Some Jazz Faves

Memorial Day Weekend, great weather, friends and relatives visiting, and an ongoing home rehab project that requires hauling boxes of books and records to the storage locker (the best argument for downloads), work against any deep-thinking blog post today, so I thought it would be fun (and easy) to list some of my jazz faves.  Like New York City thin pizza, Chicagohot dogs and Italian beef, KC barbeque, Rita’s gelato, and Chen’s crispy beef, these jazzers make me happy and keep me coming back for more; they are my musical comfort food. 

Alto Saxophone- Jackie McLean:  Passionate, adventurous, distinctive (that keening tone of his is the heart of the alto saxophone), leader on a bunch of famed Blue Note albums and sideman on that many more classic albums, my only question is:  why did it take so long to place Jackie Mac in the Downbeat Hall of Fame? 

Tenor Saxophone- John Coltrane:  St. John the Baptist of the tenor sax.  A visionary who saw the Beyond in every note.  

Tenor Saxophone- Sonny Rollins:  Played Aristotle to Coltrane’s Plato.  While Coltrane sought the Platonic ideal, the One, Rollins, with compelling Aristotelian logic, dissected, analyzed and explored every nook and cranny of a song, taking the One and making it the Many.

Trumpeter- Lee Morgan:  Lee’s playing was as hip as Lee himself; that means it was the essence of Hip.   Fast, brassy, funky, ripping off notes with pure insouciance and joy, Lee also wrote (his songwriting is often overlooked) and performed many lovely ballads.  Lee saved Blue Note with his “Sidewinder” album then almost became trapped by its success.  Check out the title cut of “Search for the New Land” - one of the great anthemic performances. 

Vibes:  Bobby Hutcherson:  Bobby is first among vibraphonist;  there is no second place.  Bobby has perfect artistic taste; never a false note.  His playing on 60s Blue Note albums added a fourth dimension to the music.  I saw him recently at a local jazz festival (the promoters, shamefully, put him near the bottom of the bill—an unforgivable lapse in judgment); he played beautifully, placing each note with pointillist precision but Impressionistic beauty.  Bobby says more in one note than other vibists say in 10 minutes of flailing mallets. 

Guitar—Grant Green: “Idle Moments” is one of my favorite albums; next time you play “Kind of Blue,” follow it with “Idle Moments.”  Grant has a warm, bluesy, soulful groove to his playing.  Grant has that admirable ability to get to the feeling beneath each  note. 

Drums- Roy Haynes:  There are a lot of great drummers, but I’ll just say this about Roy:  when he plays, great jazz happens.  60 years of drumming, and he still swings like mad—and takes everyone with him.  If I didn’t say Roy, I’d have to say Chico Hamilton, well-known but vastly underrated.  Like Roy, great jazz happens when he plays, plus he has a genius for forming combos.    Chico is utterly musical in his approach, preferring sophisticated musical palettes to rolling thunder. 

If you got this far, post your comments on your own favorites. What is your musical comfort food?