I’m looking for some recommendations of music in the instrumental jazz sort of vein, and I figure this is an area in which the Internet knows more than I do. I have some fairly idiosyncratic constraints, though, so please read the whole post before recommending stuff in comments.<\/p>\n
Background: For reasons that don’t bear going into, I prefer to listen to music at bedtime. I can<\/strong> get to sleep without it, but I get to sleep faster and sleep better with music than without. Other noise sources don’t work– ticking clocks drive me up the wall, and actually keep me awake, and the glurping noises the humidifier in the bedroom makes are even worse.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Kate has a hard time going to sleep to music with lyrics– she locks in on the words, and it keeps her awake. The compromise we’ve reached is that I put the Jazz playlist from my iPod on shuffle before bed. I don’t own all that much, relative to other things, but it’s good for nine hours or so, which is three or four days of shuffling at night and when the music alarm goes on in the morning.<\/p>\n What I have is an odd assortment: one Miles Davis record, a couple of John Coltrane, and a bunch of big-band stuff– Artie Shaw, Glen Miller, Benny Goodman. The problem is, the free-form stuff is really starting to get on my nerves.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that I can’t stand the long jammy bits of Grateful Dead live albums. They lifted the basic concept from jazz, so it’s not really a shock that my annoyance with the form transfers back in the other direction. Music taste is Abelian, I guess.<\/p>\n My gripe is that there isn’t really a tune there. It’s most pronounced with faster songs– slower tempos often have a bit of a melody– and it’s more pronounced with saxophonists (though that may just be that I have more jazz tracks by saxophonists than anything else). Most of the improvisational tracks just sound like somebody fluttering the keys as fast as they can, while shifting the basic pitch up and down more or less at random. Over the last month or so, it’s gone from “Huh. Well, that’s interesting,” to “You know, this gets old fast…” to “AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Make it stop!!!!” Which, as you might imagine, is not conducive to getting to sleep.<\/p>\n I’m fine with the big-band stuff, in the same basic way that I’m fine with the Grateful Dead doing long noodly versions of traditional songs. There’s lots of improvisation, but it’s structured, and they’re improvising around a basic tune. I’m good with that, though the songs I have tend to be on the up-tempo side, and Kate might be happier with some slower and quieter stuff. The free-form stuff is driving me up the wall, though.<\/p>\n I understand that Davis and Coltrane are generally regarded as geniuses, and the albums I have are ones that are supposed to be particularly good– Kind of Blue<\/cite>, Blue Train<\/cite>, Live at the Village Vanguard<\/cite>. It may very well be that the whole form is just a dead loss at this point. But it’s also possible that there’s something out there that won’t actively piss me off, and I just don’t know what it is.<\/p>\n So, anyway, that’s my request: Instrumental jazz-type music that won’t actively annoy me when I’m trying to get to sleep. If there aren’t any free-form jazz records that are likely to be significantly better than what I’ve got, I’d also be happy with recommendations of a broader range of older stuff– I have a smattering of Fats Waller tracks that I got off Napster after reading a Howard Waldrop story, and those are pretty good (other than the occasional singing). It just needs to be more melodic, and less “Let me imitate the sound of an annoying insect with my saxophone.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m looking for some recommendations of music in the instrumental jazz sort of vein, and I figure this is an area in which the Internet knows more than I do. I have some fairly idiosyncratic constraints, though, so please read the whole post before recommending stuff in comments. Background: For reasons that don’t bear going… Continue reading Jazz Recommendations?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}