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15 Best Jazz Songs
Jazz songs are an all-time favorite. They lighten up your mood, and if you are tired, they relax you. The effects on the mind are the reasons that make people listen to jazz songs. Various researches show that those who listen to Jazz songs are less depressed. Miles...
15 Best Jazz Songs
Jazz songs are an all-time favorite. They lighten up your mood, and if you are tired, they relax you. The effects on the mind are the reasons that make people listen to jazz songs. Various researches show that those who listen to Jazz songs are less depressed. Miles...
Jazz saxophonist Roderick Cotton sophomore album release Transitions
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15 Best Jazz Songs
Jazz songs are an all-time favorite. They lighten up your mood, and if you are tired, they relax you. The effects on the mind are the reasons that make people listen to jazz songs. Various researches show that those who listen to Jazz songs are less depressed. Miles...
Jazz saxophonist Roderick Cotton sophomore album release Transitions
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15 Best Jazz Songs
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15 Best Jazz Songs
Jazz songs are an all-time favorite. They lighten up your mood, and if you are tired, they relax you. The effects on the mind are the reasons that make people listen to jazz songs. Various researches show that those who listen to Jazz songs are less depressed.
Miles Davis – ‘So What’:
If you are looking for modal jazz, Miles from the kind of Blue of 1959 is one of the best examples. The track is sublime.
Frank Sinatra – ‘Fly Me To The Moon’
This was penned down by Bart Howard in 1954. There is another version that is much better than this. It is Frank’s recording of 1964. Interesting Fact: Sinatra’s last live performance was in Chicago (Hot bed of “Hot Jazz”) at the United Center in Chicago.
Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra – ‘Mood Indigo’:
This is an all-time classic. The lyrics are from Irving Mills, and it has been covered by Frank Sinatra and Joe Jackson.
Dave Brubeck Quartet – ‘Take Five’
This was written by Paul Desmond who was a saxophonist. It continues to be the biggest selling single of all time. The first appearance was on 1959 album Time Out.
Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto – ‘The Girl From Ipanema’
This is considered the second-best song recorded after the Beatles in pop history. It is a vocal from Astrud Gilberto.
Cab Calloway – ‘Minnie The Moocher’
It sold over a million copies. Calloway also performed in a hit movie The Blues Brothers in 1980.
Louis Armstrong – ‘What A Wonderful World’
Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ wonderful standard was recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1967. It also topped the UK top 40.
Billie Holiday – ‘Strange Fruit’
This is a protest song and put with the best. It was first recorded in 1939 by Bille Holiday. It was inducted in Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978.
Ray Charles – ‘Georgia On My Mind’
The ray Charles transcendent 1960 recoding topped the US Billboard 100. It was penned down by Hoagy Carmichael and Start Gorell in 1930.
Nina Simone – ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’
It was originally released in 1961 and is considered a good number of Jazz hits.
Thelonious Monk – ‘Round Midnight’
This was the work of American jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and is believed to be the most recorded jazz standard recorded by a musician.
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – ‘Summertime’
This is very popular, and there are around 25,000 known recorded versions. It was penned by George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward.
John Coltrane – ‘Giant Steps’
Coltrane is a known name in the Jazz industry, and his Classic LP in 1964 is a significant contribution. Giant Steps was his fifth album, and it continues to remain a must-have record.
Norah Jones – ‘The Nearness Of You’
This track from jazz-pop fusionist Norah Jones was first recorded in 1940. Ever since it has remained a top choice of Jazz fans.
Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse – ‘Body & Soul’
It was released to celebrate Crooner’s 85th birthday which also gave Tony Bennet his first Billboard 200 chart topped.
Conclusion:
Jazz songs are the best forms of music. They are relaxing, and help you cut off from the heat of modern-day life.
John Coltrane
John Coltrane was born on Sep 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. He was a Saxophonist, composer, and a bandleader with an iconic image in jazz in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a golden time for Coltrane when he released albums like Giant Steps, My Favourite Things, A Love Supreme, etc.
John Coltrane was a saxophone player and composed his own music. In the early days of his life, he developed instead in jazz and decided to pursue it as a career. He worked on his style of playing the saxophone for years while working with the likes of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. His style as a solo player started getting so popular that he stated reinventing his own work. His playing was thrilling, fluid, and visionary that made people come back for more of Coltrane.
Albums and Songs
John Coltrane was under the band of Miles Davis in 1957. Coltrane was a drug addict and was fired twice from the band for his addiction to heroin. When Miles Davis fired Coltrane from the band again, Coltrane decided to finally kick his drug habit and spend more time on saxophone.
He started working with Thelonious Monk for months. During this time he emerged as a bandleader and a solo recording artist. Albums like Blue Train in 1957 and Soultrane in 1958 became popular when Coltrane was only becoming better as a solo artist.
In the 1960s, Coltrane got signed by Atlantic Records and released Giant Steps in 1960. The entire album is his own creation and composition which makes it exceptionally evergreen and pure. Coltrane became more skilled to play with different notes at once, which was known as “sheet of sound” technique.
