Don't miss this excellent Podcast by Ken Laster at In The Groove. He features some great hard bop jazz musicians, including Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Clifford Brown and Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins. He has a few local artists featured, but some of these songs will march you through the evolution of jazz over time. For instance, Clifford Brown and Max Roach hit their peak in the 1950s, a transitional era in jazz. They sort of blur the boundaries between bebop and hard bop, but some of their albums really give a clear example from both sides of the divide. For instance, pick up this album and listen to "I'll Remember April" (classic bebop pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie) and "Powell's Prances" (a look ahead to hard bop groups like Art Blakey and the Messengers) and you'll get a clear idea of what the two styles are like. Sonny Rollins is similar to these guys, and important because he anticipated Latin Jazz in this album by mixing Caribbean and Afro-Cuban sounds with traditional jazz instrumentation. The song featured on Laster's Podcast is off his new album. Of course, Miles Davis is almost invariably mentioned by jazz fans as required listening. Davis was influential in the move away from bebop to hard bop, and gives a good picture of how jazz changed through the 1960s. His album Kind of Blue (which features Adderley and, my other favorite outside of Lee Morgan, John Coltrane) is an example of "post-bop," which mixes the influences from hard bop, modal jazz, and avant-garde jazz.
When I think of jazz music, it's usually this style of music and these bunch of guys that come to mind first. Of course, everyone's tastes are different, as are individual's introduction to jazz. I took the plunge in the 1950s and 1960s styles. I have yet to branch out into more recent artists and more avant-garde music. It seems to me that many people are introduced to jazz through rock-jazz fusion artists like Weather Report (featuring Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter) and then work backwards. (It should be noted that Miles Davis pioneered jazz fusion in this album, which is another testament to his astounding influence on jazz; he took the genre from bebop to hard bop to fusion). Others are introduced to Louis Armstrong and the like and work forward. However, if I were to write up my top ten jazz albums, many of the guys mentioned above would make the list.
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