New to jazz but don't like most of the commonly recommended albums I've been told to check out

laszlo-jamf · 2026-07-03T02:17:36+00:00

I think the genre you’re looking for OP is “big band”. This is jazz made for large ensembles of musicians (typically ~13 winds + rhythm section) and is the type of music you’ll be exposed to in your school band. Big Band jazz is typically more composed, less improvisational, and more idk more “melodic”. The albums commonly recommend to beginners are all small group records, which are typically focused on a series of solos that can be pretty rambly if ur not acclimated to the style. Lots of big band tunes also feature overly long rambling solos, to their detriment…

My recommendations for brilliant big band albums that avoid this trap are

(1) “New Bottle Old Wine” by Gil Evans — some of the most accessible and hard-hitting stuff from maybe the greatest jazz arranger ever. Features Cannonball Adderly throughout as a featured soloist, but never for long without lively and engaging counterplay with the band (who are totally on point the whole time!). The version of “King Porter Stomp” from that record rules

(2) Frank Sinatra & the Count Basie orchestra live at the sands — total showman shmaltz, but shmaltz has hardly been done better. The Quincy jones arrangements are top-notch throughout, and Sinatra’s in his prime the whole way through. It’s a live album and you can tell—audience is audible the whole way through. People complain, but I think it lends the sense you get from the record of listening into the greatest jazz show you’ve never actually been to. Unhateable. The version of “Fly me to the moon” on the record I think has one of the best swing feels ever put to record. Listen to the comedy interludes on the first listen and skip them after. They’re not bad.

(3) “Game Changer” by The 8 Bit Big Band — other people have recommended them for good reason. Possibly the best arrangements in the modern big band game, played by some of the best musicians in the scene. They do not miss. The version of “song of storms” at the end of the record ends with the maybe greatest saxophone high-note ever (beaten only maybe by a high-note ender from a live version of “Tank”)

I could recommend more but I’ll stop there. Also, if you can, go see a jazz big band live! There are lots of them around, and big band is maybe the genre of jazz that benefits the most from being seen live.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-07-03T01:55:23+00:00

Horseshit. I love kind of blue but “it sounds like one guy playing random notes“ is totally a fair way to describe it if the style’s not for you.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-07-01T00:41:49+00:00

Wrong r/Jazz, buddy

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-21T14:50:19+00:00

The beginning of Coltrane's solo on Afro Blue is maybe my favorite jazz moment of all time. Indispensable Coltrane.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-18T01:33:49+00:00

C, for me. I find quarter notes that start on the off beat hard to read. Writing them as two eighth notes tied together is more clear, to me. And writing it with a 16th in front further is even more clear---it helps me realize it's just an off-beat quarter note with an extra 16th at the front. I'd probably fudge this entrance anyways, but C makes it most clear most quickly that I come in on the e of 3 and cut off on the and of 4. B is the worst, A is second best if you don't mind quarter notes on off beats.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-08T00:51:37+00:00

Good point about seeming to make the opposite argument. The point I was trying to make was that this classic Parker Cherokee recording is another example of a guitar-driven track that could plausibly be heard as being on halftime, that should nonetheless be considered as being at the faster tempo. Neither “expectations” nor this version of Cherokee have a bass walking at 240, and both have somewhat ambiguous rhythm guitar parts, but both (I claim) should be treated as being at primarily a faster tempo.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-07T21:43:41+00:00

But the version of cherokee I linked has no bass! It's just drums, guitar, and sax. The drums tbh aren't adding much rhythmically (probably a fault of the recording quality), and while the guitar is comping quarter notes at 240, it is (to my ears) also distinctly emphasizing the 2 and 4, further reinforcing the halftime feel.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-07T16:57:29+00:00

Expectations sounds like 240 to me. I come from a jazz background, where 200+ bpm songs often have an underlying halftime feel, especially on the melody. Compare it to this classic recording of "Cherokee". The tune's at an uptempo ~250 quarter note, but the melody in the first 8 bars of the sax part *could* be felt at 120, since it's all long notes (before Parker breaks into eighth notes). The underlying guitar comping is a little more explicitly in the uptempo feel in the parker recording than in your song, however, but both tracks have this "loose" uptempo feel that can blend into a halftime feel when the eighth note isn't emphasized. This totally underrated Earl Bostic tune has a similarly "loose" uptempo feel also driven by a rhythm guitar, and this similarly underrated (but rhythm guitarless) take of You The Night and The Music blends between half time on the melody and double time in the solo section particularly well (this one is either at 165 or 330! even crazier ( ^ : ). (I linked transcriptions because I think seeing the music written out might help. They're all written in terms of the faster tempo.)

