# Modern Jazz - An Intro



## Matsps (Jan 13, 2014)

Could someone introduce me to modern jazz? I can't name a single modern jazz composer... Who are the major artists and what are the major styles that kind of thing? Help is much appreciated.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

what you mean with modern, jazz made in recent time including mainstream jazz musicians or a kind of more experimental jazz, advanced harmonies etc?


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

Lage Lund, Brad Mehldau, James Farm & Vijay Iyer,


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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)

Yes, you'll have to be more specific. Do you mean post-1960 jazz such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, etc. (not to mention younger players such as Ken Vandermark, Lotte Anker, David S. Ware, John Butcher, Mat Maneri, etc., etc.)? Or do you mean more contemporary mainstream things like Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, etc.?

Kind of in the middle of those two, more or less, I'd begin by recommending music by Tomasz Stańko, the great Polish trumpeter - some of the finest jazz of the past twenty years.

Jazz today is very much like classical - there are musicians playing in the "old styles" and others who are pushing the envelope.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I'm not very up on it, and all of these are really pretty old or dead, but:

Sun Ra
Cecil Taylor
Art Ensemble of Chicago
Ornette Coleman
John Coltrane
Anthony Braxton

etc.

I see that Sudonim has a similar and more comprehensive list, so I won't try to coax the wrinkles of my brain  Jazz was a sideline interest a couple of decades ago, fuelled by a friend's voracious appetite for it.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Sudonim said:


> Yes, you'll have to be more specific. Do you mean post-1960 jazz such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, etc. (not to mention younger players such as Ken Vandermark, Lotte Anker, David S. Ware, John Butcher, Mat Maneri, etc., etc.)? Or do you mean more contemporary mainstream things like Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, etc.?


I think it would be useful also to point out what he means with "composer", because I consider many of those you've mentioned more as performers than writers of compositions. I mean, Wayne Shorter or Andrew Hill are famous (also) for their tunes. Bailey or Cecil Taylor are famous as improvisers.


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## Matsps (Jan 13, 2014)

Just to clarify, by modern I mean people pretty much post 1950s onwards, but with particular emphasis on people that are alive and composing jazz write now. 


> what you mean with modern, jazz made in recent time including mainstream jazz musicians or a kind of more experimental jazz, advanced harmonies etc?


Anything under that broad umbrella of jazz.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Well, if there's not a distinction between "mainstream" and more advanced jazz and we're considering also the fifties there's a lot of stuff. And there are also Ellington and Strayhorn, who wrote a lot of music after the fifties, and Monk too.
I would say something like this:

Swing:
Ellington/Strayhorn - they keep composing the kind of music they composed in the thirties and in the forties, basically swing music for big band. Some of the greatest music for big band.
Ellington: 




Strayhorn:





Bebop.
Thelonious Monk: the father of modern jazz composition (someone calls him "the Picasso of jazz" because he was the first to wrote in a language that was very advanced and cerebral but not influenced at all by classical music. 





Tadd Dameron: he composed music that usually sounds "happier" and less cerebral than that of his colleagues (Monk, Gillespie Bud Powell, Elmo Hope and Denzil Best), he's probably the main influence for the hard bop generation of composers (Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Freddie Redd, Cedar Walton). The album to have is The Complete Blue Note and Capitol Recordings of Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron (but there isn't one of his most beautiful and famous pieces, "If you could see me now" (that is also one of his most melancholic pieces)




. 
Dizzy Gillespie: after the forties he continued to compose a lot of interesting compositions, influenced by cuban music but also by classical





I don't know if there's a subgenre for Herbie Nichols and Mingus.
Herbie Nichols: one of the greatest jazz composers, one of the most advanced and for a long time the most underrated. And one reason for this is that his music is very complex. He was a very cultivated men, and he was an admirer of musicians like Bartok. The Herbie Nichols project is doing a great work playing for the first time material that he did not have the possibility to record. 





Mingus - Probably the heir of Ellington, he took Ellington as his model but his music usually sounds more influenced by the blues, visceral and neurotic. He was very interested in modern classical music so he could also write very advanced music.





Hard bop
Horace Silver: with Benny Golson the most important hard bop composer. He mixed jazz with funk.




Benny Golson:




Cedar Walton: 





Post Bop
Wayne Shorter: with Ellington and Monk probably the most influential jazz composer ever. His music brought a new sensibility to the genre, and his music, very sophisticated and elegant sounds very... zen. The albums with the second Miles Davis quintet are essential listening and he was the key element of the group.




Andrew Hill: the heir of Monk and Nichols, and with Shorter probably the most important composer of post-bop. His music, extremely complex sounds very nervous and angular. And like Nichols and Shorter his music produces a soundworld that is difficult to describe.




Grachan Moncur: he wrote very dark music with a noir feeling. In my opinion after Hill and Shorter who tower over the others (a fantastic company by the way, Joe Henderson, Sam Rivers, Booker Little, Jackie Mclean, Eric Dolphy, Walt Dickerson, Bobby Hutcherson just to mention a few) he deserves the third place.





ok, this is just a first part.


