Like any good and true ‘lover of music’, I had to eventually pay my pittance to jazz music. Where to start though? Its history is impossibly immense, with no hope of simply dipping one’s toes within - even the shallows are as vast as a continental shelf to the scene’s endless oceans. Acid and nu-jazz have provided me a few backdoor avenues, though only delayed the inevitable proper step into the world of swing, blues, bebop, Afro-Cuban, bossa-nova, smooth, cool, free, and a zillion others, I’m sure (and you thought electronic music could get convoluted in its genre demarcations). A ‘best of’ collection seemed an appropriate starting point, but how does one differentiate the soulless corporate cash-grab compilations from the earnest sets curated by authorative historians? Packaging is usually a good indicator of quality, hence why I impulsively sprung for a 4CD box-set celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Verve Records sitting in a used shop – the box has a nifty, faux-vinyl texture to it.
This, of course, means I must now write four reviews of jazz music. No, there’s no avoiding it, no loopholes in my arbitrary rules I can exploit. I’ve written reviews for Every. Single. Disc. of box-sets that include Neil Young, Pete Namlook & Klaus Schulze, Pete Namlook tributes, plus two centered around video game music. It’s only appropriate and decent that I afford jazz music the same prestige (shut up, Goa Trance – Psychedelic Flashbacks, you’re irrelevant to this discussion).
Think there’s not enough material to cover here? Please. I could easily spend four reviews discussing the players involved on CD1 alone, though most of it would be dry regurgitation of historical talking points. I have practically no intimate knowledge of such musicians like Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Illinois Jacquet, or Machito & His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. I do recognize some names here though, like Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Nat King Cole, and the ever-famous cheek-puff maestro Dizzy Gillespie, but that’s through sheer cultural osmosis. I can tell you how these guys were influential in the development of jazz music, but not why it’s significant with any sort of clairvoyance on my part.
Nay, the most I can offer here is detailing the ‘feels’ such music gives me, and yeah, CD1, I feels ya’. The disc covers the first ten years of Verve’s history (technically not even Verve yet, but I’ll get to that later), when jazz was moving on from swing and into its bop era. For the most part, I quite like this era, what with its brisk rhythms and free-wheelin’ solos (soundtracking cartoons of the time doesn’t hurt either). There’s an energy and zest for performing to the best of one’s abilities captured with these recordings, a chunk of which are live as performed in concert halls. Even the slower, bluesy numbers have enough soul in them I can’t help but hang on each note. Add in that authentically crap, crusty, ripped-from-records quality, and it feels like I’m transported to another time and place.
ACE TRACKS:
Oscar Peterson Trio - Tenderly
Dizzy Gillespie & Stan Getz - It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)
Johnny Hodges - Jeep’s Blues
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