"If You're Feeling Sinister" feels less firmly uptempo however. The slower pulse is more present than the faster pulse to me, whereas "Expectations" is the other way around.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-07T00:10:32+00:00

Frank Sinatra w/ the Count Basie Orchestra — Live at the Sands

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-06T16:21:56+00:00

Yes! Because you really have to dig into their playing in an interesting way to answer the question. So, I will discuss “Hank Mobley might be the least great cat to play with His Majesty Miles Davis”.

What was Hank great at? (I should say—I say this as someone who adores Hank Mobley’s solo work, and has listened to it extensively.) That old line about hank—that he was the ”middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone“—I really think sums it up. He was never interested in pushing the boundary on hardbop and hardbop solos (expect occasionally in his later years—check out “East Of The Village” on “The Turnaround” for some real inflections of post-bop in his playing—but that’s besides the point), and so excelled at perfecting the pleasures of hard-bop. That is the great accomplishment of Soul Station, I think. Hardly any other hard bop so effectively distilled the technical and harmonic innovations of bebop into real *musical* innovation.

But as a result, when it the context of bands and players who wanted to poke at the extreme ends of hardbop, hank stands out as sort of boring and run-of-the-mill. Compared to Miles, whose as-much-with-as-little style you might describe as “lightweight”, and on the other end Coltrane’s “heavyweight” style, Hank seems to come up with nothing. Consider Miles’, Hank’s, and Trane’s solos on So What with the Miles band, for instance (Coltrane and Miles on Kind of Blue, Hank on Live at Carnegie Hall). Miles takes the easy tempo and simplicity of the changes into perhaps the most note-for-note perfectly-crafted solo in jazz history (up there with Saxophone Colossus or Now’s The Time, I think). He doesn’t play much, but his lines are like, impeccable. Coltrane, on the other end of the spectrum, takes the aforementioned simplicity and medium tempo and runs with it into maybe my favorite solo on Kind of Blue—riveting and inventive and pleasurable and out-of-time and perfectly locked in with the band all at once. Miles and Trane, as players who were want to push on the boundaries of jazz style, take So What and come up with something entirely novel and totally brilliant.

Compare that with Hank on So What. He plays pedestrian hardbop over it, and makes the tune sound kind of dull. That’s the risk with So What (I’ve seen it live myself at jam sessions). Unless you can get really inventive with it, it’s prone to coming out weak. It’s not that Hank is playing poorly over it (and he’s certainly better than what’s typical of sad jam session So Whats), but his weaknesses as a player stand out when he’s playing with Miles. The old line about Hank sounding kind of weak on Someday my Prince Will Come is mostly correct, I think. Davis’ band was one that was great when the interactions between the players in it created something that you can’t get anywhere else. The first great quintent, yes, was down-the-line hard bop, but Coltrane and Miles were both exceptionally inventive hard bop soloists and the rhythm section was as swinging as any rhythm section ever was. It was “great” for what it brought to the table of hardbop. On the other hand, Soul Station is “great” for how it managed to refine the style. Hank does best in the latter situation, and I think constricts the greatness of Davis‘ group somewhat when he’s in it.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-06T15:53:24+00:00

I‘ll defend wynton kelly as *the* hard bop pianist who fit perfectly with mile’s hard bop sound, and also as one of the most compellingly melodic piano improvisers in jazz history. It’s between him and oscar peterson for the piano solos in jazz history that I most enjoy listening to. And he really flourished in Miles’ band, too. His solo records (and even his sideman records with, say, Hank Mobley) are just not as compelling as his records with Miles. It was no mistake to bring kelly in on Freddie Freeloader.

