My Twitter feed was inundated with posts about Kind of Blue and Time Out for International Jazz Day yesterday. Refusing to play into the hands of cynical marketers and self-serving institutions, I didn’t write any replies. Yet the clickbait posts soliciting answers to questions like “which jazz records changed your life?” prompted me recall becoming a discerning jazz enthusiast in the 1980s. Then, as now, my ears were open to all genres, so jazz albums had to be just as exciting as groundbreaking music by the likes of the Clash, Prince, Public Enemy and Talking Heads. The ten albums on the following list that I purchased as new releases in the 1980s met that standard. Without these titles in my life during that formative decade, I may not have made a lifelong commitment to jazz.
1. Jack DeJohnette- Special Edition (1980)
2. Pat Metheny- 80/81 (1980)
3. James Blood Ulmer- Free Lancing (1981)
4. Miles Davis- Decoy (1983)
5. Wynton Marsalis- Black Codes (From the Underground) (1985)
6. John Zorn- The Big Gundown (1985)
7. Ornette Coleman- In All Languages (1987)
8. Henry Threadgill- Easily Slip Into Another World (1988)
9. Bobby Watson & Horizon- No Question About It (1988)
10. Chet Baker- Plays and Sings from the Film “Let’s Get Lost” (1989)
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I write weekly concert previews for The Kansas City Star.
(Original image of the Tennessee Theater at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, by There Stands the Glass.)
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