what got you into jazz

My dad.

well, in a roundabout way, you did marcello, by recommending the charles mingus album (let my children hear music), previously i had really liked a shamek farrah track (first impressions), i'm still not hugely into it, i am a tokenist. this threads token tokenist?

Blue Note put out a 99p sampler cassette in about 1986, I liked that.

not really into jazz, my dad has loads of it though. So, I could listen to it if I liked.

growing up with it throughout childhood

Maybe the Style Council too.

Tutu by Miles Davis

Combination of a few things: influence of friends, teachers/professors, interest in American history, etc., etc.

A friend of mine played me Monk's "Little Rootie Tootie." And lo, a punk/indie kid discovered that the old jazz men spoke his inchoate language too. Weird, but true. And then Miles/Mingus/Coltrane/Coleman sealed the deal.

Oh and a turning point was seeing Charles Gayle in 1994. At the time, I only knew about Charles Mingus and Miles Davis.

"Tutu by Miles Davis" and Cab Calloway on The Blue Brothers film

I've never really managed it. I like some jazz records (the obvious ones you'd think I liked) and there have been times - eg when working with Andrew L! - that I thought I was on the verge of 'getting' it but, eh, no.

Another vote for dad.

Playing drums ----> listening to Buddy Rich because he an unconscionable bad ass ----> listening to Miles and Blue Note stuff, after narrowly averting not liking it due to not understanding Sorcerer/Tony Williams and not liking or understanding 80s jazz like Wynton and Chick Corea's Akoustic Band.

acid jazz, so i guess its thanks to gilles peterson

ken burns and the other fellow with the bugle

my dad.... his worn out copy of dave brubeck's "time out". it was so smooth and catchy. it was hard not to stay out of his big band records too.

m.

just going to the right rec shops really (same with improv, its quite expensive usually) and seeing it there at decent prices.

i buy the free stuff actually so if you're w. marsalis it ain't jazz dude!

My friend Steve (who had things like 'Live Evil') + R. Meltzer's jazz rec reviews in Forced Exposure + Sonic Youth + 'Spiritual Unity' by Albert Ayler

my Dad listened to a lot of it, but it took me a while to get into. Playing drums was part of it for me as well. A crucial moment took place when a friend in high school lent me a Sonny Rollins record, along with Maceo Parker and Uncle Tupelo. Then I went to a music store near my high school and got Coltrane's Live At Birdland, which, as I have said a million times, changed my life. After that, I have gotten loads of Miles stuff from all eras, as well as more Coltrane, and from there, Ayler, RRK, Shorter, Sharrock, etc. I tend to appreciate, but not enjoy, swing and early bop. I have been lucky not to know too many snobs whose ideologies might have turned me off at an early age.

I still don't feel that I've gotten into it although I like some examples of it, and at times have liked more than I do currently, or different things anyway.

Hearing free jazz (at around 12 or 13) made me much more interested, and Coltrane was one of the first musicians I really liked (or whose sound I could recognize--which might be part of why I liked him). Before that I had used it as aural wallpaper mostly.

I suspect that there is so much of it, there must be a lot more of it out there that I would like, but it's going to require a lot of sifting, since I still think most of it isn't going to do much for me.

When do you decide you will never like something? I'm not sure it's possible. I have gone for years not liking a certain CD and then heard it entirely differently. Does it work for genres?

in highschool, the majority of the music i listened to was hip hop (and pink floyd, but shhhh...)

i started buying jazz records because of the samples. friends would tell me so and so sampled this record. my collection just started growing, but i was getting really sick of owning all these records for a 1-5 second snippet on one track and thinking the rest was junk. so i got into more than just the 70s funk jazz

now the bulk of my collection is jazz. mostly freer, spiritual stuff. along the lines of alice coltrane, pharoah sanders, don cherry kinds of stuff

I think Musician magazine did a profile on John Coltrane, and I picked up a copy of BLUE TRAIN. One of the few albums that legitimately changed my life forever.

Discovered free jazz in college through working at the radio station, but the first time it really clicked was at a Splatter Trio/Debris/Rova/Hank Roberts & Tim Berne concert.

