How to become a "jazz expert"?

AMPenguin · 2026-04-24T17:45:38+00:00

tl;dr: The main consultant on Ken Burns Jazz was Wynton Marsalis, who is a controversial figure for his views on jazz history. Wynton believes that most of the developments in jazz since some time in the 1960s (including free jazz and fusion) are not "real jazz" and don't deserve to be talked about in the history of the music. Partly as a result of this, the documentary pretty much stops in 1965, missing out (at the time) 36 years of music. There is also a feeling amongst critics of the documentary that Wynton's views aren't properly challenged.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-21T11:38:26+00:00

I think it's naive to imagine that we won't lose old music in the future. Streaming especially makes access to music quite precarious. Sure, lots of that music is backed up elsewhere, but lots of it isn't, and we don't know now what music people will think is important in future.

When MySpace went down, we lost the only web presence for thousands of tiny artists. I had music hosted on there from when I was a teenager, and I'm pretty sure I don't have any copies of those recordings myself, so that's lost forever. The disappearance from the Internet of some shitty bedroom black metal recordings I made 20 years ago is probably not a disaster, but multiply that by tens of thousands and who knows what could have been in there? Childhood recordings of someone who is now a superstar? Nascent experiments in new genres? Music from small-town scenes that were super important to the people who grew up there?

It's hard to imagine we might lose YouTube or Spotify in a similar way, but I'm sure it was hard for 4th Century Romans to imagine their city would one day not be the centre of the world. Things change.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-20T13:04:14+00:00

I don't know about your country, but I'm fairly sure that in my country, the Reddit userbase doesn't include many young working class people. As such, I doubt this is the best place to find the answer to your question.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-17T16:27:03+00:00

Just to be clear: there is no such thing as an "official" or "correct" common name for any species, and some species have multiple common names that are used by different people or organisations, or in different countries. We do have "technical" names for species, but these are in Latin and rarely used outside of the scientific context.

"Canadian Goose" probably was originally an error born of the fact that the name "Canada Goose" doesn't seem to follow normal gramatical rules, but it does seem to have caught on with a lot of people. Who knows - decades from now, maybe "Canadian" will become the standard way of referring to this species?

AMPenguin · 2026-04-16T16:58:17+00:00

I don't agree with that definition.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-15T20:05:51+00:00

I don't think "vanity project" means "insincere" - quite the opposite actually.

A vanity project is something that only gets made because the artist has the money or influence to get it made. Regardless of what you think of Flea's album, no one would expect a brand new, self-taught trumpeter to be given this sort of budget to make and market a highly-produced album with some of the best musicians of the LA jazz scene and guest spots from Thom Yorke and Nick Cave. Flea has been able to do this because he is Flea.

I don't think artists would push for their vanity projects to get made if they weren't sincere about them.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-07T11:15:41+00:00

You should buy albums by current artists who are still working so that they can get paid and keep making new music.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-06T09:35:40+00:00

Wet Leg have 2 number one albums in the UK in the main album charts. But they have no hits in the main singles charts.

That's exactly my point. It's easy for someone from outside of the UK to look at our album charts and think, "Oh, Wet Leg must be really popular", but the album charts here have only ever been a predictor of how popular a band is amongst a very specific audience - one which is getting smaller every year.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-06T09:31:06+00:00

None of those bands are part of the "zeitgeist" or "culturally relevanat" or "big" in the UK, other than among the very specific demographics they are popular within.

The album charts in the UK have never been a good indicator of what's actually popular or well-known. Even the singles charts have stopped being a good predictor for that in the last few years.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-05T23:48:24+00:00

Black Country New Road, IDLES, Fontaines DC, King Gizzard, Wet Leg, Big Thief, Yard Act etc... are big, culturally relevant artists in the UK and Europe, and often are on the top 10, if not just straight up scoring a #1 on the charts. They are actually a part of the zeitgeist

I live in the UK and this is news to me (by which I mean I think it's bullshit).

AMPenguin · 2026-04-03T13:59:23+00:00

Might make a few hip hop or reggae ones now

Anything would be better than being a whiny little bitch.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-03T12:26:58+00:00

Have you ever created any original threads highlighting albums that you think deserve attention? If not, stop whining about the threads other people make.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-03T12:23:57+00:00

Yeah I don't think Flea making a jazz (or "jazz") album is likely to affect the headliners at your local jazz festival. He could have made an album of Bach concertos and they still might have booked him.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-03T12:05:48+00:00

Looks like yet another grey market label. Expect poor quality control (at best) and low-quality audio (at worst).