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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)




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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)




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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)




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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)




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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)

I can keep going all day, of course, but here's a start ...


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Matsps said:


> Could someone introduce me to modern jazz? I can't name a single modern jazz composer... Who are the major artists and what are the major styles that kind of thing? Help is much appreciated.


wait a minute, when I've read that "I can't name a single modern jazz composers" I thought you were interested in jazz composers and my previous post was about that, but maybe I didn't understand that you are interested in all jazz and not just composers, aren't you?


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## Matsps (Jan 13, 2014)

I'm somewhat interested in all jazz, but composers in particular. Thanks for the posts so far! Much to be listening to in the coming weeks...


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Matsps said:


> I'm somewhat interested in all jazz, but composers in particular.


Good, so I wasn't going off topic. 
Ok, before the more recent ones, I would mention also Mary Lou Williams (probably the most important female jazz musician ever), who like Ellington started in the twenties but she ended playing with Cecil Taylor and she never ceased to try new things. The zodiac suite is a good introduction the her work.
And two underrated composers were also Bob Zieff (Chet Baker for instance recorded in the fifties an album of his complex compositions) and Cal Massey, who wrote for Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and other important musicians and still he's very little known. This one on Africa brass was written by Massey:





John Lewis, the leader of the Modern jazz quartet.
And obviously there's George Russell, the man behind the modal revolution. He made very ambitious albums with complex pieces. I think his music is fascinating (personally I like especially Jazz in the space age) but he's not a composer of memorable tunes for sure. 





Free jazz:
Ornette Coleman - the most famous exponent of the genre was also a very good melodist. Lonely woman is probably one of the few standards composed by a free jazz musician




Sun Ra - the most famous band leader (and one of my very favorite musicians). I don't know, maybe his talent was more as an arranger (an arranger of very weird music), and often the composition was not important at all, but he was also capable of very well crafted music with an harmonic taste that was unmistakably his own




Muhal Richard Abrams, the composed especially in the eighties and in the nineties some interesting big band music like on The hearinga suite and Blu blu blu

Fusion:
Don Grolnick is the one I like the most. Fusion because he wrote for the Steps ahead, but basically his influences were the post-bop composers of the sixties like Shorter or Hill.




Pat Metheny: I suppose I should mention him, I'm not a great fan of his music but I'm very fond of a little tune of him called "In her family" (I hate the original arrangement, but that's another story)

In the eighties and the nineties there are also some interesting albums made by Henry Threadgill, Tim Berne, Bob Brookmeyer. Progressive music that mixes post-bop, free jazz and a lot of disparate influences. The same for the female counterparts Carla Bley (and his ex husband Michael Mantler) and Toshiko Akyoshi and more recently Maria Schneider.




Another female pianist who is very respected as a composer is Jessica Williams, but altough I like her music she often sounds a a bit too much like Monk.

Consider that this is obviously just a very little introduction (I haven't even mentioned people like Bill Russo, Coltrane, Mal Waldron, Denny Zeitlin, Kenny Wheeler, Eberhard Weber, Clare Fischer, Mulgrew Miller, Oliver Nelson and many others).


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

After all that, a little consideration. Unfortunately, even if there are few exceptions and there are many interesting musicians, I think that the generation after the one of Shorter and Hill didn't produced any other composer of the level of them (or of the level of Monk, Nichols, Ellington, Strayhorn, Mingus or Silver).


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Check out Gregory Porter for some great contemporary jazz vocal work.


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## samurai (Apr 22, 2011)

Both Herbie Hancock and the late, lamented and great Esbjorn Svenssoon are--at least in my book--two of the greatest jazz musicians and composers to ever grace our world. Below, two of their marvelous inventions:


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## samurai (Apr 22, 2011)

Both Herbie Hancock and the late, lamented and great Esbjorn Svensson are--at least in my book--two of the greatest jazz musicians and composers to ever grace this world. Below, two of their marvelous compositions: _Cantaloupe Island and The Face Of Love 
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2VN8zH366M8#t=48

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fOMr0feernc#t=12

For some reason, the Hancock link doesn't seem to be taking; sorry. I would definitely urge you to check it out on YouTube and/or Spotify


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## Matsps (Jan 13, 2014)

Thanks for all the replies guys! Especially to norman bates! I'm now slowly working through these posted pieces & reading a little about some of these people on wiki along the way.


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## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

You could also have a look at Stanley Clarke
with his trio and with the interesting Japanese pianist Hiromi, as well as Chick Corea


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Definitely check out George Russell, and Gil Evans They were two of the great modern jazz composers. Also, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul. For someone on the contemporary scene, I would recommend John Hollenbeck, or Maria Schneider. And even Dave Holland, who has been around for decades, but is still writing great music.

There is a great Danish band called New Jungle Orchestra led by composers Pierre Dorge and his wife, Irene Becker. Wonderful music.

Others to definitely listen to are Carla Bley, drummer Paul Motian, and the great tenor sax player Joe Henderson. Check out his Big Band album on Verve.

Guitarists Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, and John Scofield are all great writers.

And there's Chick Corea. Love him or hate him, he's a brilliant and prolific composer.


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