B5Erik

Some of the greatest musicians ever to pick up an instrument were Jazz musicians. Some of the greatest composers and arrangers to ever put pen to paper to write music were Jazz musicians. Some of the best bands ever were Jazz bands.

And yet Jazz is, for 98% of the population, a forgotten art form. A relic of the past. And that's a shame, because there was so much amazing music put out by Jazz musicians.

I grew up listening to Jazz in the 70's, and got to see many legends live (Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, etc), and I can honestly say that the power and energy coming from a Jazz Big Band was every bit the equal of a great Hard Rock or old school Heavy Metal band. Musically, it was incredibly exciting stuff.

Like this, for example... This is a track written by Don Menza (father of the late Nick Menza from Megadeth). This track is a great example of how Big Band Jazz kept moving with the times and kept up with Rock and Roll when it came to that musical energy. And this track has a ton of great stuff going on - a lot of musical sophistication to go with the power and energy.


That band of Buddy's was simply amazing, as it always was from the time he re-started his Big Band in 1966 until his last show in 1986. He kept bringing in young players from Berklee in Boston and from Texas. The average age for his band in the 70's was about 24. Here he has Pat LaBarbera on lead sax. His first chair sax position was always filled by amazing players, from Don Menza, to Pat LaBarbera, to the late Steve Marcus, he always had a phenomenal sax player to take the solos. And the rest of his band was incredibly hot, too. The best young players available. If they weren't the best, they didn't last long in Buddy's band.

And this is one of Buddy's signature songs. A medley of musical themes from West Side Story given a Jazzy spin. Great stuff!


But Buddy wasn't the only one who had great bands...

B5Erik

Another great band was Woody Herman's Thundering Herd. Woody was actually a big star in the late 30's to the late 40's, and had a ton of Top 20 hits, including a #1.

This is something from his Grammy winning album from 1973, Giant Steps. This is a pretty damned hot band! (I got to see Woody's band live at least 5 times, and they were always great!)

morriscroy

(As a hypothetical).

In the year 2100, how much 20th century music will be remembered by the general public? (ie. Besides music historians).

B5Erik

The way things are going now? A ton of it!

Music from the 20th Century is more popular today than current music is. Modern music has no staying power.


But the most artistically powerful/sophisticated music from the 20th Century is fading. Go figure. Music from centuries past is still being played and enjoyed today (Classical), so it's not unreasonable to expect music with strong artistic merit to hold up for centuries as well.

morriscroy

What I never quite understood, was how did something like Bach survive in the popular culture for several hundred years into the 21st century. After he passed away, many generations had to have kept his music either in-print (via sheet music) and/or played frequently. Otherwise Bach's music would have faded away with time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recept...Bach%27s_music

B5Erik

Absolutely the sheet music and continued performances of pieces of music that were considered to be outstanding kept it alive. People still wanted to hear good music. And it was harder to hear music back then - incredibly hard. But that music survived - and still thrives today!

I'd love to see Jazz end up the same way, but in the modern era it isn't getting much attention at all (relatively speaking). Most people are not exposed to it and know nothing about it.

andicus

I love jazz, though I'm more of a piano/bass/drums trio fan.

Vince Guaraldi
Ray Bryant
Oscar Peterson
Bill Evans

I do like non-trio stuff, as well. Brubeck and Miles Davis are up there, certainly.

Here's the Vince Guaraldi Trio with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete. I've probably posted this on the forum, before, but I'm old and tend to repeat myself


Of course, all my jazz piano heroes have passed on, but for living performers, I really enjoy a guy named Steve Ash.

B5Erik

I like trios a lot, as well as combos, but, man, for me the Big Bands topped them all. The power and energy of a Big Band was like the Heavy Metal of Jazz. When you had a Big Band wailing it was like a force of nature. And the thing about Big Bands is that they could tone it down and play some really cool stuff, too. They had a wide range of musical possibilities, and most bands took advantage of that.

B5Erik

That's really good. Really good.

rbrown498

I saw Buddy Rich's band when I was in junior high school, and I saw Lionel Hampton's band in college. Both were great, although I was a bit too young to fully appreciate Buddy Rich.

And in the trio department, I would guess that very few people remember that comedian Dudley Moore was an excellent musician:

B5Erik

I'm a big fan of Don Menza. Great composer and arranger, but also a great sax player...

Nick Danger

Vivaldi was forgotten for almost 200 years, until someone found his music in an archive in 1926. It makes me wonder how many other masters have been forgotten and their sheet music discarded.

Josh-da-man

To me, it is sort of fascinating to think about how many works of art (music, literature, painting, sculpture) have been lost over the ages. How many Beethovens and DaVincis and Shakespeares have been forgotten by history, their works lost to time. Paintings and manuscripts burned in fires, discarded, lost in floods, stolen or vandalized.

On a related note, I also wonder how much of twentieth century pop culture will survive the centuries. We have, over the past century, churned out such a massive deluge of pop culture -- songs and movies and tv episodes and novels and comic books -- that it's staggering. There's no way that a single person, over a single lifetime, could experience even a fraction of a percent of this stuff.

