Which BLUES/JAZZ Albums Do You Think Are Perfect?

The FREEP, Of Course! ^ | 8 June 2002 | All of Us Nuts

[BluesDuke]

OK, since Big Guy and Rusty 99 did this for rock and soul, let's do it for the blues and jazz! One difference - we'll count best-ofs because for only too long the blues guys didn't make albums...so here's mine and let's build from here:

Louis Armstrong, The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven and Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy
Count Basie and Joe Williams, Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings
Count Basie and His Orchestra, Sixteen Men Swinging: The 1952-53 Dance Sessions
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Hard Bop
Michael Bloomfield and Friends, Live at Bill Graham's Fillmore West
Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out
R.L. Burnside, Come On In
The Butterfield Blues Band, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and East-West
Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz To Come Albert Collins, Truckin' With Albert Collins and Ice Pickin'
John Coltrane, Blue Trane, Giant Steps, and Live at the Village Vanguard
John Coltrane and Milt Jackson, Bags and Trane
Miles Davis, Birth of The Cool, Kind of Blue, and In A Silent Way
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Ellington at Newport, The 1946 Carnegie Hall Concert, The Complete Brunswick Recordings 1926-32, and New Orleans Suite
Ella Fitzgerald, The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook and The Duke Ellington Songbook (with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra)
Stan Getz, Jazz Samba and Getz/Gilberto
Astrud Gilberto and Walter Wanderley, A Certain Smile/A Certain Sadness
Dizzy Gillespie, Gillespiana
Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, The Carnegie Hall Concert
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie and Gotham City
Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage
Corey Harris, Between Midnight and Day
Billie Holiday, Lady in Satin
John Lee Hooker, The Complete Modern Recordings, Don't Turn Me From Your Door, It Serve You Right To Suffer
Son House, Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions
Howlin' Wolf, Howlin' At The Sun, Moanin' at Midnight, and Howlin' Wolf
Keith Jarrett, Standards (with Jaco Pastorius, Jack DeJohnette)
Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings
Lonnie Johnson, Steppin' On The Blues and Another Night To Cry
Junior Kimbrough, Meet Me In The City
Earl Klugh Trio, Volume One
Albert King, Born Under A Bad Sign and Live Wire/Blues Power
B.B. King, Live at the Regal, Blues on Top of Blues, and Completely Well
Freddie King, Let's Hide Away and Dance Away With Freddy King
Diana Krall, The Look of Love
John Mayall with Eric Clapton, Blues Breakers
Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah, Um, Blues and Roots, Changes One
The Modern Jazz Quartet, Fontessa, No Sun In Venice, Three Windows
Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music Vols. I and II, Live At The It Club Complete
Wes Montgomery, Movin' Wes and Smokin' At The Half Note (with the Wynton Kelly Trio)
Charlie Patton, Founder of the Delta Blues
Sonny Rollins, Volume Two and Live At The Village Vanguard Complete
Frank Sinatra with Count Basie, Sinatra/Basie
Frank Sinatra with Duke Ellington, Francis A. and Edward K.
Horace Silver, Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers and Song For My Father
Muddy Waters, Live at Newport, 1960 and Hard Again
Sonny Boy Williamson, Down and Out Blues
Tony Williams Lifetime, Emergency

[BluesDuke]

ok, everyone...join in the fun!

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

Maybe not the best, but I've always enjoyed The Best of George Benson. He plays a guitar like nobody else.

[BluesDuke]

I enjoyed his debut album, It's Uptown with the George Benson Quartet, but I will go to my grave believing Wes Montgomery (on whom he modeled practically his own entire style) was the best of the breed. And brother, could our man Wes play the blues, too!

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

I've never been a big blues fan, but I love jazz. The greatest treat of my life was working as a Sunday morning DJ for a local radio station that included a four hour "Jazz Morning Brunch". There was no list of songs, like the Top40 Station in the same building, it was pick what you wanted to hear. Heaven.

[BluesDuke]

The jazz and blues stations are like that. What killed rock and soul radio was the advent of The Playlist a long enough time ago, then factor in all the damn categorising and compartmentalising, and I can barely stand today's rock and soul radio. Even the oldies stations are ossified - they have the widest spread of music they could work without boring the hell out of their listeners, but...well, put it this way: I'd bet a generation is growing up thinking the Four Tops didn't cut a damn thing beyond "I Can't Help Myself" or "Baby, I Need Your Loving"; or, the Rascals other than "Good Lovin'" or "Groovin'". And the DJs they bring in seem to know as much about music as Congress knows about animal husbandry.

Remember that old goofy hit "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well, it was wrong - radio killed the radio star, so far as rock or soul music are concerned. (I'm betting it'll happen to rap soon enough, too.) With jazz and the blues, that isn't the case. And people I know who ordinarily don't care for jazz or the blues like listening to it on radio, because of the very factors you cited. Well, since the blues birthed both jazz and rock and soul, maybe blues and jazz radio can re-birth the others?

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

I agree that Rap will bite the big one in a few years for the reason you stated. The Playlist has eliminated any kind of enjoyment for modern pop because it's as bad as the music itself. Brittney Spears may be an absolute hottie, but she can't sing worth a damn. Mariah Carey's futile attempts to sing a high note only bring a yearning for deafness. And no amount of packaging can save nSync from the fact that they are a bunch of pathetic wooses.