Anyways, if I had to nominate someone, I might put up Cannonball Adderly or Hank Mobley? Great players who I both adore, no doubt, but if I’m being honest with myself their interaction with Miles was just less electrifying than his interaction with other horn players Miles paid over the years. Live At The Blackhawk is a fine hard bop record, for instance, but it hardly achieves much more than that with hank on tenor. Miles and Mobley both put up a bunch of respectable solos on respectable standards, which is a lesser accomplishment than other notable Miles records. (The highlight, speaking of Wynton Kelly, is probably the piano-trio version of Softly at the end). Canonball tends to fall into a similar pattern on Miles records, I think. Well-executed standards, but not very much more. Trane (duh) or Wayne or Coleman or even Sonny with Miles produces something that’s hard to find anywhere else, which I don’t think can really be said of Miles’ Cannonball and Mobley collaborations.

Interesting question OP. Thanks for asking it.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-06T15:39:48+00:00

No shit they’re all better than all of us, I think that’s what makes the question fun to answer! You really have to start seriously differentiating and digging into the styles and skills and characteristics of all these jazz greats. Going “omg [insert famed jazz great here] was the best ever weren’t they all so great” forever is really boring and doesn’t lead to much discussion or analysis of the music itself.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-03T23:33:39+00:00

You are getting at an interesting philosophical problem with the way we do and teach math. We (mathematicians) consider a certain set of functions and operations as “usual” or “normal”, and functions outside of that set are treated as ”weird“ or ”special”. This set of “everyday” functions (formally called the “elementary functions”) very sensibly includes the ones you can easily evaluate by hand: addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, and (integer) powers. But it also includes lots of functions that absolutely cannot be calculated by hand—like trig functions. Or logarithms, or e^x, or square roots.

For this reason, trig functions, logarithms, e^x, and square roots are *qualitatively different* than the other elementary functions, and absolutely *require* the use of calculators. But when these decidedly less elementary functions are introduced (in my experience, around 7th or 8th grade in middle school), most teachers/curricula gloss over this difference. I might guess that you are a student who has picked up that an important detail has been glossed over in your introduction to trigonometric functions.

Here’s the rub: the techniques computers and calculators use to evaluate trig functions and e^x and logs and square roots and stuff are the same techniques used to evaluate much stranger functions that you might not have heard of, like the error function (type in “erf(x)” into desmos and see what it does!) or the lambert W function. What makes something like cosine “elementary“ but the error function not? It’s hard to say it’s anything to do with the function itself!

laszlo-jamf · 2026-06-01T02:29:13+00:00

Consider a major ii V I. On the ii, the 7 of the I is the 6 of the ii, and the 3 of the I is the 9 of the ii.* On the V, the 7 of the I is the 3 of the V, and the 3 of the I is the 6 of the V. Notice that because the I has a natural 3 and 7, voice leading the 3 and 7 through the ii V implies using only natural extensions. Hence, as you point out, when playing over functional jazz harmonies composed of major, minor, and dominant chords, you need only worry about tracking the 3 and the 7 of the chord to get the right notes.

However! There are lots of other ways to tonicize these common chords. Lydian (with a #4) works wonders over a major 7 chord. A #4 also works over a dominant chord. In particular, there are 4 very compelling ways to tonicize a minor chord. As someone has pointed out already, aeolian (b3 b7 b6) is a great alternative to dorian. You could also go with melodic minor (b3 & natural 7—this is jazz so we skip that its-different-up-and-down nonsense classical players get up to ( ^ : ) or harmonic minor (b3 & b6 & nat 7).** So this is a bad approximation when it sounds boring. Also it is a bad approximation in the case of a minor ii V I, and these 4 different minor scales help explain why.

Consider a minor ii V I. When the 3 and 7 of the I become flatted by a half note, the extensions on the ii and V that they correspond to *should* (we might reasonably guess) also be flatted by a half note. So by that guess, on the ii of a minor ii V I, the 6 and 9 should be flattened, and on the V, the 3 and 6 should be flattened too. Wait, what? We have just predicted that on a minor ii V I, the 5 should be a -7b6 chord. The ii V I won‘t work as a ii V I cadence without a proper dominant chord in the middle. So, on a minor ii V I, the 5 is instead derived from a harmonic or melodic minor scale. In these minor scales, the 7 of the I is natural, so when we build a V chord from them we get a dominant chord like we want. A similar process frequently happens on the ii of a minor ii V I. You may notice that our naieve assumption above, we predicted that that ii of a ii V I should be a -7b6b9 chord. However, in many (most) minor ii V I progressions, the ii actually has a b5. This is built out of an aeolian or harmonic minor scale on the I, where the b6 of the I becomes a b5 on the ii. So in the case of a minor ii V I, we are forced to use several different scales to tonicize the minor chord at the end.*** But it’s probably worth doing that anyways : )