I saw the movie "Bird" when I was in 7th grade (at a point when I was mainly listening to Pink Floyd, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles, etc.). I'd never really thought about jazz before -- I definitely didn't know who Coltrane was, for instance, and only had the most peripheral awareness of people like Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. Whatever its flaws, that movie somehow made a light go on in my head; I'm tempted to say that "I realized this music had teeth" but I'm not sure that's what I really thought at the time. Maybe it's more accurate, if less colorful, to say "I realized there was something about this music that made me want to find out more about it".

Once I started playing in jazz band in 8th grade, and heard Coltrane, Jaco Pastorius, etc., things progressed pretty rapidly from there. My friends M. and N. definitely accelerated the process, too -- they were a few steps ahead of me, both in terms of their musicianship and their familiarity with the literature -- and that gave me a lot of drive to try to keep up with them, when we played together and talked about music.

I don't remember what the first jazz album I got was -- probably something I taped or borrowed from M., or E., my brother-in-law. I borrowed Jaco's two solo albums from E., as well as Mingus at Antibes, Hartman and Coltrane, and The Best of Miles Davis (which, totally went over my head: it took me at least a year to figure Miles out).

I had a very brief flirtation with Mahavishnu (haven't even heard them in years) but John McLaughlan kept name-checking Coltrane so I bought "A Love Supreme". Took quite a lot of hard listening before the penny dropped (I'd never be interested in persevering so hard with something that didn't initially appeal nowadays).

My guitar teacher when I was 15 dubbed off around a bunch of 90 minute cassttes of albums by Coltrane, Miles, Jaco Pastorious, Pat Metheny, and John McGlothlin. After digging into that I got into Bitches Brew, Mahavishnu, Mingus, Coleman and others...this was also around the same time I got into punk.

Jazz until I was older was something that I listened to on my own, as really other than one friend, no one else I hung out with really liked it until years later. My early memories of listening to jazz are also tied with reading some cool books, as I used to like to put it on when I was reading back in those times.

I think the thing that really started me off was buying the Bitches Brew box. I had a few albums before that, mainly Miles. Enough people raved about BB that even if I didn't like it at first, I felt I'd have to get into it having spent that sort of money, and sure enough it worked. I had much the same experience with "Trout Mask Replica", which was one of the first albums I ever bought. Didn't like it at first, but I'd spent so much money on it (seven pounds twenty nine pee if I remember correctly) that I persevered.

Anyway, I was pretty soon travelling backwards and forwards through Miles Davis, and then sideways to the second quintet's solo albums, other Blue Note stuff, Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Jarrett, and so on.

And Coltrane, but somehow I've never warmed to him - I prefer Cannonball's playing in the MD sextet, which I think is one of those things a lot of people think but don't like to say because it's not the conventional wisdom. Coltrane's intense, but intensely what?

in junior high school I would finish lunch and go by the stage to hear the high school jazz band practice, and something about it made me try out for the junior high jazz band once I had the opportunity. 'getting into' as a listener was more complicated.

Same older brother that got me into "college rock." In addition to the REM albums he was bringing home, he was also into Miles Davis (but only up thru In A Silent Way), Monk, Benny Goodman, etc. It was that first big wave of Columbia Jazz Masters CD issues that did it really.

The Rose's department store had alot of the Columbia and Atlantic jazz albums for sale on casette for around two and three dollars each when I was fifteen or so and learning to drive (my car only had a cassette player, as is true today as well) so I bought these up and grew quasi-addicted for awhile. The'Jack Johnson' reissue sealed the deal (still one of my favorite albums).

My Dad, bless him - kindly introduced me to the wonders of New Orleans Dixieland stuff - Beiderbecke, Bechet, Satchmo and all that, er, jazz. Still love it now - no time for anything post-about 1940 tho.

unless Herb Alpert counts.

No.

Wayne Shorter's solo on Aja / Weather Report's "Night Passage"

Meeting quasi-jazzfiend M. in first year. Reading about Charles Mingus somewhere & falling in love with the concept of him (didn't hurt that the first thing I picked up Mingus Ah Um, seemed really exciting). Also tied in with the war/postwar US literature I was studying.