The latest trend, and I actually enjoy it a bit, is 80's music. After jazz and classic rock, it's my favorite choice. I guess it just makes me feel nostalgic for my high school years and Ronald Reagan. Everytime they play that leftist, nuclear freeze favorite: "99 Balloons", I kind of giggle and remember that the Gipper was right all the time. 8^)

[2Trievers]

&;-)

[BluesDuke]

I think the 1980s were actually pretty underrated as far as music was concerned. A lot of good stuff in a lot of genres was emerging then. There was Wynton Marsalis and company prodding jazz's sort-of post-bop revival - finally, some jazzmen emerging who sounded more as though they'd learned more from Thelonious Monk and the early Miles Davis than from the post-Coltrane insane free jazzmen and fusionists. The Clash still had one more inning in them (Combat Rock). You had some halfway decent bands playing the early variants of what would become known as "techno" (Ultravox was my personal favourite of the lot; I still think the world of their albums Vienna and Rage of Eden; a sort-of Ultravox side project, Visage, was doing stuff almost as interesting). The blues made a big comeback. The original, early rappers (Grandmaster Flash; the Sugar Hill Gang; et. al.) were hitting their peaks and getting in the good stuff still before the bloody gangstas rolled around and guttered it. There were R and B performers like GQ and the like bringing back ensemble-style soul singing (well, GQ were sort-of '70s holdovers, but don't hold that against them - people sated or sick of disco were bound to look for the real deal sooner or later). And, you had the beginnings of that so-called Seattle scene (people like to forget this but Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and company cracked the nut first in the latter 1980s).

[opbuzz]

That's ahelluva list! I'm gonna have to get me some new albums!

Miles Davis - Round Midnight

Larry Coryell and Eleventh House

John Mahavishnu, a Miles protoge, as so many were.

[Slug]

The Age of Steam...Gerry Mulligan Down Here on the Ground...Wes Montgomery

[herewego]

Gimme Son Seals, Albert King,Lonnie Mack and other Chi-town bluesmen.

Damn , too many to mention- I like the old Leadbelly and B.L. Jefferson also.

So much talent has escaped that to me- there is no best. Thanks for posting this!

[WIMom]

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[Yardstick]

Albert King, King of the Blues Guitar

Funky grooves, a couple instrumentals, heaps of Albert's perfect phrasing (played through a frequently overdriven amp) -- good stuff.

[BluesDuke]

The trouble with a lot of the Chicago bluesmen is that so few of them made regular albums until they were just about at the end; in the prime years of the Chicago blues, the genre pretty much followed the rest of the music that wasn't classical music - you did singles, you did singles, and your first album was likely as not going to be most of those singles and a couple of odd-and-end tracks, if you got to do an album at all. (Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were notable exceptions for several years, as also Buddy Guy with his magnificent Left My Blues In San Francisco.)

Most of the best Chicago blues albums from the artists who worked before 1970-75 were compilations; the best of the bunch were the series released as the Chess Vintage Blues Series between 1969-73 (you probably know them when you see them: black and white jackets, usually toned a little bit like flatted gloss a la old publicity photos, with black backs and liner notes in white lettering). Here were my calls on the best of those sets, if people want to step in slowly (if you want to take a flying leap into the meat of the earlier Chicago blues, you go for the Chess 50th Anniversary Collection of 1998-2000):

Muddy Waters, Sail On
Little Walter, Hate To See You Go and Confessin' The Blues
Jimmy Rogers, Chicago Bound
Sonny Boy Williamson, Bummer Road and One Way Out
Albert King, Otis Rush, Door to Door
Howlin' Wolf, Evil
Buddy Guy, I Was Walking Through The Woods
Lowell Fulson, Hung Down Head
Various, Drop Down Mama

There are also the newly pressed discs of the late-50s/early 60s West Side Chicago bluesmen, the ones who put a little high octane into the Chicago style, who recorded for the old Cobra/Chief operation (Willie Dixon, then having a beef with Chess, defected and worked as the label's A&R and production head, and a lot of the top sessionmen who had been working on Chess sessions did a lot of work for Cobra/Chief, too, including Dixon himself, guitarist Syl Johnson, keyboard ace Lafayette Leake, drummer Fred Below, and others); the sets of Junior Wells and Otis Rush are by far the cream of those - I always loved Magic Sam but I think he, of all the Cobra/Chief stable, should have had better on his recordings, though a lot were exquisite.

One note: Albert King wasn't a Chicago bluesman; he recorded for Chess for a couple of years in the early 1960s, but he had been of the St. Louis blues scene much of his career until he signed with Stax in 1964 and began the most successful period of his recording life. Of the latter-day Chicago blues people, I've always been fond of Luther Allison, Son Seals, Hound Dog Taylor, and Lonnie Mack.

[Rudder]

I'd like to add:

Miles Davis--Jack Johnson

Ellington at Newport 1956

Count Basey--April in Paris

Alligator Records 20th Anniversary of Blues

[herewego]

Alligator Records 20th Anniversary of Blues

damn straight, jammin' it right now!