Yes, your right. I meant Ornette. A major link between the joy of swing and the edge of be bop. Got a disc of Getz somewhere. Sounds like Doris Day on acid.

This disc I've got kicking around somewhere is a lot of 'cool' standards. I think you'd have to be wearing a tux and drinking a cosmo to really get it.

Same with Django; I can appreciate it but I like my jazz with a bit more 'ghetto'. Parker's 'blue' period,  Ornette and let's not forget Billie. Holiday's voice is like someone finding a tulip in the trash.

That's my favourite of all time, Bogey.

This one is for the trad jazz fans. Much of what was idiomatic in early jazz has been absorbed by popular music, but if you listen carefully to the fills and breaks here you can tell these blokes had highly developed jazz sensibilities in 1938. The trumpet solo at the end is top class.

I wonder what the guys in the Benny Goodman band would think if they knew people were driving around in 2015 listening to a CD of a concert they had played in 1935.

The world is an amazing place.

True, but even the average stuff was better than the best stuff of today.

It's truly remarkable the story of jazz.

From the brothels, dance halls and Dixie street bands of Noo Orleans to the sophistication of the 1930s swing bands and Carnegie Hall seems like the blink of an eye. One could go back to the songs, chants & laments of the cotton fields.
And from there to the bebop clubs of New York, the cool jazz of Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan on the West Coast, the Ivy League colleges and concert halls of Europe is like a nanosecond. And along the way there have been legions of stand out figures in the music, many now sadly only remembered by a few.

But the influence of jazz is astonishing on so much of the modern world. Say what you like about America but what it has given the world more than any other culture is improvisation. The music of India and the middle east contains improvisation but it has had nowhere near the influence of American jazz. The freedom of expression it represents has flowed through to all other art forms.

Added to that is the thrust it gave to the civil rights movement. The influence it had on the thinking of young people had to be immense when they saw & heard the genius that flowed from the black musicians. It was many of the leading white musicians, Benny Goodman and others, who forced hotel and dance hall owners to treat their black musicians on an equal basis.

The popular music of today owes a great debt to the jazz musicians past & present. I remember John Lennon saying how they would go down to the Liverpool docks to buy the latest blues records from the black seamen.