I learned trumpet at school and somewhere along the line was exposed to a bit of light swing and jazz playing in the school band. I had a good teacher who taught us a basic blues scale and let us improvise a little. But it wasn't till I heard Miles Davis' album "The bitches brew" that I really took any interest in listening to jazz. I was about 16 and I heard pharaoh's dance on a radio scotland show. The next weekend I went up to Edinburgh and picked it up in the CD outlet shop (at the foot of victoria street - now long gone). I remember that I didn't have the money, but managed to convince my dad to go half each, him knowing full well that he would never listen to what he would describe as "when does the tune start, jazz".
I remember sitting in my room listening to that album on headphones that day. I put it on, and then stopped, skipped back to the start and prayed, "thankyou lord for this, wonderful thing. Let's listen to it together." And there in my bedroom me and Jesus listened to The Bitches Brew start to finish only occasionaly commenting on particularly good passages.
From there I had a few years of jazz, jazz, jazz. I played in some jazz groups, got a feel of what I was trying to do, and most importantly, I started to methodically work my way from Miles Davis, to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and on. For a while I would literally just make a list of the personel on a record I liked and then look for records by them. This was of course before the days of streaming and so to hear records you had to find them and then sometimes you could get the shop to put them on, and sometimes you just had to chance it. FOPP records (on coburn street then) and CD outlet were great friends to me as they both sold quite a lot of "back catalogue" stuff at reasonable prices £5,£7,£10. So I got some listening done and it has stayed as one of my passions. Once upon a time, I was asked to pitch a radio show idea by a friend and I thought of "everything but jazz" - a show where I would play music from my collection which was on the edge of jazz or jazz influenced, but not mainstream jazz and talk about it. I reckoned I'd get some milage out of the afrobeat stuff and ska and the Indian-fusion Shakti stuff and the rock related stuff. Well I went on holiday and never pitched for the show, but may it'd have been a neiche listership thing anyway.
So Here I'm going to list and link to loads (or some) of Jazz stuff I think is great and you can look around it and see if there are things you didn't know about. Hopefully this will develop into a real spaghetti of links that you can get lost in, but let's see. Start by clicking on an album cover, and see where it takes you.