My parents were never fans (or at least actively so)...I dunno. I think it was just one of those things that was around.

it was acid jazz for me as well. that took me to latin jazz, and from there to kenny dorham, herbie hancock, brazil... i still love and buy and dj a lot of this stuff.

age 9
Brubeck - Take 5

age 20
Jazz class featuring Smithsonian Collection Of Classic Jazz LP Box Set:
Charlie Parker - "Ko Ko"
Sony Rollins - "Pent-up House"
Miles Davis - "So What"
etc

age 21
Charlie Parker - Savoy Sessions 2LP and Ross Russell - 'Bird Lives' book

rock sucks

Hearing "Files de Kilmanjaro" at 17 years old on acid.

I've always been into it, but 1986's Round Midnight (Dexter Gordon) really lit a fire under my butt. ¥

Initially, my Uncle's Herbie Hancock records and later dope.

thinking that rock sucked (it was the 1980s so it was E-Z to think that)

Yeah, you can't think that nowadays!

massive curiosity about all music but not knowing where to start so giving up. liked certain swing things as a 9-year-old or so, got some big-band tapes (I was heavily into old time radio shows at that point so it wasn't a stretch). it crystallized later when Christgau gave all those A minuses to Electric Miles albums in the 70s book; started tracking those down (or tried to, most of 'em were out of print). Jack Johnson was the way in for my rock-besotted self as well.

a friend made me a tape. can't remember most of it too clearly but it had Hog Calling Blues by Mingus and Ghosts by Ayler. Too ignorant to think of jazz as anything but supperclub at the time I f**king freaked. oh, and Mouth music by Ornette. And I was deep into No Wave at the time.

My dad played John Coltrane - A Love Supreme a lot when i was young.

One of my mom's boyfriends, who had a record collection that I loved. I really wanted my mom to marry that guy.

three seperate things that happened to me between the ages of 15-20:

(1) the record club i belonged to recommended Out to Lunch by Eric Dolphy, and it was so engrossing and too hard to easily understand, so it set the standard for jazz to come for me (and led directly to Mingus and Coltrane)

(2) my closest friend and me both bought the same Anthony Braxton lp in a big cut-out sale, because we thought it looked cool, intellectual, obscure etc. with the strange diagrams -- we both played it lots and found we had this "new secret shared knowledge that nobody else in new zealand had" (very high school logic)

the Braxton and Dolphy both complimented each other yet made the other seem less alien, so i knew there was other music out there like that, somewhere, and so this started a musical quest for me

(3) having loved the piano/backing of David Bowie's 'Aladdin Sane' i read about it compared favourably to some jazz piano, notably [leading me directly to] Cecil Taylor
(Mark Sinker found out about Taylor having liked Garson and Bowie's song too, i later read in The Wire magazine 'Epinphanies', a weird coincidence)

(1) and (2) made out the groundwork for (3), although i'm still making sense of Braxton and Taylor in my own way, which is part of the ongoing mystery and most of the fun

Being played Dudu Pukwana and Andy Shepherd on the way to school.

heh, was ready to answer this thread all over again.
recovered-memory : in TS Eliot-worshipping phase, read the Eliotcentric The Archivist - recent novel about a librarian whose wife gets institutionalised & commits suicide. while listening to lots of Bud Powell. was v.taken with (her) descriptions of his music (also : first serious engagement w/jewish diaspora, possibly - so doubly hitherto-unknown-facets-of-america-etc) despite not finding anything by her for years.

am now attempting to get into jazz again (still haven't really "succeeded"!) via Sextant (& have Get Up With It & Dancing In Your Head on order) after reading Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun. possession of a walkman may be useful.

(haha Radiohead interviews going on about Alice Coltrane circa Kid A! "The National Anthem"! hahaha!)

sadly it was prob a "yeah how hardcore can i get! bring the ruckus" impulse

also def ess kay's sextant/george russell/eshun thing as a teen