Six easy masterpieces: The ultimate beginner’s guide to Jazz
One thing that is certain in this miserable old life of ours: All the best things in it are acquired tastes. The glorious amber nectar of a cold beer tastes bloody horrid to a soda-loving 13-year-old. The drab prospect of a 0-0 draw precludes many people from falling in love with the beautiful game. Hot sauce is no good to an unaccustomed baby. Hell, I didn’t even know what I’d been missing with the serene perfection of Gardener’s World until lockdown forced more casually paced viewing upon us.
Yes, from olives to open-voiced modal scales, it’s clear that the best things in life take time to acquaint yourself with. Jazz is a paradigm of this—it’s a realm of aficionados, not fans, and that can be an off-putting pretence for those remaining happily outside the club. Name me the best jazz song ever written… you can’t, Noel Gallagher once said in a cutting riposte. But that’s just the point these days. It stands aside your Beatles and your Stones, some allegorical alternative, wildly different but almost the same.
You see, the thing is pop music in its various permutations is a wondrous thing—a sort of technicolour affirmation of life. From the gritty blast of Black Sabbath to the mellow meadows of peace-inducing Joan Armatrading, it has got it all covered. But we’re a greedy species, and spice is the definitive variety of life, as they say. Thus, you can even get tired of the greatest thing on Earth. That is when jazz comes into its own.
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here,” while you’ll need all the Godspeed in the world to see that outsider shot, the number is irrelevant: life is long and weary. Why not spice it up by at least trying jazz? It’s like the nutmeg in the cabinet; you never think you’ll need it. You’re happy with all the staple legends like chilli powder or mild paprika. But one day, you might wonder whether you’d like to try eggnog, and nutmeg changes your life forever.
This beginner’s selection below is your figurative recipe card. These records are specifically chosen not just because they are masterpieces but to ease you in. Before you graduate to the sonic Vindaloos, these are the gorgeous shandies of the jazz world, the delicious Chicken Tikka Masalas. To drop the food analogies, these are the best records to start with if you’re considering getting into jazz.
Six best jazz starting points:
Poetry for the Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen
In this sumptuous meeting of poetry, prose and jazz music, the lulling and dreamy piano playing coaxes up connotations of sanguine mornings. As the 12-inch whirls around under a stylus, it swirls up a cornucopia of café culture comforts and window gazing content. Kerouac talks of the San Franciscan streets and transports you in wistful daydreams. Each ‘song’ is a glowing transfiguration of his mellowed twilight outlook, romantic but never romanticised, in a musical encapsulation of America’s jazz, art, and adversities.
It’s as easy to sink into as a cool swimming pool in summer. Jazz is notably less rigid than pop structures, and on this occasion, that seamless balm is one that you can float into and endlessly deep therein. As the Persian poet Rumi elucidated back in the 13th Century when he wrote, “God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposite so that you will have two wings to fly, not one,” poetry is at its best when it encapsulates the true duality of life. With this album, Kerouac captures that in piano keys’ black and white colours. As swell as the surf.
IV by Badbadnotgood
Jazz is often so sentimentalised with a bygone aura that the question for modern acts is, how do you even craft something contemporary while upholding the charm of the genre? Well, Badbadnotgood answered that in glowing style with their 2016 outing IV. With enough fusions to make the foreign sound familiar, they make musical virtuosity seem like a simple exploration of fun.
With simple waltzing basslines acting as fluid ostinatos, and the added interest of on-beat/off-beat melodies, IV makes classic techniques like moments of the one and the five colliding so seamless you barely notice them. Pop music can do so much with so little, and Badbadnotgood apply that same tenet of taking something simple and stringing a myriad of creative ideas out of it. It transfigures the age-old into something akin to a sonic swirl where jazz shakes hands with all of the genres it helped to herald. And what’s more, it actually achieves the rare feat of something close to jazz hits.
Ella and Louis Again by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
When two of the greatest singers in history combine, what more could you want? This album defies usual genre tastes and serves up a wholesome dollop of joy for everyone. The maestro Miles Davis once said, “Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is”. That message soars when it comes to the universal love that Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong offered up. As the latter opined: “All music is folk music. I ain’t never hears a horse sing a song”.
That sort of charm typifies their collaborations. You just have to look at the cover to know what this record is all about. Armstrong’s grin makes you think he was privy to the soothing secret of the universe that has escaped the rest of us. That toothy smile would be the sage of his journey throughout a life of sanguine defiance. And that same buoyant grace is writ large in the purring of Fitzgerald’s perfect pipes. This record is spiritual honey for the soul.
It Could Happen To You: Chet Baker Sings by Chet Baker
Chet Baker is the undoubted king of the crooners. With his matinee-idol good looks, boyish charm and effortless performances, he typified a timeless generation with his trumpeting ways. Softer than velvet, he could hush a hurricane to sleep, and if that’s not for everyone, then I don’t know what is.
However, suppose a few of you thorny contrarians feel like that sounds like Baker is probably a proponent of the sort of elevator music that is suitable for Starbucks but gets shunned for something a bit zestier at home. In that case, this record is the classic that throws such an assertion back at you. Unusual things take place in masterpieces like ‘Old Rebel Moon’, and they have your feet moving across the room as you bask in the sophistication of a sound that stirs the soul with ineffable style.
Verve Jazz Master 9 by Astrud Gilberto
Jazz is a transportive tool. You can be enduring the grimmest Monday morning in February. Yet, you spin Verve Jazz Master 9 and pleasantly find that the beautiful Astrud Gilberto has grabbed you by the hand and waltzed you off to Ipanema. With the help of Stan Getz, João Gilberto, Urbie Green and more, she could create enough atmosphere to sustain life on mars.
And what a life that would be—all sunshine, flowery courtyards where smartly dressed folks recline with a beer and non-carcinogenic cigarettes. However, this utopia comes with an edge. There are also bosa nova notes in this that you haven’t heard before, little patches of dissonance that hit like the odd passing cloud, imbuing the unfurling perfection with a wandering waltz of humanity – jazz for the beach.
Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock
Tied to a nautical theme, Maiden Voyage is fittingly a record that you could set sail on. After turning out five albums in a mere three years for Blue Note Records in 1965, Hancock took things to the leisurely seaside and offered a beguiling piece of tranquillity. Therein he happily drops anchor with the likes of Freddie Hubbard and George Coleman, piecing together tracks that do what jazz does best: set the imagination out sailing.
“Life is not about finding your limitations,” Hancock once poignantly mused, “It’s about finding your infinity”. He crammed some of the profundity into the luscious melodies of this sumptuous record. It might be one of his simplest offerings, but as John Densmore, “It’s the space the musician makes in between the notes that gives music the human element”. And the breathing room Hancock allows for in this voyage creates an abyss you can bask in.
