# Is there any kind of jazz you don't like?



## PresenTense (May 7, 2016)

In my case, I don't like Jazz Fusion, Gypsy jazz and smooth jazz. Even though I am not a fan of the guitar in jazz, I found this guy who played an interesting piece that I loved.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Jeez I feel so old, after waiting through a 3 min intro/preamble I thought it would get going but no. I am not a fan of this kind of jazz but that is my age showing through, at least they managed to play it without the dots so there is hope.
As you can guess I am a Trad man plus MJQ, Brubeck, Adderley, etc even Grappelli which you are not into, really so long as it has a melody and strong rhythm on acoustic instruments I will like it. :tiphat:


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## PresenTense (May 7, 2016)

This is the kind of jazz I love:


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Out of those 4 Sun Ra was more to my taste now this is my kind of jazz.

Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli - Minor Swing





Sack O' Woe Sack O' Woe · Nat Adderley · Cannonball Adderley




Jacques Loussier Prelude No 1 BWV 846 Play Bach Aux Champs-Elysees


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## chill782002 (Jan 12, 2017)

I'm really not keen on free jazz. I know that it's all about musicians freeing themselves from expressive constraints and so forth but I just find it unlistenable.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

chill782002 said:


> I'm really not keen on free jazz. I know that it's all about musicians freeing themselves from expressive constraints and so forth but I just find it unlistenable.


From what I have heard I agree totally


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

PresenTense said:


> This is the kind of jazz I love:


I like the Mingus and the Miles Davis.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I've given pretty much everything a try over the decades but I'm not a fan of the following:

Trad/Dixieland
Hot Club 
Electric jazz guitar before John McLaughlin's fireworks with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra 
Cool jazz - Chet Baker, Stan Getz etc.
Smooth jazz - Sade etc. (or Wine Bar Jazz, as we used to call it)


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Trad, Dixieland or anything with vocals. That's it.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

elgars ghost said:


> I've given pretty much everything a try over the decades but I'm not a fan of the following:
> 
> Trad/Dixieland
> Hot Club
> ...


I concur with the exception of Stan Getz. On his good days he was pretty formidable.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

PresenTense said:


> This is the kind of jazz I love:


Absolutely. This is the bees knees as we say in Blighty!


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I dig everything from Be-bop to the present. I don't bother too much with the old 78s, but I like Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. I don't like generic stuff or copy cats. No Brecker or Metheny clones, or soloists that play a zillion notes with no soul.


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## Jos (Oct 14, 2013)

Not a big fan of absolutist free jazz. Nor of Wine Bar Jazz (thank you, Elgars Ghost)
Jazz is not often on my turntable, but when I, or especially my lovely, get into that jazz mood there is nothing else for a few weeks.

Dixieland is fine when it's live, accompanied by large amounts of beer and conservative, yet attractive women. Not so much for home listening.


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## 38157 (Jul 4, 2014)

chill782002 said:


> I'm really not keen on free jazz. I know that it's all about musicians freeing themselves from expressive constraints and so forth but I just find it unlistenable.


A lot of the time I'm not sure that free jazz is necessarily about freedom from "expressive constraints", but rather the reprioritisation of musical features. You don't necessarily find the same hierarchy of lead & accompaniment, or the same foregrounding of melody & rhythm, which can be disconcerting, since most of the music in our environment follows rules of harmony which are spelt out in melody and the structures of which are emphasised by rhythm.

I find it useful to think of "motifs" in free jazz as "sound objects" (thanks Varèse), which might not derive their identity from melodic or harmonic features but from timbral of textural features. This way I'm not trying to compare the music to other music which follows a fundamentally different system, which I think is what most befuddles the uninitiated. Even if you think of it this way, you might not like the aesthetic, but you might find it a slightly less frustrating listening experience.