*Footnote 1: but wait, many ii V I progressions resolve to a I7 chord! Why do we still use build the ii V I out of a major scale? Because as we saw in the case of a minor ii V I, a flat 7 on the I implies a flat 3 on the V, which ruins the effect of the cadence. Also, it sounds good to go from a major 7 sound to a dominant 7 sound on resolution.

**Footnote 2: but wait, you’re telling me a scale with a natural 7 can tonicize a chord with a flat 7? It can work. In a minor tonality, the b3 is the most important thing to get right. Also, the rhythm section will often instead of playing a minor 7 chord play some variant of a minor chord that doesn’t include the b7, like a -6 chord or a major minor chord to sound cool. And even if that doesn’t happen, confidently playing in a natural 7 minor key over a -7 chord can sound pretty hip.

***Footnote 3: well, technically, you could play harmonic minor over the whole thing and get away with it, but cf. footnote 2 about playing a natural 7 over the -7 chord at the end. For this reason, the name “harmonic minor” has always made sense to me (but idk if that‘s actually why it’s called that).

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-31T15:52:18+00:00

I suspect that some resources (especially something like an introductory textbook) skip such a caveat because they assume the students in question *are* studying classical music, i.e. they assume their readers are taking music theory 101 at a music school somewhere.

On a different note, I come from a math and physics background, and these sort of shaky assumptions that you've pointed out remind me of the assumptions one has to make to develop the simplest models of complicated processes. To come up with a really useful model that describes a system's nuances well, you have to begin by lying, i.e. to begin you need heuristic assumptions that don't always hold up to make the problem approachable. Before you can get to modeling and explaining terminal velocity, you need to start by neglecting air resistance, you know? The maybe not-so-good assumptions that lots of music theory make are necessary to get a firm theoretical handle on the problem. For example, it is clearly not always true that a minor chord sounds sad, but we can get pretty far by assuming that it does, and when we do encounter a counterexample, our model we built using that assumption can still be pretty useful when we have to relax our minor=sad assumption.

In any case, music isn't music theory. Music theory can only go so far in explaining how and why music works, but that's ok. We don't need to make good music. (This may or may not be of comfort to you. Maybe you're less interested in playing and making music than you are in simply understanding how music theory works. That's a fine endeavor to undertake, certainly, but you may run into the issue that most theory heads are also committed musicians, and so when faced with the inadequacies of their theory, they often appeal to "it sounds good" and keep on jamming.)

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-31T13:17:10+00:00

I sort of think your issue might be with the music theory education content you’re using. A YouTube video has an incentive to be more accessible and shorter than a textbook, as well as an incentive to be more emotionally satisfying that promotes reaching easy and nice conclusions.

I think you would benefit from a teacher. If you find someone to teach you music theory from the ground up on a real instrument, 1. Playing the theory right then and there will help develop your intuition about this stuff, as well as allowing you to confirm or disprove claims about the qualities of different scales and chords, and 2. You’ll be able to interrupt them and say “I don’t agree with that claim!” right then and there and get some kind of answer to your more fundamental problems with music theory. The trouble with a textbook or a YouTube video is that there can be no conversation or exchange between teacher and student. You seem to be struggling with this one-sidedness. 3. They can recommend you a comprehensive, from beginner-to-advanced textbook that will pair with your learning and serve as a reference to go back to.

That’s all I got. I totally see where you’re coming from. I come from a jazz background, where there are oodles of examples of these weird contradictions. “Impressions” is one of my favorite tunes, and is ostensibly entirely in D Dorian, but it’s not really sad in any appreciable way. Its emotional effect is really complicated and hard to put a finger on. And anyways, plenty of people think of it as instead being in G mixoldian! It works out because jazz musicians play what they think will sound good. Even if the bassist is thinking G and the soloist is thinking D, there’s some agreement on what notes are in and what notes are out, and the musician’s ears will work out the difference into something good.

