Music I

     Lately I haven't been listening to too much cutting edge stuff. For the longest time I had only been listening to the most cutting edge free jazz out there. But now I've kind of reverted to the stereotypical straight ahead jazz kind of listener. I've been listening to a lot of Kenny Garrett for some reason. He's one of those sax players that I always fall back to whenever I just to listen to something and relax. He's a great player too but I've heard some of his work that is a lot more smooth jazz than I'd like him to be. I heard a few tracks of John Mcalughlin's new album and I was a bit disappointed. He was getting a lot of press in the guitar magazines because he's playing a lot of electric guitar now but those tracks sounded way too smooth jazz to me. Right now I'm just chilling listening to a Jimmy Heath pandora radio station. So it plays a lot of Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, etc. All the main heavy hitters of straight ahead jazz. I feel like you have to really go out of your way to listen to more interesting jazz (free jazz) and sometimes you don't feel like listening to it because its much harder to listen to free jazz than straight ahead because of the lack of musical and rhythmic structure. But the last free jazz I was listening to was Tomeka Reid's Quartet with Mary Halvorson. It was really good stuff! Reid's cello playing is a breath of fresh air in the free jazz scene and she's an AACM musician from Chicago, pretty much my favorite jazz collective. I think very highly of AACM because of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They pretty much changed how I see jazz music as whole. They showed me that anything is possible in jazz and that you can do everything, and do it well. A while back I wrote about a Steve Coleman record. It was good but it didn't catch my attention as hard as Henry Threadgill's work did. I'm in a free jazz group on facebook, check it out https://www.facebook.com/groups/342186855874771//. It's a great group and we have over 12,000 members. It's the biggest facebook group I've been in and I've learned a lot by listening to the music other people recommend. Although I have to say that the group is biased and mainly only post European free jazz musicians. I think there's still a lot of great free jazz musicians in Chicago and New York that haven't been discovered or been put on a big radar musically or socially among jazz musicians. The last CD I got was a rock album from a friend at work. It was a Dinosaur JR CD. It was a really good album but I just can't get back into listening to rock again after getting so deep into jazz. I'm just a straight up jazz connoisseur now and its great.