings con­sist­ently help me under­stand The Music better.

35) Wes Montgomery Trio (Riverside, 1959)

Took me a while to get this guy. Is he TOO taste­ful? I’m not sure. He’s not any kind of icon­o­clast but the depth and com­plex­ity of his har­mon­ic con­cep­tion isn’t com­pla­cent either. Especially on early sides such as these.

34) Dave Douglas, Uri Caine, Andrew Cyrille, Devotion (Greenleaf, 2019)

Douglas is a search­ing musi­cian whose treks don’t always hook me. This ses­sion, clearly an unusu­ally sig­ni­fic­ant one for him, pairs him with pian­ist Caine, a long­time col­lab­or­at­or, and drum­mer Cyrille, who I’d listen to play a phone book. I’ve had this record for a while, but as I heard one 20-something long­hair say to anoth­er while on line to see Lou Reed at the Capitol Theater in Passaic in 1974, re Reed’s then-new Sally Can’t Dance, “I haven’t got­ten into it yet.”

33) William Parker/In Order to Survive, Live at Shapeshifter (Aum, 2019)

I some­times have a hard time nav­ig­at­ing Parker work­ing with expan­ded song-forms or exper­i­ment­ing with jazz ora­tor­io and such. But I have no prob­lem hear­ing him blow with Rob Brown on alto, the indefatig­able Cooper-Moore on piano, and Elvin Jones inher­it­or Hamid Drake on drums.

32) Dunmall, Gibbs, Taylor, Young Landscapes (FMR, 2019)

Paul Dunmall’s a British saxist/flautist of indefatig­able energy who puts out a record about once every twenty minutes. I’ve not heard a bad one yet, although some leave me cold. This, with a bassist, viol­ist and gui­tar­ist back­ing him, is pretty intriguing.

31) Matt Mitchell, Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi, 2019)

A fab NYC scene pian­ist with a quin­tet in which the female play­ers out­num­ber the male, which is nice. Cerebral in the sense the title implies, but not dry.

30) Keith Jarrett, Arbour Zena, (ECM, 1976)

Wait, is this even jazz? Here Jarrett tri­os up with Haden and Motian with a string orches­tra behind. Because so much of the final third of his career has been devoted to impro­vising with the now-defunct Standards Trio, Jarrett’s writ­ing isn’t talked about much except by mavens. It’s good. This is a good record. It might not be jazz.

29) Houston Person with Ron Carter, Just Between Friends (High Note, 2005)

This most cer­tainly is jazz. Person, born in 1934, formed his style before Coltrane shook things up and to this day plays with a pleas­ing burr, a nice sense of fizzy intox­ic­a­tion. Ron Carter is Ron Carter. The set begins with “How Deep Is The Ocean” and con­tains “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” Get it?

28) Forde Gjerstad  with William Parker and Hamid Drake, On Reade Street (FMR, 2006)

Norwegian alto/clarinet yawper of dis­tinc­tion meets two American con­tem­por­ary giants. I don’t think I’ve actu­ally listened to this yet.

27) Steve Kuhn Trio w/ Joey Baron and Steve Swallow, To and From The Heart, (Sunnyside 2018)

Pianist Kuhn in a mood almost (but not quite) sop­or­ific­ally sweet and ton­ic. Exceptionally listenable.

26) Duke Ellington Octet, At The Rainbow Grill 1967 (Gambit, ?)

This is a bootleg that took me forever to acquire. Sounds like a bootleg too. See below.

25) Bill Evans, California Here I Come  (Verve, 1967)

I acquired this and the above Ellington live set — recor­ded on the same night! — to com­plete the inter­act­ive part of Ethan Iverson’s New Yorker art­icle in which he con­trasts Evan’s mod­al impro­visa­tions with Ellington’s  (and Paul Gonsalves’) solo­ing and vamp­ing  on the chord changes. The para­dox is that while Ellington and com­pany were play­ing for a dance crowd and Evans was play­ing for the ser­i­ous listen­ers of the Village Vanguard, Ellington’s get­ting into knot­ti­er har­mon­ic ter­rit­ory. The dif­fer­ences are fas­cin­at­ing and both per­form­ances are ter­rif­ic. Evans is easier-listening while Ellington stead­fastly answers the demands of his mar­ket at the time while stealth­ily deliv­er­ing a soph­ist­ic­a­tion he just can’t help. I ima­gine that in 1967 jazz was even fur­ther ali­en­ated from the con­tem­por­ary pop­u­lar cul­ture than it is today. Of the two artists it was prob­ably Evans who was con­sidered “hip­per” at the time.

