Jazz is two things at once: it’s the oldest kind of pop music, and the youngest kind of “trad” music, alongside things like classical and opera. The best jazz albums, therefore, often sound old and young at once – a bit like the past and a bit like the present. The genre’s highpoint in the early and mid 20th century also coincided with the creation of popular music as we understand it today. The concepts of the single and the album, of bands and individual artists, were formed when jazz ruled the roost.
Things are obviously different today. But not quite as different as you might think. Jazz has had a key role in some of the 21st-century’s best albums, like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. The last winner of the Mercury Prize was a jazz group, Ezra Collective. Understanding jazz helps you understand modern music. But even if you don’t want to play sonic historian, then this selection of some of a big genre’s best albums is well worth delving into, for the simple reason that they all sound fantastic. Happy listening.
Frank Sinatra – In the Wee Small Hours (1955)
By the mid ‘50s, Sinatra was in the middle of a career comeback, tearing through big albums and big film roles. His personal life was less sunny – he and his second wife, Ava Gardner, were gradually falling out of love with each other. This contributed to the melancholy mood of In the Wee Small Hours, often thought of as the very first concept album, due to its songs having more cohesiveness than simple collection of singles. The master of easy listening is audibly not having an easy time on this record – he reportedly broke down and cried after recording “When Your Lover has Gone” – but the emotion he brings to a set of classic songs pushes them to new heights.
Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)
Not just a formidable bassist, but a composer par excellence, Charles Mingus’s genius can be heard both in his own playing and in every melody he put to paper for his bandmates. Mingus Ah Um – a riff on variations of his surname in Latin – gets in references to gospel, twelve-bar blues and more. “Fables of Faubus” was written as a protest against the then governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, who two years earlier had resisted the racial integration of Little Rock High School. Mingus’s record label, Columbia, refused to allow the song’s lyrics to be included, but the horn lines still sound like they’re dripping with distain.
Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings (1954)
Chet Baker had a potent pair of lungs on him. As well as being an acclaimed trumpeter, the Oklahoma-born musician could croon like nobody else. His singing voice was low, slow and distinctly moodier than those of his peers – a reflection of a painful life marred by addiction and tragedy. When he applied that voice to some time-honoured jazz standards, as on Chet Baker Sings, his first vocal album, the results were heart-breaking.
Billie Holiday – Lady in Satin (1958)
Released the year before her untimely death, Lady in Satin was to become Billie Holiday’s penultimate album, but the last to arrive while she was still alive. Although it’s widely acclaimed today, the record was initially met with mixed reviews, largely because of Holiday’s drastically altered voice, which had become raspy and lost much of its upper range due to years of alcohol and drug abuse. Ray Ellis, who conducted and arranged a 40-piece orchestra for the album, was a fan of Holiday’s changed vocals, describing them as “very evil, sensuous, and sultry”, with “evil” meaning “earthy”, rather than something sinister. Lady in Satin also marked Holiday‘s return to Columbia Records after 16 years, and was seen as a new beginning – one in which she would record new tracks, as opposed to re-recording old material. Although the record ultimately marked the end of Holiday’s life, as opposed to a new start, it saw her go out with a bang, and, for many, remains the high point of her career.
Louis Armstrong – The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (2000)
A maverick vocalist and trumpeter, Louis Armstrong was one of the most important musicians the US has ever produced. His career not only spanned most of the 20th century, but incorporated every diffident type of music, from gospel and blues to hillbilly and pop. Armstrong’s unmistakable voice, full of cracks and fissures, is a cornerstone of early jazz, and his trumpet work is nothing short of pioneering. This 2000 collection of his best work, The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, from 1925-29, includes some of the earliest recorded jazz, as well as the track “West End Blues”, which was once called “the most perfect three minutes of music” ever created.
Duke Ellington – Far East Suite (1967)
In his 50-year career, Duke Ellington composed over 2,000 pieces of jazz, including sprawling orchestral suites, pop songs, dances tunes, and everything in between. He also kept an orchestra on the road his whole professional life, and in that respect resembled Bob Dylan (and his “never-ending tour”), a wandering journeyman. It was this lust for travel that caused him to visit the Middle East and Japan in 1963 and 1964, a tour that resulted in Far East Suite, an album ranking among his greatest achievements.
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1964)
John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is one of the most popular jazz records of all time, and a collection of songs that highlight jazz at its very highest level of achievement. Coltrane was a genius, but he’s also tagged with encouraging everyone who came in his wake to think a saxophone solo could last serval weeks. When Coltrane died, aged 40, Philip Larkin wrote that the only compliment one could pay him was one of stature: “If he was boring, he was enormously boring. If he was ugly, he was massively ugly.” Nevertheless, A Love Supreme is genius.
