How did you discover Jazz music?

Drummer Karl

KARL MEMBER
Hi friends!

I`m currently producing a web-radio/podcasting kind of project. For the first show I`m dealing with the subject "How did you discover Jazz music?".

For this I`m asking YOU to talk about your story on my "station" JRadio... =)
It`s a station about everything regarding Jazz music and everything what`s around this style of music, this way of life.

So, tell me! Write about your first experience with Jazz music, did you like it? How did this relationship develop?
Simply leave me a reply with name and place of living (country/state)...and your story!

I`d be very happy to "broadcast" your story on JRadio!

Best wishes,

Karl
 
My father had quite a few records of the big bands and my older brother was getting into modern jazz when I was 6 years old so it was around me from the beginning. We had this great jazz show on the radio where I grew up in the Montreal area, it was also simulcast in Toronto, it was called Phil Mckeller and All that Jazz and I listened to it as a teenager, late at night. That was where I was really introduced to it. I was and still am a fan of Be-Bop but not strictly.
 
My dad was a jazz drummer and had been touring since he was 16, all over the US and Europe for a short time. He had a massive record collection and didn't own a TV, so any time spent with him from the day I was born, had something to do with jazz music. He lived the culture, of course and most of his friends were musicians. I loved it as a kid but also grew up surrounded by rock n' roll, so my interests went in that direction instead. I still love and respect jazz more than any other type of music, to this day. He was from NYC (Bronx), I grew up in western NY.

Cheers Karl - send me a URL when you get a chance!

-Vin
 
Actually, my inspiration for learning jazz was from listening to some of your early recordings on this board Karl. Everyone gave you great comments so I checked out the playing, didnt totally understand the music and what made it good but i wanted to find out. Since you're a couple years older than me it gave me a benchmark to aim for in my playing. This was about 3 years ago now. At 16, I'm not quite as good as you were back then but getting closer. Jazz is now my favourite style of music and I want to be a jazz musician.
 
Growing up in the 60's and 70's it seems that the longer the hair got the worse the music got, for me anyway. So it was just a matter of turning the radio dial until I found something else that agreed with me. For that reason I pretty much lost track of groups, bands, drummers etc in the 70's. I had played drums in band and orchestra in high school so my music influences were varied. My Dad was a sax player and my Mom did singing of Big Band, Swing era stuff, and a little jazz thrown in. I had a lot of outside influences that helped me form my musical taste.

Johnny Getz
Florida, USA
 
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I started to discover a lot of great drummer who had soething in common: They all played jazz so I decided to check out some of it and fell in love so I started hearing it and playing it so I fell even more in love.
 
Back in the 60s and 70s, listening to jazz is what musicians did. There was a popular expression of jazz and many of these more popular guys had true jazz credentials. George Benson and Pat Metheny came out of what Wes was doing, Mclaughlin, Freddie Hubbard or Chick Corea had played with Miles, Art Blakey and Stan Getz. People who listened to rock also talked about Metheny or Mclaughlin as much as Dickie Betts or Eric Clapton.There was a certain respect for musicianship. If you were in HS band, you listened to Chicago and Tower of Power, or Earth Wind and Fire, the horn bands.. That really died with punk rock

I can remember seeing Buddy Rich and Max Roach at an early age and the experiences are still permanently etched on my memory. They were that good, that stunning and that incredible. If you were growing up as a drummer then you listened to Krupa, Buddy, Max and Louie. You just did. There was no leap of faith or getting into it. It was just what drummers did.

I disliked the 80s music, but looking back it wasn't all bad. The thing I hated about it was how bands that seemed to be doing the most useless tripe were often heralded as some great genius. I remember that came to a head for me with REM when they did Losing My Religion with a mandolin and it was such a big thing, as though they were this incredible band that had invented a new instrument. And it was a get tune. But we had to listen to it over and over and over again. It's like, hey we know Billy Jean is not your lover. Enough already.

I had worked in college radio and everyone loved REM; they were the Alt rock sweethearts. U2 was also an alt rock band in the beginning. The bands never did that much for me. I listened a lot to ECM: Metheny, John Abercrombie, Jack DeJohnette, Charles Lloyd, Ralph Towner even John Adams and Steve Reich were on ECM at the time. I saw John Adams last year and said I had been following him since ECM and he really just didn't know what to say.

I had quite a bad reputation at the station for saying that alt rock was really crap as compared to jazz. When Wynton Marsalis did a blurb in Grammaphone about how pop music was really not art and it was jazz that was the true American tradition, I plastered it on the bulletin board. Then Wynton's band went and joined Sting, who I loved, so that was just too funny. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with pop and that there were not some geat writers. it was just that it got too much undo attention.

I remember seeing Bono with Sting at one of those big fund raising concerts and he sang Sting's "Invisible Sun." At the end there is counting. I think he counts up to six, and Bono was putting up his fingers but didn't stop at six. He kept going. I realized he had never heard the song. For me, that really symbolized what alt rock was all about. There is something precious about reinventing I-IV-V-I. But it aint' that precious. I'd rather listen to somebody whose done some listening.