24) Art Pepper, Live at Fat Tuesday’s (Elemental, 2005 recor­ded 1988)

After his sear­ing auto­bi­o­graphy Straight Life was pub­lished in 1979, altoist Pepper would spend the next, what, three whole years of his life (he died in 1982, aged 56) work­ing his ass off in stu­di­os and on the road; they’re still put­ting out pre­vi­ously unre­leased mater­i­al from this era. Garrulous on stage, the not-quite-clean Pepper (he claimed to have giv­en up get­ting high as such but appar­ently there was a whole lot of self-medicating going on) was an equally gen­er­ous soloist, and on this set with Al Foster on drums he goes to town on two stand­ards, one Monk, and two of his own com­pos­i­tions, which tend to the mel­an­choly even when ostens­ibly upbeat. He had great tone, great feel and a LOT to say. Check him out.

23) Keith Jarrett, Paris/London, Testament (ECM, 2009)

Jarrett described his own men­tal state pri­or to the 2008 London con­certs tran­scribed here in a beau­ti­ful inter­view with Ethan Iverson in 2009. A lot of the time when musi­cians talk out their own work it’s dif­fi­cult to frame up what they’re say­ing with what you hear. In this case, it’s all there. And yes, the music is uncom­monly emo­tion­ally dir­ect. It’s easy to rag on Jarrett because of his oft-detailed per­son­al prick­li­ness, and a lot of the time on his solo record­ings I get thrown by his seem­ing inab­il­ity to dis­tin­guish between his best ideas and his worst, but when it comes down to it he really is a geni­us of mod­ern music and his record­ing with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette are con­stant founts of pleas­ure and soul.

22) Barry Guy @ 70 (FSR 2018)

British free play­er of exquis­ite sens­it­iv­ity. This is a three disc set, live record­ing of a birth­day event as you may have inferred. So far I’ve only listened to the trio ses­sion with Marilyn Crispell on piano and Paul Lytton on bass but it’s a delight.

21) Dexter Gordon, 5 Original Albums

Less than 20 bucks at Academy and fea­tur­ing Doin’ Allright, Dexter Calling, A Swingin’ Affair, One Flight Up, and Getting’ Around. YOU CANNOT GO WRONG IF YOU ENCOUNTER THIS SET UNDER SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES.

20) Dexter Gordon Quartet, Tokyo 1975 (Elemental 2018)

On a lot of ‘70s jazz, the record­ing makes my teeth hurt a little at first. Pianos sound too bright, very nightclubby if you know what I mean. I have this prob­lem with Gordon’s small-band major-label 1978 Manhattan Symphonie, too. It’s not as pro­nounced on this exuber­ant set fea­tur­ing Kenny Drew on piano and Albert Heath on drums. But it’s there, and my ears need to adjust to it. I’ve always had this prob­lem with “Old Folks,” maybe stem­ming from the fact that for years of my act­ive alco­hol­ism my radio alarm was tuned to Phil Schapp’s Charlie Parker morn­ing show on whatever that FM sta­tion was and he’d invari­ably play the Parker-with-chorus “Old Folks” three or four times a week and it ser­i­ously, I mean, have you ever HEARD it? And then have you ever heard it while HUNG OVER? Anyway, they do “Old Folks” on here and it’s tolerable.

19) The Tal Farlow Monkey Album (Norgran, 1955)

Farlow’s long fin­gers and search­ing music­al intel­li­gence enabled him to leap incred­ible inter­vals in a single bound. But the gui­tar­ist was no shred­der. He’s fleet, clean, and SUPER FRESH. When he goes on one of his long runs and bends the notes, it’s per­fect exhilaration.

18) Art Blakey, The Jazz Messengers (Columbia 1956)

This assemblage fea­tures Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver and Doug Watkins. All of them “cats.”

