The thread title says it all. I can listen to jazz recordings for hours on end but can scarcely name a dozen tunes. My jazz collection is small but still growing. Most recordings sound great. On the other hand, I have a substantial rock, pop and country collection and like most of us, have a near encyclopedic knowledge of it.
We remember the rock, pop and country collections because this is what was played back in the days of no format FM radio stations.
To my ears acoustic music almost invariably sounds better than electronic on a high-quality system, and I suspect that the recording engineers (e.g. Rudy Van Gelder) who focussed on jazz were among the very best.
IMHO, with jazz you get both – good music and good sound. Like @whipsaw mentioned, Rudy Van Gelder (Blue Note) engineered tons of material from the bebop/hard bop/post-bop eras. Several other labels had good production quality as well, like Prestige, Riverside, Columbia, Verve, and Impulse.
@strateahed,
I noticed you left out the Rudy Van Gelder post strateahead CTI years! ☺
Which are some of my favorites to this day, but I do also love the above!
Off the top of my head I can't remember some of the Bill Evans session engineers but they were some of the sharpest ever!