I can't say that I hated alt rock, it just wasn't my thing. There was really nothing not to like about Black Flag and Dead Kennedy's or Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Rage etc. I think it is great now that guys like Brad Medhlau and Ethan Iverson are arranging these tunes with a jazz sensibility. But Wynton was right; it was the jazz greats that were the true geniuses of the time.
 
I first discovered Jazz back in the late eighties while I was helping Al Gore invent the Internet. Al and I would listen to all of the Jazz greats while we wrote all of those lines of computer code in Al's basement. Sometimes Bill Clinton would drop by with some beer and a pizza and lend us support.
I can't remember when I first started listening to Jazz. It may have been the first time that I saw Buddy play on The Tonight Show when I was about 8 years old.
 
My mother was a big band singer so I grew up with it. I knew of Gene Krupa when I was 4.
 
I first discovered Jazz back in the late eighties while I was helping Al Gore invent the Internet. Al and I would listen to all of the Jazz greats while we wrote all of those lines of computer code in Al's basement. Sometimes Bill Clinton would drop by with some beer and a pizza and lend us support.
I can't remember when I first started listening to Jazz. It may have been the first time that I saw Buddy play on The Tonight Show when I was about 8 years old.



Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.......
 
God bless my middle-school ego.

When I got to middle-school, I was told that the jazz band was audition-based, and so in order to be the best drummer, you had to make the jazz band. Well, you have to know what jazz is to play it, so I started listening. Who would have guessed it would be a life-long passion?
 
When my parents forced me to study I liked to have music playing to ease the pain. Trouble is, the singing distracted me. I was playing in a garage band at the time and the name Mahavishnu Orchestra cropped up at some stage because John McLaughlin had gained a rep for being a hot guitarist (even hotter than Ritchie Blackmore, some claimed *gasp!* ... he certainly had better hair).

So I decided to buy one of MO's records to study to and Birds of Fire was the first thing of theirs I found in the shop. I found it kinda scary at first because the melodies and moods were so weird but in time it distracted me from my studies too ...
 
Id say my first experience with jazz was probably with my Grandpa. He had just found his old record player and was playing some jazz that really didn't strike me but then... He put on a record of Gene Krupa playing Sing Sing Sing and even though that was long before I started drumming I felt it had an impact on the musical area of my mind if you know what I meen. I currently play in my high schools jazz band and I love every minute of it. Even though jazz isnt my favorite genre its still really fun to listen to and play. Also, my favorite type of music, Rock, was basically born from jazz, so i feel credit is due.
Good luck with the show!
 
Jazz had always been there for me in some form or another, but it was thanks to a broken car stereo that helped me re-discover it. I had been listening to CDs of stuff I liked in the car, but when that broke, leaving me with only the radio, there were no stations with "good" music except for Jazz and Classical. Now that's almost all I listen to driving.
 
My Uncle was an amateur drummer. He had a lot of Krupa records as well as Bellson, Rich and even Art Blakey.
I was into Rock'n'Roll as a teenager. I also collected 78 rpm recorfds so I heard a lot of jazz, including Baby Dodds with Bunk Johnson's New Orleans Jazzband.

In 1968, when I was 15, The BBC put on an old Bing Crosby Movie - Rhythm on the River - this featured Wingy Manone and his New Orleans band. I decided I liked this music so went and bought an LP called New Orleans Jazzmen with Kid Ory, George Lewis and Papa Celestin.

Celestin's drummer was the great and little known Christopher Black Happy Goldston. His style was press rolls. If you've not heard him have a listen here:
http://www.traditional-jazz.com/mainpages/goldston.htm

I started buying more jazz records and eventually got the Benng Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert with Krupa's Sing Sing Sing. That was my biggest inspiration.

I got my uncle's old drum kit and taght myself, playing to classic jazz records by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five etc.

I did my first gig in 1973, went pro in the mid 80s and have been playing jazz ever since, including touring and recording with American veterans, Wild Bill Davison, Art Hodes, Al Casey, Kenny Davern, Billy Butterfield and Slim Gaillard.

These days I play a lot of swing dances for young audiences
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBhTndx0fQ&feature=channel_page

and organise jazz festivals in the UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2Jea-AJ2QA&feature=channel_page

Keep swinging
John Petters
www.traditional-jazz.com
 
I was lucky to have grown up in a town with an award winning music program, headed by Don Doane(Stan Kenton,Woody Herman,Maynard Ferguson alumnus).Most of the staff were freshly minted Berklee grads so hearing all sorts of jazz was a daily occurence.By the time I was 12, I'd had the good fortune to have met Buddy and Gene Krupa once used my throne while on a gig in Maine.I think I was 19 years old before playing straight 1/8 notes.
 
Through the radio when I was about 14 years old. It's always captivated med and still does.
 
Barney Rubble all the way baby! That and the old movies from the 30's and 40's that they put on tv in the 60's. Count Bassie, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman ect.
When I got a bit older it was modern fusion. I am now finaly starting to get onto 50's bop.
 
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