17) The Max Roach Trio, Featuring The Legendary Hassan (Atlantic 1965)

Hassan Ali was this hot pian­ist out of Philly who was big on Elmo Hope, who was big on Thelonious Monk. (One of the tunes here is called “Hope So Elmo.”) Hassan and Hope were well-versed in the strangely pleas­ing dis­son­ances Monk advanced, and Hassan tricked these up with ever wack­i­er and ever-changing time sig­na­tures. Challenging time sig­na­tures were among drum­mer Max Roach’s many breads and but­ters so it is apt that Hassan’s only offi­cial record­ing was made pos­sible and led by Roach. Art Davis is the bassist.

16) Walter Bishop Jr. Trio, Speak Low (Venus 1993)

The plain truth is I got this because I moment­ar­ily mixed up Walter Bishop, Jr., with Walter Davis, Jr., whose Scorpio Rising is one of my favor­ite latter-day post-bop piano trio thangs and Davis didn’t record solo too often. Anyway. This is pretty good too. More lush than tricky (Davis is equally both) but very pleasing.

15) Randy Weston Trio Plus Cecil Payne (Fresh Sound com­pil­a­tion 2012)

Weston is a def­in­ite and abso­lute great but in terms of my atten­tion has always stayed in the “sub­jects for fur­ther research” cat­egory. Here you get sol­id unfussy bop of uni­form excel­lence, but noth­ing that will imme­di­ately blow your mind.

14) The John Coltrane Quartet, The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions (Impulse, 1961/1995)

Pretty much as advertised.

13) Art Blakey, Indestructible (Blue Note, 1964)

He does look badass on that cov­er, with the cigar­ette dangling from his mouth. He was also into heroin, too, appar­ently. That stuff’ll kill you. But lung can­cer got him first, at 71, not young exactly but too young to die, espe­cially these days. Where was I? Oh yeah. Despite being into heroin I’ve nev­er heard a recor­ded instance of Blakey being inat­tent­ive. And on this record the mes­sen­gers are Lee Morgan, less than a dec­ade away from get­ting his ass shot by his com­mon law wife in front of a bar where he was gig­ging, “how very jazz,” Wayne Shorter, who’s still with us, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, and Reggie Workman. You know what to do.

12) Count Basie, April in Paris (Verve, 1958)

“An early influ­ence and still some­thing to always answer to the ques­tion, ”Who do I like as a piano play­er:” Count Basie. That’s the final arbit­er of how to play two notes, the dis­tance between them and the volume of them is per­fect. I can’t hold myself to that stand­ard, but I can appre­ci­ate it.” — Carla Bley, in an inter­view with, yes, Ethan Iverson

11) The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume One (Blue Note, 1951)

One of the things that frus­trates a grow­ing jazzbo is when you’re read­ing some­hing about some artist or oth­er that tells you that what you’re listen­ing to right now isn’t that artist’s REAL STUFF. I remem­ber years ago get­ting a reis­sue of Bill Evans’ Trio ’65 and the whole gist of the liner notes was that Chuck Israels was no Scott La Faro. HEY LINER NOTE WRITER DUDE, CHUCK ISRAELS IS STILL ALIVE EVEN AS I WRITE THIS. DO YOU THINK HE DOESN’T KNOW HE WAS NO SCOTT LA FARO? DO YOU THINK HE DOESN’T HAVE FEELINGS? Anyway, you get a lot of “you’ll nev­er hear the good shit” when read­ing about Bud Powell. All the records were made after he star­ted fall­ing apart, etc. Nevertheless, this lives up to its title in my book.

10) Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans, You Know What I Mean? (Riverside, 1961)

“Everybody Digs Bill Evans” was the state­ment used for an album title of the pianist’s, but the pro­clam­a­tion was argu­ably as true or more so for Cannonball, a delight­ful bluesy play­er and by most accounts a sol­id guy. Not a chal­len­ging clas­sic, just a classic.