Nina Simone – Little Girl Blue: Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club (1959)
Little Girl Blue: Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club is Nina Simone’s debut album and her first classic. It was actually recorded over 14 hours in a single day in 1957, over a year before its release, and, in light of Simone’s frustration with the delay and Bethlehem Records’ resistance to release a single, ended up being the only album she made with her first label (although that didn’t stop the label from capitalising on these early recordings for years after they were released). As well as including some of her most famous hits – “Love Me Or Leave Me”, “I Loves You, Porgy”, and “My Baby Just Cares For Me” – Little Girl Blue introduced Simone as an accomplished jazz pianist and exceptional vocalist, and set her up for what would become an inimitable career.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Time Out (1959)
In the late ‘50s, Brubeck became the biggest jazz star in America, a white pianist who conquered a middle America just coming to terms with the expansionist Populuxe dreams of suburbia. He was the hipster it was okay to like. Brubeck’s critics thought he was all puff and bluster. “[His audience] enjoy being offered titles such as ‘Blue Rondo A LA Turk’,” wrote one, “because the implication is there that they understand blues, rondos, and even Turks.” Time Out contains “Take Five”, one of the most popular jazz records of all time, and deservedly so. Not owning this record is like not owning Revolver or London Calling.
Charlie Parker – Yardbird Suite (2000)
Parker was the King of Bop, the fastest saxophonist in the west, and at the time – the mid ‘40s – one of the coolest men in America. This collection, Yardbird Suite, has many of his classics – “Ornithology”, “Ko-Ko”, “Groovin' High” – as well as his greatest ever recording, the incomparable “A Night in Tunisia”, which must rank as not only just one of the greatest jazz records of all time, but one of the greatest records, period. Parker had a terrible impulse towards self-destruction, and before his untimely death in 1955 (from a heroin overdose: he was 34, although the coroner thought he was 60), became quite adept at burning the candelabra at all ends. As well as being responsible for recording some of the finest music of the 20th century, he also came up with the ultimate jazz truism: “If you play something that seems be wrong, play it again, then play the same thing a third time. Then they’ll think that you meant it.”
Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (1956)
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook is the record that turned a great American voice into a national treasure. This collection was the brainchild of Norman Granz, the founder of Verve Records, who had been trying to sign Ella Fitzgerald for six years. Thinking she had been recording substandard material, when he finally got her he put her in a studio for three days, and this is the result. It was so successful he followed it with collections based around Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Kern and Mercer, although The Cole Porter Songbook was the most memorable. Her version of “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” puts Mick Hucknall in his place.
Stan Getz and João Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto (1964)
For half a century, Astrud Gilberto has been singing the gentle, lyrical samba ballads of Brazil, a career kick-started by happy accident in a New York recording studio in 1963. Early that year, Stan Getz called up the Brazilian pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim, asking him to bring along some of his new material. Getz was looking to record the follow-up to Jazz Samba and Jazz Samba Encore – his two breakthrough LPs, which had resulted in the hits “Desadinado” and “One Not Samba”. The sensual, sun-kissed samba Jobim brought to the studio that day was “The Girl From Ipanema”; he also brought along a friend, the guitarist Joao Gilberto. The song vividly showcased Getz’s pure-toned tenor sax and the intimate, burry voice of Gilberto. Though as recording progressed, it became evident that Gilberto could only sing in Portuguese, and so Getz asked Gilberto’s 24-year-old Bahia-born wife Astrud to sing it for him. Her contribution was initially considered so slight that she was not even credited on the album, though stardom beckoned when an edited version of the song went to number five in the US charts. It’s just one of many phenomenal classics on Getz and Gilberto’s aptly-titled, Getz/Gilberto.
Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue (1959)
Miles Davis’ soft, muted trumpet sound (dry as a martini) has become synonymous with ‘cool’ jazz, and there is no better example of the genre, or of his art, than Kind Of Blue. The album is the best-selling recording in Davis’ catalogue and the best-selling classic jazz album ever. It regularly tops all-time favourite lists, and has become a template for what a jazz record is meant to be. It’s also perhaps the most influential jazz record ever released. Musically, it’s where modal jazz really hit paydirt, and where linear improvisation came to the fore (Davis playing Samuel Beckett to John Coltrane’s James Joyce), and its tunes have been covered by everyone from Larry Carlton to Ronny Jordan. Its influence is far-reaching; “Breathe” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon was based on a chord sequence from this album. From its vapoury piano-and-bass introduction to the full-flight sophistication of “Flamenco Sketches”, Kind Of Blue is the very personification of modern cool. And, according to Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, it’s also something else far more important: “Sexual wallpaper.”