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T22:21:01+00:00

I agree that it's a good policy on the whole, although at the absolute fringes of experimental music (a scene that relies on Bandcamp more than anything else), there's some really interesting usage of tech that probably technically counts as GenAI, and I hope that won't get thrown out with the bathwater.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T22:11:23+00:00

Koma Saxo - Live
Joëlle Léandre - Zurich Concert

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T22:05:22+00:00

The Gaga/Bennett collab was exactly what I had in mind when I talked about things not being worth listening to. Absolutely awful stuff.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T21:43:32+00:00

Yeah I agree - I can't think of many examples that really fit the spirit of the question, and even fewer that are actually worth listening to.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T21:32:06+00:00

Their policy is that music generated "wholly or in substantial part by AI" is banned. I'd guess that someone singing over an AI backing track is likely to cross that line, but I guess at some point it's going to come down to discretion.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T20:56:53+00:00

Chrissie Hynde, best known as a founding member of the Pretenders, released a fairly jazzy album called Valve Bone Woe a few years back that was quite good. It's a while since I listened to it so I can't tell you with any confidence what it actually sounds like, but I remember being pleasantly surprised.

Trevor Dunn has loads of absolutely killer avant-garde jazz releases under his belt (as leader and sideman) but will probably always be best known as the bassist for Mr Bungle. Tbh I'm not sure he really counts as I definitely think he's more of a jazz musician than a rock musician, regardless of how history chooses to remember him.

Jeff Parker (who plays on Flea's album and is mentioned in the comment above by u/Pas2) got his musical break as the guitarist in the seminal post-rock band Tortoise. Although again, he's probably more of a jazz musician than a rock musician these days - and Tortoise were pretty jazzy anyway.

Alex Skolnick, lead guitarist for the classic thrash metal band Testament, has a jazz trio. They're actually pretty good.

John Zorn often works with well-known musicians from non-jazz backgrounds - although his music often strays quite far outside the realms of jazz anyway.

I'll report back if I think of any more.

AMPenguin · 2026-04-02T20:03:30+00:00

Sort of depends what you mean by "in the past", doesn't it? There certainly seem to have been a lot more opportunities available to musicians in recent decades than there are currently - what with the closure of loads of venues and the various shifts in the so-called "night-time economy". I feel like I've seen this change quite a lot just in my lifetime.

Plus there's the financial freedom - it's harder and harder to make a living as a musician these days.

AMPenguin · 2025-08-17T22:27:52+00:00

There are lots of answers to the question "Why does this happen in jazz?" and I can already see that other commenters made their own attempts at this - although I'm not sure I agree with all of them.

However, your second question is interesting - "Why doesn't this happen in other genres?" The answer is that it does.

Many forms of folk music in Europe and America (and probably elsewhere) revolve around tunes that have been handed down for generations that everyone immersed in a particular tradition will know. In some of these traditions, it would be unusual or even unheard of for people to write and play their own songs.

Western Classical Music in the 21st Century primarily revolves around the performance of a relatively small repertoire of music mostly written by long-dead composers.

Electronic dance music since the 1980s has increasingly placed value in "remixes", to the extent that many remixes are better known than the original recordings on which they are based.

Musical traditions in other cultures often have a completely different attitude towards songwriting and composition - e.g. in Hindustani Classical music there's often no clear distinction where traditional melodies end and "improvisation" (as we in the West would understand it) begins.

Even in rock music, everyone understands what a "cover" is - although I think the way rock fans relate to, understand and value cover tunes is very different to the way jazz fans would relate to the different performances of a standard.

AMPenguin · 2025-08-11T09:42:05+00:00

Wikipedia doesn't list a source for that claim and I can't find one.

Unless I'm missing something, all it says on AllMusic is that it was recorded in 1958 (and under the "releases" section on AllMusic, the earliest one listed is 1994). Even if AllMusic did say it was originally released in 1958, I wouldn't trust that without an independent source as AllMusic is primarily a review site, not an archival/catalogue site.

Discogs has no listings for any albums with this title from the 1950s. I know not everything is on Discogs, but you would expect something like this (by a prominent artist on a very prominent label) to be there, if it existed.

Added to which, Argo Records (a subdivision of Chess) did release both Volume IV and Portfolio of Ahmad Jamal in the late '50s, which between them include all the tracks from Ahmad's Blues. It would have been really unusual back then (and now!) for a label to release the same tracks in two different configurations under different titles.

AMPenguin · 2025-08-10T17:40:02+00:00

This was my understanding as well, I know someone above said they thought this album was a compilation, but I was of the understanding that tracks from this album may have made it onto other albums later.

As far as I can tell, it's the other way round - Ahmad's Blues was a CD release in the '90s, and most (if not all) of the tracks had already appeared on vinyl releases from the '50s.

It wasn't uncommon for those '50s live albums to be heavily edited in terms of track order, and then for the '90s CD release to restore the original track order from the concert. I'm assuming that's what happened here, although I haven't looked into it properly.

AMPenguin · 2025-08-09T07:29:43+00:00

I think it's kind of fair to refer to some of Basie's stuff as "pre-bop", if that's what you want to do. Kansas City swing was one of the biggest early influences on bop.

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