Snooze jazz.

....and they would say nothing even polite about smooth jazz. UGH!!

I prefer New Orleans jazz, especially the historic stuff.

Smooth jazz is not really jazz at all.

but no smooth stuff. It sounds like elevator music.

Modal Jazz can be 'smooth' and hypnotic, but it sure ain't no "Smooth Jazz"

I love jazz, almost as much as blues.

We drove motorcycles from east Texas for this pilgrimage. We were really hating the 80's back then. Seemed like the only logical thing to do.

1). Miles Davis / So What

2). Herbie Hancock / Maiden Voyage

3). Wayne Shorter / Deluge

4). Wayne Shorter / Mahjong

5). Wayne Shorter / Witch Hunt

6). Wayne Shorter / Speak No Evil

7). Wayne Shorter / The Big Push

8). John Coltrane / Equinox

9). John Coltrane / My Favorite Things

It's like "smooth jazz" with teeth...all of the tracks have a discernible melody, but there is also improvisation. When I lived in California, this CD sounded SWEET driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. It's pretty much great driving music anywhere, except the Nevada desert. When I lived there, it felt like the right music for the wrong place, or the wrong music for the right place. Take your pick.

I have quite a bit of music from all of the artists above, but this is the CD I would give to someone who says "I don't like jazz." If they still don't like it after that, I give up.

then some Charles Lloyd, Freddie Hubbard and the Creed Taylor guys.
But Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew" and Coltrane's "Kula Se Mama' made me get into
a different, more edgy jazz. When I play it during the day, as background music, it sounds like
consciousness.

My first awareness of John McLaughlin came via the Mahavishnu Orchestra. In the days of "Inner Mounting Flame" and "Birds Of Fire," he hit the rock audience like an early Eddie Van Halen. No one had heard that kind of playing before. It was a King Crimson Wetton-Bruford era dynamic...while the spirit of collaboration and improvisation was clearly present, these were individual musicians who were also in a "take no prisoners" form of competition with each other. Or to give one more example, Buddy Guy's walk-on for Muddy Waters' "Champagne And Reefer" during the Stones' "Shine A Light" concert film. As one observer put it, it wasn't a jam session, it was a reckoning.

That said, I discovered McLaughlin's work with Miles after the original Mahavishnu was long gone. I own every note he played with Miles, all of the box sets for "Silent Way," "Bitches Brew" (the "Complete Sessions" AND "40th Anniversary" boxes), "On The Corner," "Cellar Door," all of the box sets AND the individual albums...every note.

But I think "Right Off" offers the best playing of McLaughlin's career, largely due to its simplicity and deadly precision. Every chord is like a karate chop, it has the same blues-rock punch as when BB King teamed with a seasoned band of rock musicians for his "Completely Well" album and just tore up everything in sight.

I also enjoy Miles' "noise trilogy"..."Dark Magus," "Pangaea," and "Agharta." In all of those album-side length cacophonous explorations, there were jaw-dropping moments of clarity that reached out of the murk and grabbed you. Then there's the 30-minute "He Loved Him Madly" from "Get Up With It." There's just so much to discover in his catalog, more than people who think they don't like jazz could imagine.

is the live version of "Naima" with Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders from Live at the Village Vanguard Again. Completely mind-altering.

Smooth jazz.

Just listen to an hour of Monk every day for good mental health.

"Well, You Needn't" is a favorite.

My dad was a west coast jazz guy. (Farlow, Randolph, Brubeck, et al.) He had an album he never listened to that was Monk, Bird, Mingus, but i now forget the drummer. (Jones?)

Anyway, when i'm 10 and had been playing piano for about 6 years, i heard that album and that was it.

Changed teachers to a jazz guy because i wanted to play like Monk. It's so liberating because there are no "rules". Play what sounds right.

Now, as a jazz student, i was required to explain everything i was doing, so it wasn't purely freeform, but i learned more about the construction of music in 2 years, by a factor of 10, than i learned in the first 6.

Still love listening to Monk.

