Kind of Blue

@frogman -thanks very much, nice to see you.

I'd be interested in looking at how a music librarian catalogs stuff. Oh, I'm getting on the phone with one in a minute or ten. I'll ask her.

I tend to like material that bends the genre a little- whatever it is. Not for novelty's sake, but to make something new and different. 

Surprised that great Oliver Nelson record isn’t mentioned. A warhorse to be sure, but to me, at the level of Kind of Blue.

I think the reason that the old recordings can sound so good is manifold:

• the studio equipment was far more primitive, less outboard gear, less fiddling with tracks;
• the musicians were extremely capable- they could play the whole song in a single take, even stuff that had orchestrated parts; no "oh, we’ll fix it later" mentality.

I do have a lot of the warhorses, but lost interest. My interest was renewed a little over a decade ago. I got into so-called "spiritual" and "soul" jazz through the recommendation of someone I knew. There were a few labels that concentrated on this-- mostly top notch sidemen who had no work on mainstream records in the post-Monterrey "youth" explosion. Perry Como was out; new sounds were in, thanks to people like Chris Blackwell at Island who signed an amazing roster of talent (Traffic, Crimson, Free, Tull, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, eventually Bob Marley, etc.)

Meanwhile, in the "jazz" world, it became much more local, community oriented stuff- in NY, Detroit (Motown moved to the West Coast), the West Coast sound, including all the acolytes of Horace Tapscott. Nate Morgan was a killer pianist who did stuff for Chaka Khan when he wasn’t doing deep jazz.

I’m only scratching the surface here, but to paraphrase David Lindley (RIP), the brilliant string player, you can make almost any song "jazz" (Lindley said "reggae" but I think it’s all the same).

If you like straight ahead stuff, check Art Pepper’s last recording of Patricia (he released it three times), this last version, with Cecil McBee (one of the most tuneful bassists I’ve ever heard), Roy Haynes and the recently departed Stanley Cowell (co-founder of Strata-East, one of the wellsprings of spiritual jazz). It is accessible and McBee’s bass work is classic, as is Cowell’s piano work. Pepper was a great altoist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKUz2763fDo

"Crossings" is almost a compendium of jazz styles and motifs turned on its ear. It keeps morphing. I compared a sealed Green Label to the Kevin Gray cut a few years ago. Listening to that album was a revelation.

My impressions fresh from a comparison at the time of reissue: https://thevinylpress.com/herbie-hancock-crossings-speakers-corner/

OK, FWIW, one of the challenges in musicology librarianship is descriptions in catalogs with appropriate cross references. Not easy. But think about a large repository that is made available not only to scholars but to the average person- how do they access material that is "on file"? That's one of the challenges, according to the person I just finished speaking with. Along with making sure the artifact (recording) is shelved properly. I have that problem here and I'm not a library or archive. When I had guests over the weekend, playing the system, I was trying to find a record I knew I had- but where the hell was it? I found it moments after they left. 

One facet of how to characterize a recording and "index" it if you are compulsive or have a large collection. I trimmed my collection substantially and still have issues- the record will pop into my hand afterwards, but sometimes, trying to find something on demand is a challenge. I know this doesn't address "short hand" genre classifications, but the issue is one that is taken up in library science.