On the note of free jazz, I love watching performances from The Stone on Youtube - Mary Halvorson, Nels Cline, Trevor Dunn, etc - great musicians who show their capabilities in genres across the board.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Trad/dixieland and what they are nowadays trying to sell as 'jazz': smooth vocal jazzy soul music. The North Sea Jazz Festival - one of the biggest jazz festivals on earth - has an increasingly bad habit doing this. In the past we had all the great jazz musicians in the forefront and on the telly the same day. Nowadays you have to go to small dark avenues and holes and you won't see any of it on public television. They are not worthy of 'jazz' anymore.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Casebearer said:


> Trad/dixieland and what they are nowadays trying to sell as 'jazz': smooth vocal jazzy soul music. The North Sea Jazz Festival - one of the biggest jazz festivals on earth - has an increasingly bad habit doing this. In the past we had all the great jazz musicians in the forefront and on the telly the same day. Nowadays you have to go to small dark avenues and holes and you won't see any of it on public television. They are not worthy of 'jazz' anymore.


Yes. People like Gregory Porter, Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse and Madeleine Peyroux are lounge crooners and are no more jazz than Take That.


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## Anankasmo (Jun 23, 2017)

Hmm Jazz is beautiful but imo too much jazz piano can easily destroy a song. Also the trumpet is too stereotypical and often doesnt blend all to well into the atmosphere of a song. Furthermore I am not the biggest fan of male jazz singers (ofc excluding Louis Armstrong, Gregory Porter, and a few others) especially the Frank-Sinatra-Bobby-Darin-Tony Bennet-white-male-voice.


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## nikola (Sep 7, 2012)

Jazz is mostly awful imo. I like old jazz that is not considered to be jazz (dixie, swing, Tom & Jerry jazz etc.) .. .that's probably why it is good. I don't care for jazz noodling, free jazz, as*hole elitist jazz, simple as*hole jazz, tone deaf as*hole jazz etc.


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## SarahTG (Sep 26, 2017)

(I don't like jazz) *le gasp


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## Torkelburger (Jan 14, 2014)

I love all jazz.


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

I am almost as big a jazz fan as I am of classical.

I don't like: swing, Dixieland, (40's) big band, smooth, fuzak (what fusion became in the 80's: John Klemmer, Bob James,etc). Free jazz, I can take in doses, when I am in the mood.

My favorite styles are:

ECM style of *'chamber jazz'* (Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Barre Philips, Ralph Towner, Eberhard Weber, etc). Where most jazz is characterised by the standard, head-solo-head-solo, etc format, the typical ECM artist has a different approach. There tends to be more interplay with all the musicians, where their solos are more integrated into the music and interwoven with the other players. Even when one specific player is soloing, the other players will not just be playing chords behind the soloist, as is the standard in the head-solo-head-solo format.

I actually think that many classical fans, that are naysayers of jazz, might find much to like in a lot of this style.






Fusion (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Brand X, Weather Report, Iceberg, etc). This style has to be intense, fiery, and played with virtuosity. Sometimes it gets a bad rap for being too 'show-offy' with regards to chops, but with the best musicians in the genre, there is a deep jazz vocabulary to back up their musicianship. People often equate fusion musicians with metal 'shredders', which is far from the case.






Some late 50's and 60's post bop (Coltrane, pre electric Miles, Mingus, Tyner). Can't escape the genius of these and others of the era.

M-BASE. Which is a school of music developed by saxophonist, Steve Coleman and a group of like minded NY musicians in the early 90's. It's signature is complex rhythms and time signatures, but still retaining a great deal of groove. soloing retains little connection to bebop.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Still hoping ECM will re-issue Towner's Old Friends... and Abercrombie's Characters.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Barbebleu said:


> Yes. People like Gregory Porter, Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse and Madeleine Peyroux are lounge crooners and are no more jazz than Take That.


I had heard of Amy Winehouse but thought she was just a pop singer but after her death I heard (for the first time) some of her work on the radio and TV and she had a very strong, earthy voice and a sense of rhythm that seems to be lacking to day and IMO would have been very good in the jazz world that I am used to. What a waste.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Dan Ante said:


> I had heard of Amy Winehouse but thought she was just a pop singer but after her death I heard (for the first time) some of her work on the radio and TV and she had a very strong, earthy voice and a sense of rhythm that seems to be lacking to day and IMO would have been very good in the jazz world that I am used to. What a waste.