Then, when my last band got together in the late 80's, the drummer had never heard of Monk. This guy he knows gave him a jazz sampler CD and he was in the car listening when he said he flashed "This piano player sounds like GAC." At a red light, he picked up the CD case and it was Monk.

I felt i had accomplished my mission, after that. (BTW: Not saying i was as good. But, enough of a disciple that a non-jazz guy heard it.)

Real jazz is what you hear being blasted in some shady, down-low club at 12:30 at night on a Thursday. Smooth jazz is what I play when your alone with someone special & your drinking cognac & lighting candles that you have no intention of putting out.

... when he isn't interested in what the musicians have to say. Which is appropriate, because they ain't sayin' nothin'. It's essentially music for passive listeners.

-- Mal

Take 5 is one of my favorite tunes ever. But I don't really know enough about jazz to know who is what.

I can tell you I love Brubeck, Coltrane, Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. Oscar Peterson is pretty cool. Bela Fleck is great.

Does Herb Alpert count?

I never heard a Kenny G song I liked. Or even listened to all the way through. Not trying to be an elitist snob but he does nothing for me. I save my elitist snobbery for death metal.

I grew up on Brubeck thanks to my dad's great taste in music. Got to see the original line-up (minus Desmond, of course) back in the 90's in Anchorage. They had to help Dave walk to the piano and we were thinking, oh man this might be hard to watch. But the moment he started playing it was absolutely sublime. Brought tears to my eyes.

it's happened to me with a few performers. Man I hate that I never got to see any of those jazz greats live.

so the question now is, who are the new cool/hot jazz people to go see? Bela tours so I might get a chance to see him but can you even imagine just walking into a club one night and there's John Coltrane playing? Who are the new Brubecks and Coltranes? I desperately want to see live jazz played by legends or future legends.

One of my dad's favorites.

Smooth jazz is easy-listening background music. A type of pop, basically.

There is amazing stuff being put out every year.

Name one amazing piece of smooth jazz that has come out in the past year.

No one is following you around.

Late to the thread again... I've seen jazz fusion artists like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Larry Coryell, Return To Forever, Pat Metheny Group, and others. I've loved their music for years.
I've also seen smooth jazz artists like The Rippingtons and Acoustic Alchemy. They were all phenomenal musicians. Acoustic Alchemy's rhythm section of the Grainger brothers is as good as anybody.

The KMHD jazz station morning DJ's April Fool's joke was to pump up a song by Kenneth Bruce Gorelick and then play the first 45 seconds. Luckily, he stopped it when he did.

Yes, that is Kenny G.

I have two CD's that are just under the title of "Smoth Jazz"....and I see there is a song by Miles Davis, Chuck Mangione, George Benson, just to name a few. Love these......

Have you listened to some of these non-smooth jazz artists?

Keith Jarrett
Kamasi Washington
The Bad Plus
Nik Bartsch's Ronin
Kurt Rosenwinkel
Michael Formanek's Ensemble Kolossus
Jason Moran
Anne Mette Iversen
Tomasz Stanko

I could go on and on. There are so many amazing musicians out there, and many of them are producing great new works. Explore! You will probably be surprised.

They even played at the Fillmore (West).

I enjoy Spyro Gyra and Weather Report as much Dave Brubek and Chick Corea in much the same way as I enjoy Maurice Ravel as much as George Gershwin.

Contrasting the styles and variations on the same themes by different arrangers or musicians often allows me to see something in the piece I'd never considered before.

It makes Tim Tebow cry

He strikes me as a genuinely-nice person who has been public about personal decisions he made, didn't really try to force those on anybody else (unlike countless GOP pols), and became the poster-boy for a vast legion of assholes that believe in foisting those decisions on people. So he doesn't believe in premarital sex; his body, his choice.

That said, he's a poor QB and should have listened when NFL coaches and scouts told him he'd have more of a chance at a career in the NFL as a safety, RB or TE.

Here are some of my favorites from Smooth and non-Smooth Jazz: