Wednesday 31 August 2016

Are these the 50 greatest jazz albums of all time?

 

uDiscoverMusic reckons this list represents the 50 greatest jazz albums of all time. Are they? No, of course they’re not. Not when so many geniuses are so under-represented.

Where’s Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, Blanton-Webster Band or Such Sweet Thunder?

Where’s Louis Armstrong with the All Stars  or Louis Plays WC Handy or Satch Plays Fats?

Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter Songbook?

Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain or Silent Way?

Thelonious Monk’s Trio?

Even (since this mostly a post-50s list) Wynton Marsalis’s Black Codes from the Underground?

Sure, this is picking albums from the 50s, 60s & 70s when albums rather than 3-minute recordings became a thing. But almost any compilation album of Django Reinhardt, Jelly Roll Morton, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Art Tatum, Artie Shaw or Billie Holiday (none of whom even get a mention) shits all over Errol Garner’s frankly boring Concert by the Sea or the Mahavishnu Bloody Orchestra, to pick just two pieces of dreck out of dozens.

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