Chekhov’s Mistess

You Just Can’t Do This: On David Remnick’s 100 Essential Jazz albums

Not successfully anyway. David Remnick at the New Yorker tries to put together a list of the 100 Essential Jazz Albums. His preface is pretty much all admission that it’s a futile exercise, that 100 albums isn’t enough and that the list is narrowly focused on past masters. That’s not to say his list is bad; in fact it’s broadly representative of my jazz collection (a paltry 200 or so jazz albums!) and probably most jazz fans out there.

The big problem with a list like this is that it defies the very idea of jazz. Jazz takes a familiar room and turns it inside out, explores its four walls and seeps through the corners. In short, it’s about exploration (firmly rooted, but exploration nonetheless). Remnick says the list is more for the uninitiated than anyone, but for those people a list of 100 is useless because they’re better off being fed only 5 or 6 things to get excited about and the rest is exploration (yet try to list only 5 albums!).

I found my way through jazz by finding someone I liked then finding albums by people on the first person’s album and so on (this is easy to do in jazz because there’s a lot of cross-over). Sure that leaves a lot of room for mistakes. I listened to David Sanborn in the eighties. I seem to recall Sonny Rollins doing some pretty bad eighties music too, Michael Franks, Stanley Jordan, Spyro Gyra, Jeff Lorber Fusion (with Kenny *G*orlick) and so on, but I think maybe going through all that led me to find the good stuff naturally.

At the time I started listening to jazz in the late 70s I didn’t have access to jazz clubs as I do now (for all the good they do me), but in the eighties when the CD started coming out there were a lot of used CD stores popping up that let you sit and listen to whatever you wanted, not the 30 seconds you get online now. I spent a lot of time in those places. There wasn’t as much released on CD then, but enough of the older catalogs and of course there was Wynton Marsalis who is responsible for my introduction to jazz more than anyone (I met his father, the patriarch of the New Orleans Marsalis family briefly at the Iridium once and I was so excited I could only mumble something incoherent).

But in particular, there are essentials and there are essentials. In the eighties I couldn’t stand “Bitches Brew” or “Ascension” and now I love them, but there’s no way I’d put those albums, as Remnick has, on a list for the uninitiated or even call them essential, at least in the context of his list. Lastly though, even through Remnick says that he’s not trying to be representative of newer musicians he should be. While compositionally I’d argue that jazz hasn’t progressed much in the last decade or longer there are a lot of great musicians playing their hearts out whould should be recognized and Remnick only throws out one bone there, listing Joshua Redman’s 1995 Village Vanguard album.

So what are my essential 5 or 6 jazz albums? I could pick pretty much anything from Mingus, Miles or Monk, Coletrane, Ellington….da da da, but that doesn’t mean much. I think Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert” (on Remnick’s list) got me really excited when I first heard it and still does. Charlie Haden’s “In Montreal with Egberto Gismonti”; Ellington’s “Latin American Suite” is hardly representative, but it’s exciting. I’d have to have Mingus on my list, but my collection has gotten so mixed between Mingus’s albums and The Mingus Big Band’s (also formed as the Mingus Dynasty or the Mingus Orchestra who, under the guidance of Mingus’s widow, keep all of Mingus’s compositions alive), but maybe “Blues and Roots” would win out just a bit over the rousing opening of “Better Git Hit In Your Soul” on the “Mingus Ah Um” album. I guess it really is useless to try to narrow this down to just a few because I haven’t even gotten to the current (and Remnick only lists one album in a hundred from this decade) stuff that must be a part of this.

But of course you see, the uninitiated for me happens to be four years old so in real life outside of this blog, my task has even finer constraints than the “essential.” My guy knows Coletrane’s “Giant Steps” pretty well (and the way he says “this is jaaazzz” when he hears it is just awesome), but has no interest in the likes of the insistent rhythms of Haden or cerebral Jarrett. He’s not even ready for “Kind of Blue” but I try out all sorts of things (not just jazz, but every kind of music) and see what I can get him accidentally excited in. This sort of exercise takes you right down to what’s important in jazz, or in any music: What moves you.

The picture above is of the inimitable Nina Simone.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 16, 2008
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

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