{"id":1027,"date":"2009-12-17T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T18:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/12\/jazz-1959-and-today.html"},"modified":"2009-12-17T10:51:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T18:51:00","slug":"jazz-1959-and-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/12\/jazz-1959-and-today.html","title":{"rendered":"Jazz, 1959 and Today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ONE of the exciting things in music this year was the excuse a 50th anniversary gave to us jazzheads to return to what I consider the best year <i>ever<\/i> in the history of the art form. Okay, I know that sounds like something between an advertising slogan and a gloomy denial of the ensuing 50 years. But in a year when Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, etc. were all punching at their respective peaks, it&#8217;s hard not to miss it.<\/p>\n<p>The winner of this blog&#8217;s poll for best 1959 jazz album, of course, was Miles&#8217; &#8220;Kind of Blue.&#8221;\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/scott-timberg.blogspot.com\/2009\/05\/miles-davis-and-kind-of-blue-at-50.html\">HERE<\/a> is a link to my Sunday LATimes piece on that album and its musical \/ cultural context.<\/p>\n<p>Sony has reissued that masterpiece as well as several others in expanded editions this year. The 2-CD versions of &#8220;Blue,&#8221; Brubeck&#8217;s &#8220;Take Five,&#8221; &#8220;Mingus Ah Um,&#8221; and Olatunji&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jazz.com\/jazz-blog\/2009\/9\/27\/the-forgotten-masterpiece-from-1959\">Drums of Passion<\/a>&#8221; &#8212; which the late great dj\/critic Tom Terrell called one of the century&#8217;s overlooked masterpieces &#8212; make perfect Christmas gifts.<\/p>\n<p>(I&#8217;m happy to say I own the deluxe-anniversary set of &#8220;Blue,&#8221; bigger and alas pricier than the 2-CD version, with photographs of the session and vinyl LPs in addition to outtakes.)<\/p>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/Syp8-SVzegI\/AAAAAAAAAlo\/tJ43k-jEikY\/s1600-h\/Coltrane_.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"320\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/Syp8-SVzegI\/AAAAAAAAAlo\/tJ43k-jEikY\/s320\/Coltrane_.jpg\" width=\"264\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>For those of you interested in listening closer to the present,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jazz.com\/jazz-blog\/2009\/12\/9\/the-best-cds-of-2009\">HERE<\/a> is a best-of-2009 list from Jazz.com&#8217;s Ted Gioia (author of the truly awesome &#8220;West Coast Jazz&#8221;) which includes albums by Joe Lovano, The Bad Plus and Matthew Shipp. Those three alone make me happy &#8212; as much as I love the old-school cool of 1959 &#8212; for the form&#8217;s last five decades of evolution.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ONE of the exciting things in music this year was the excuse a 50th anniversary gave to us jazzheads to return to what I consider the best year ever in the history of the art form. Okay, I know that sounds like something between an advertising slogan and a gloomy denial of the ensuing 50 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[344,42,169,214],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1027","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-344","7":"category-jazz","8":"category-miles-davis","9":"category-ted-gioia","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}