9) Paul Bley, Footloose (Savoy, 1960)

If you have a hard time get­ting into Ornette Coleman, one good way to try is by listen­ing to his stuff inter­preted by oth­er play­ers. This album, with Bley backed by Steve Swallow and the mag­ni­fi­cent Pete LaRoca on drums, kicks off with a speedy ver­sion of Ornette’s “When Will The Blues Leave?” which may or may not help with con­ver­sion. The rest of the record is split between Paul and Carla’s tunes. This is def­in­itely an under­ap­pre­ci­ated land­mark of 20^th cen­tury piano jazz.

8) Art Taylor, AT’s Delight (Blue Note, 1960)

Taylor, a drum­mer who was Present At The Creation of many land­mark American Jazz Moments, also wrote, in 1977, an incred­ible book called Notes and Tones. It is made up of inter­views in which Taylor invari­ably asks what is the situ­ation of the black jazz musi­cian today, and the inter­viewee invari­ably responds that the situ­ation of the black jazz musi­cian today is FUCKED UP. You really can’t say it enough. Anyway. This is one of his few records as lead­er and it’s a super friendly bop and post-bop ses­sion (kick­off track: Coltrane’s “Syeeda’s Song Flute,” one of his hap­pi­est tunes) fea­tur­ing Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers.

7) The Lucky Thompson Quartet, Lucky Strike (Prestige 1964)

Man, this cat is smooth. His tone on either sop­rano or ten­or can melt you into a puddle. Hank Jones, Richard Davis and Connie Kay back him up, so climb on board all you Astral Weeks fans.

6) Sonny Rollins, The Bridge (RCA, 1962)

Every list of the greatest jazz albums ever needs at least one Sonny Rollins record on it. Good thing this was on my floor then. Although I prefer East Broadway Run Down.

5) Oscar Peterson, My Favorite Instrument (Verve, 1968)

It’s the piano! Who’d have guessed?

4) Duke Ellington and Ray Brown, This One’s For Blanton (Pablo, 1975)

Not quite the ulti­mate in jazzbo eso­ter­ica but not noth­ing in that depart­ment either. The back­ground: In 1939 and 1940, Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton recor­ded some piano/double bass duets that were the first com­mer­cially released items of such jazz inter­play ever. And as such genu­inely ground­break­ing. Blanton was a bassist of excep­tion­al sens­it­iv­ity, already an innov­at­or while barely out of his teens. He died in 1942, at only 23 years of age, of tuber­cu­los­is. (How very not jazz, right?) In 1973, in Las Vegas yet, Duke and vet­er­an bassist Ray Brown (stal­wart of Oscar Peterson, stal­wart and ex-husband of Ella Fitzgerald) laid down this trib­ute. It is lovely.

3) Bill Evans, Some Other Time (Resonance, 2017/1968)

This is one of two newly dis­covered and spif­fily mastered Resonance releases chron­ic­ling an Evans trio with long­time col­lab Eddie Gomez on bass and not-for-long mem­ber Jack De Johnette on drums. In his first trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, Evans kept Motian in line with his con­cep­tion by encour­aging him to use brushes. Motian became a low-key co-conspirator with La Faro’s revolu­tion­ary con­cep­tion of time, while his more anarch­ic instincts were kept in check. I don’t know much about Marty Morell (although—holy shit!—I just found out that Evans cov­ers my favor­ite Bobbie Gentry song, “Morning Glory,” on a Tokyo live album with Gomez and Morell) and I haven’t heard his one record with the gen­i­al Shelly Manne. With Philly Joe Jones, Evans swung. Jack DeJohnette, a def­in­ite hit­ter who would later become a huge Levon Helm fan, was a dif­fer­ent pro­pos­i­tion from any of these drum­mers, and he imbues these ses­sion with a drive that stands out without ever becom­ing over­stated. And you can sense how this stretches Evans even as he sticks largely to a rep­er­toire of reli­able standards.

2) McCoy Tyner, Today and Tomorrow (Impulse, 1963)

Alternating between trio cuts with Jimmy Garrison and Albert Heath and a quin­tet with three horns, includ­ing that of Thad Jones, out front, this is an ideal way to get to know Tyner in the absence of Coltrane. McCoy still walks among us, by the way.

1) Bill Evans, Another Time (Resonance 2016/1968)

See num­ber three. More of the same only live instead of stu­dio. BUT an almost com­pletely dif­fer­ent playl­ist, includ­ing “Alfie.”