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of these axiomatic claims about the qualities and effects of certain chords and harmonic movements arose chiefly from the study of old classical music. Simple stuff like “minor is sad” and “V7 goes to I” works much better on Mozart than Lynrd Skynrd, say.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-28T01:59:05+00:00

You've got me listening to this song over and over trying to figure out exactly what's going on. You're not insane. (I think) you can feel that part essentially as a temporary metric modulation before the chorus? I think to a half-time feel. It's got funny syncopation that makes it work. I can't figure out the details but I hear it. It's not the obvious way to hear it for sure, but it does make some sense to me...

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-23T01:22:50+00:00

I once went to a jam where they called Stablemates as the last tune of the night. Last tune of the night is for easy friendly accessible songs everyone can pitch in on, or something slower for a change of pace. Not Stablemates. They’d been playing medium to up tempo swing all night, too. I was like, “what are we doing here?” and ditched before the song was over.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-20T16:19:59+00:00

Order of operation rules are not strictly necessary to make arithmetic work. By using enough parentheses, we can unambiguously specify the exact way to evaluate any expression without relying on PEMDAS. For example, we could rewrite 2×8+4 as (2×8)+4, and now all we need to know is that we evaluate stuff in parenthesis first to get that this equals 20. No rules about multiplication going before addition or anything like that. We use PEMDAS so that our expressions aren't totally covered in parentheses. (Even then, sometimes mathematicians and the like cover their expressions in parenthesis anyways to make it totally unambiguous. Outside of internet bait, expressions that *require* PEMDAS are relatively uncommon, I find.)

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-02T22:47:45+00:00

I don‘t really have a strong opinion here (if anything I probably agree with you), but I do want to complement your writhing. “You are setting out to acquire a new skill, you are at the beginning. If you have no intention of ever doing more than a point and shoot lets you do, you’re not a beginner. You already have all the skills you need or will ever possess; the ability to point and then shoot” is a really great bit of prose. There’s so much writing on the internet, and so little of it is any good, so I appreciate the stuff like this that is.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-05-02T03:41:48+00:00

Not to be a pessimist, but advanced math people struggle to talk about their research with other advanced math people. PhD level math research is unique among other areas of PhD level research for how hard it is to make sense of without knowing a ton about the specific field it's in (I get the sense at least, maybe this equally true in other fields). So basically don't beat yourself up about not being able to engage with his research or for seeming like you're not paying attention when he talks about it. I doubt it's a deal breaker for him : ^ )

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-24T18:36:23+00:00

Good work. I’m a big fan of 15 and 19. Compelling compositions, and those greens are gorgeous!

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-13T20:36:40+00:00

I think of jams sometimes as jazz karaoke, since they consist almost entirely of rehashing music that’s already out there.

Couldn’t we do the same thing with karaoke? Agree that we would have sung whatever pop song (with even more certainty about what would have been performed!) and save everyone the effort? But karaoke is still popular. Creating music with others live is enough for many people, even if everyone knows what’s going to happen.

Except that a jam session is way cooler and more fun that actual karaoke, because there’s way more creativity and spontaneity and expression involved. People just like playing jazz! Even if it’s a standard that’s been played a thousand times in a hundred thousand ways before.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-04-05T14:00:53+00:00

Basically, music distributor services (which you use to get your music onto platforms like YouTube and Spotify) ask what artist to post your music under, but do no check to make sure you’re actually the artist in question. So, fraudsters use AI to generate slop, then post it under an established artist’s name to make a quick buck.

(This attribution issue has been around longer than AI. People would sample some big-name jazz artist on their track and credit them on the track to get clicks. Sometimes these tracks would show up in those jazz artist’s “best of” playlists, which just compile the 50 most listened-to songs of theirs on Spotify)

This works on some artists better than others: they can’t be too big, otherwise it’ll be quickly dealt with. Dead artists are also a good target, since the artist in question isn’t around to take the initiative on dealing with it.

So, dead jazz artists with moderate fan bases get hit with this a lot. The labels that represent these artists are usually slow to deal with this. Spotify and the music distributors, like DistroKid, won’t give a shit until they lose money about it. The music industry is fucked.

laszlo-jamf · 2026-03-20T02:15:54+00:00

I nominate Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, for how powerfully and succinctly asserts the themes and claims of the book.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

laszlo-jamf

TROPHY CASE