Here we will need to agree to disagree. I see no link to someone like Amy Winehouse or any of the others I mentioned to jazz. They are certainly accomplished singers of popular music but their type of non-improvisatory musical skill disqualifies them from what, and I stress this is purely my opinion, I consider to be the primary quality that constitutes jazz.

I realise that the boundaries of what is considered to be jazz in the 21st century have somewhat blurred but unfortunately I have always had real problems with the human voice in a jazz milieu.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Barbebleu said:


> Here we will need to agree to disagree. I see no link to someone like Amy Winehouse or any of the others I mentioned to jazz. They are certainly accomplished singers of popular music but their type of non-improvisatory musical skill disqualifies them from what, and I stress this is purely my opinion, I consider to be the primary quality that constitutes jazz.
> 
> I realise that the boundaries of what is considered to be jazz in the 21st century have somewhat blurred but unfortunately I have always had real problems with the human voice in a jazz milieu.


I agree that improvisation is very important in jazz but I did not say she was singing jazz just that she would have been a good jazz singer, but of course if you don't like the voice in jazz then you would disagree. 
I have the same feeling towards Wagner love the music but not the singing.


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## chill782002 (Jan 12, 2017)

Bossa Nova is a form of jazz and a musical style I'm particularly fond of.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Dan Ante said:


> I agree that improvisation is very important in jazz but I did not say she was singing jazz just that she would have been a good jazz singer, but of course if you don't like the voice in jazz then you would disagree.
> I have the same feeling towards Wagner love the music but not the singing.


It would be a dull old world if everyone liked the same things. Curiously a friend gave me a Brad Mehldau album where he is partnered with Renee Fleming. I only got it on Wednesday so I haven't heard it yet. I shall report back!


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

chill782002 said:


> Bossa Nova is a form of jazz and a musical style I'm particularly fond of.
> 
> Moacir Santos (as many others) mixed brazilian music with jazz, and Coisas is a great album. But I would not say that bossa nova is a form of jazz, altough it was certainly influenced by it, as a lot of of other brazilian music before and after.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

I listened to the Mehldau/Fleming album. It's very good but whatever it is it's not jazz by any stretch of the imagination. I would say it's modern classical but who knows.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Modern jazz fans wore the better clothes - sharp, cool, confident.

Trad jazz fans looked like a bunch of effeminate onion sellers.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Barbebleu said:


> I listened to the Mehldau/Fleming album. It's very good but whatever it is it's not jazz by any stretch of the imagination. I would say it's modern classical but who knows.


The only thing I found on YT was this, but is probably not on your album and as you say is not jazz,
I don't think you would even say it is cross over, I have never heard a classical singer that can sing jazz they are two different methods of singing, 
I have seen Kiri TeKanwa live a few times and have heard her attempts at swing type music but IMO it just does not work.








elgars ghost said:


> Modern jazz fans wore the better clothes - sharp, cool, confident.
> 
> Trad jazz fans looked like a bunch of effeminate onion sellers.


In that case I must have looked peculiar as I was a into both.


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## Joe B (Aug 10, 2017)

*"IS THERE ANY KIND OF JAZZ YOU DON'T LIKE?"*

Not really......depends upon my mood.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Dan Ante said:


> The only thing I found on YT was this, but is probably not on your album and as you say is not jazz,
> I don't think you would even say it is cross over, I have never heard a classical singer that can sing jazz they are two different methods of singing,
> I have seen Kiri TeKanwa live a few times and have heard her attempts at swing type music but IMO it just does not work.
> 
> ...


That is indeed the album to which I was referring and I concur with your view regarding Kiri's efforts out with the classical field.


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## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

and i like jazz fusion and the rest of jazz stuff


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mingus, Dolphy and Monk are pretty much the only Jazz I like.


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## Joe B (Aug 10, 2017)

Phil loves classical said:


> Mingus, Dolphy and Monk are pretty much the only Jazz I like.


Dolphy is at the top of my list.


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