This is a new genre for me, but one I’ve gone deep on in the past week: Japanese jazz and soul. Like always with YouTube, the rabbit hole is deep (and rewarding!).
This guy is a YouTube DJ that picks a genre and a geography, and digs crates., or does so virtually. He has a video on his process.
The new medium in COVID times for musicians is the live session on Zoom. This is a fun one from Seatbelts, playing their theme song from the 90s anime Cowboy Bebop.
This year is the 60th anniversary of Miles Davis’s legendary Kind of Blue.
This video is a great explainer of the origins of Kind of Blue’s modal jazz style and the history behind how the group came together to make it happen.
I have no idea how many hundreds of times I’ve listened to this album over the years, but it’s still in the frequent rotation to put on whenever I can’t think of anything else. A default soundtrack for working or...
The title track from vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s 1975 album Montara. I love the gentle electric piano, muted horns, and of course Bobby’s vibes.
Madlib also sampled this one on his album Shades of Blue, which remixed tons of the great hits from the Blue Note catalog.
There are several excellent renditions of this tribute to the late trumpeter Clifford Brown, originally composed by saxophonist Benny Golson (well known for his time with the Jazz Messengers).
My favorite version is this live cut from Freddie Hubbard, 1984. Captures the soul of the original perfectly, on stage and with little accompaniment.
See also the excellent original studio recording from Donald Byrd’s Jazz Lab, 1957.
This live rendition by The Jazz Messengers is a great version of an even better song. It was composed by Art Blakey’s sideman and pianist Bobby Timmons (on the keys in this session). I love the blues-infected build and refrain. Lee Morgan’s blasting first solo is one of the best out there.
My dad has been putting together a playlist of all-time great songs, and mentioned to me and my brothers that we should do the same and share with one another. “Great” songs in this case don’t have to be by any particular measure other than personally important to yourself — either ones you got enjoyment out of when younger, ones that have an emotional connection, or just fun favorites you always tune in to when you hear it come on.
I started putting together my own playlist and thought I’d share them here in no particular order.
The first on...
This is amazing work by Google putting air quality sensors on their Street View cars to collect air quality data. The resolution of this is amazing — to see how drastically the pollutant level changes from street to street.
I love Ryan Singer’s perspective on product development. In this post he levels critique at the now-commonplace “agile” software development process. It’s been distorted into a simplistic set of tactical process methods (building in “cycles”), and has lost what its original value was as an upgrade...
The ultimate checklist for my completionist self to listen to the entire Blue Note back catalog. I’m currently ripping through the 1950s, building some excellent playlists.
Jazz is a genre of music I never used to take seriously. When I started listening to decent music around junior high (very little of it was “good”), I would mentally lump jazz music in with the standards and classical pieces — the “music we play in band class” genre. I was even an alto sax player, but had next to no interest in learning the history of the music, or a desire to understand its styles, structure, or theory. Early in college, something turned me on to the records of Coltrane and...