And I wonder how many of our icons today will survive the centuries... which twentieth century movies will still be watched two or three centuries from now? How many novels published over the past century will still be read? How many albums will still be listened to?

I have little doubt that most, if not all, of this stuff will continue to exist in some form -- even when the copyrights expire -- but will anybody care? I could see some things, like the Beatles and Bob Marley and The Godfather and 2001 becoming timeless classics like Shakespeare or Bach, but what about Harry Potter and Stephen King and Star Wars? Will people still be reading The Stand centuries from now? The boy from 4 Privet Drive?

andicus

We saw the Glenn Miller Orchestra, quite a few years ago, at a local university. That was quite the show!

Regarding trios and quartets, and sometimes even quintets (actually, I see a septet scheduled), there's a live stream, every night, of two clubs in NYC. Small's and The Mezzrow. Both very intimate clubs, which I'd love to visit, someday.

https://www.smallslive.com/

Each club has a couple of shows a night.

I don't remember if you have to register to watch, but if you do, it's free. You only have to pay if you want to watch archived shows, and that is just based on a donation, which I don't believe has a set amount.

Once I discovered Steve Ash, on YouTube, I was looking for upcoming live shows and came across the above. It's very cool to be able to just put a live jazz stream up.

Nick Danger

It's popular culture, and I expect it to evaporate. How many 19th century songs do you know? Camptown Races and Jimmy Crack Corn made it, but thousands are forgotten. Authors? Jane Austen at one end of the century and Bram Stoker at the other, and maybe fifty in between. Plays? I've seen The Importance of Being Earnest and The Pirates of Penzance, and that's all I can think of. I've seen one opera.

I've said here before that I expect Stephen King to be read as much in a hundred years as Bulwer-Lytton is read today.

This is coming from someone who likes old music and books. Just yesterday I was listening to a 1940s recording of Woody Guthrie singing Gypsy Davy, a song which is hundreds of years old.

B5Erik

Here's the thing - there were no recordings of anything prior to the late 1920's. No way to watch or listen to popular entertainment from the past.

NOW? I've got hundreds of old movies from the 30's through the 70's on DVD and Blu Ray, and hundreds of music recordings from the 30's through the 70's on CD. That wasn't possible before.

Granted, there are way too many movies and songs for any one person to listen to all of them, but I would think that key works would last. Or should.

kd5

I've liked jazz since the 70's but my preferences leaned more toward progressive jazz (fusion): Brand X, Jean-Luc Ponty, Jerry Goodman, John Goodsall, Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Tom Scott & the LA Express, Passport, Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Terje Rypdal, just to name a few. I collected my favorite vinyl from all of them and more (still have them). There aren't too many people out there making music like that anymore, at least none that I'm familiar with.

Nick Danger

I'm not a big fan of jazz. I have a handful of albums I like, but out of the over 100 jazz CDs I inherited from my father, I don't think I ever listened to 20%.

slop101

Reading the thread title, I thought you were talking about the "Brown Acid" series from Riding Easy Records, who have unearth hundreds of KILLER hard rock bands/songs, mostly from the late '60s through the '70s, that were lost to time, be it due to never getting proper record contracts and/or radio play, and just sort of disappearing, leaving behind some amazing heavy rock songs that almost no one has heard.

Here's the first volume (out of 15), and they're honestly, all great, that is, if you're into heavy '70s stoner/psychedelic rock, but really, who isn't?

https://ridingeasyrecords.bandcamp.c...the-first-trip

B5Erik

This is a great re-interpretation of (even then) an old standard. It starts off slow and mellow, and becomes something really cool. Great dynamics, and some fantastic flute playing. Great stuff...

devilshalo

I got to see Buddy Rich just prior to his death when he was playing showcases at Disneyland.

I had a few Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers CDs. And I had more modern CDs of Chick Corea, Tom Scott, Dave Grusin, Branford Marsalis, etc.

ViewAskewbian

Any of you ever see the Ken Burns doc Jazz. It's one of the things I say changed my musical direction and opened me up to all this amazing stuff I probably wouldn't have discovered if I hadn't had pulled that flick from our local library.
Afterwards, I started collecting the CDs from the series that were retrospectives on most of the featured musicians. I was hooked.

Toby Dramit

Picked up the double album MOV version of Kind Of Blue and the Acoustic Sounds Series version of A Love Supreme on vinyl recently, along with a 1959 Fontana vinyl single of Dave Brubeck's Take Five (with Blue Rondo A La Turk on the B side). Looking to add some Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Art Pepper, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Herbie Mann, among others, on vinyl as well. Love the late 50s thru mid-60s jazz era.

B5Erik

Yeah, I saw Buddy Rich there at least twice (the last time in '85 if I remember right). I also saw him at the San Diego Zoo, playing their amphitheater. The place was packed, and his set was phenomenal!

I miss the days when Jazz bands would play the Carnation Bandstand! So much fun!

Toby Dramit

Reviving this thread to present the legendary Herbie Hancock, with Christian McBride and Karriem Riggins, performing Watermelon Man on Spectacle: Elvis Costello with ...