In the autumn of 1960, John Coltrane led a band with McCoy Tyner as a pianist, Steve Davis on the bass, Elvin Jones as a drummer, and made My Favourite Things. It was released in 1961. Coltrane’s work on this album left people startled whoever listened to it. He rose to stardom for his unique taste in music, while he also received several criticisms for it. In the upcoming years, he released albums like Impressions and Live at Birdland.
In 1965, Carlton released A Love Supreme, which arguably became the most globally acclaimed record from him. The album made it to gold label along with his other work, My Favourite Things. His work was nominated twice for Grammys and is written in the history of jazz forever.
Conclusion
In his last two years of life, Coltrane made a set of materials that he liked to call as avant-garde. His last two recorded albums were Kulu Se Mana and Meditations. John Carlton died at the age of 40 from liver cancer. Considering what the jazz fans have to say, Coltrane left a huge impact on music with his innovative and demanding techniques. Coltrane received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. His work is a study for the young and upcoming jazz musicians to understand the dynamics and possibilities while composing music.
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong was one of the legendary instrumentalists who took a step forward to change the way people will sing in future altogether. He is one of the spoken jazz musicians who improvised the concept of solo improv, use of scat singing, and the concept of swing.
Nicknames as Satchmo, Pops, and Ambassador Satch were given to Louis Armstrong throughout his career in jazz music. Louis was a native of New Orleans, Louisiana. Born on August 4, 1991, Armstrong lived in a neighbourhood nicknamed “The Battlefield” due to its condition. He had a rough youth time being raised by his mother alone. His father left the family after Louis was born. Her mother often left Louis with his maternal grandmother to earn money. Louis left the school in fifth grade and started to look for work. A local Jewish family got his a job for delivering coal and also encouraged him to sing. In 1912, young Louis shot his father’s gun in the air to celebrate new year’s eve. He got arrested immediately and was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. He received his first musical instruction on the cornet and immediately fell in love with music. He got released from the home in 1914 and started pursuing his career in music.
Music and Albums
Louis Armstrong replaced Oliver in Kid’s Ory’s Band in 1918, that was the most popular band in New Orleans at that time. He could now stop working manual labour jobs and concentrate completely on cornet. In 1922, He received a call from Oliver to come to Chicago and join his Creole Jazz Band, which he accepted. Chicago gave the right audience to Armstrong and his music.
He worked with several artists as a sideman, creating inspirational music, backing blues singers such as Bessie Smith. In 1925, OKeh Records decided to let Armstrong create his own band which they called – Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. The band created over 60 records from 1925 to 1928. Later the band became Hot Seven. He also began singing in these recordings, popularizing wordless “scat singing.”
Late Career
Armstrong had a gruesome number of tours in the 1950s. He pushed himself to his limits which also had effects on his health. In 1959, he suffered a heart attack while travelling to Spoleto, Italy. But, Armstrong only grew stronger after this and was performing 300 nights a year. In 1964, he released a new record that hit the number one spot in the pop music charts in May 1964. By late 1968, Armstrong’s gruesome lifestyle caught up with his health and forced him to stop performing by 1969. Armstrong spent most of his time at home and practised the trumpet daily. Despite several heart attacks, Armstrong’s spirit to perform never stopped. Armstrong died on his bed in his sleep at his home in Queens, New York, July 6, 1971.
Miles Davis
Miles Davis was one of the top jazz musicians during his era. He was born in 1926 in Illinois and moved to New York City at the age of 18 to pursue music. He was driven by a vision of changing jazz music completely and won eight Grammys while doing so. He was a musician who started from a circle of modern jazz and had intuitions to take up new sounds and challenges. While every other musician was settling with something they have discovered already, Miles never stopped exploring and followed his intuition and innovations until his death.
Early Life
Miles Davis was born to a prosperous dental surgeon and a music teacher on May 26, 1926. He grew up in a higher middle-class household and received his first trumpet at the age of 13. He received his very first lessons from Elwood Buchanan, who was a friend of his father and the director of a music school. Miles style of playing the trumpet is inspired a lot from Buchanan.
Miles started playing professionally in high school and was invited by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to play with them when they needed a trumpet player to replace their sick bandmate. Miles later left Illinois and enrolled in Juilliard School in New York.
He met Charlie Parker, and they started playing at Harlem nightclubs. During these gigs, he met several musicians with whom he would eventually play in future.
Career and Albums
Miles Davis became the bearer of the new generation of musicians and shaped the music improvisation more than half-dozen times. In 1945, Miles Davis decided to drop out of Juilliard and became a full-time jazz musician. Along with side Charlie Parker, Miles recorded his first recording in 1946. For the next two years, Davis and Parker recorded non-stop. This was also the time Davis was experimenting with the improves in jazz. In 1949, Davis and Parker formed a band of nine musicians. Some of them played uncommon instruments like French horn, Trombone, and Tuba. Davis released a series of singles that were his first contribution to modern jazz. Later, all the songs were released again under the album ‘Birth of the Cool’ in 1950.
In the next decade, he released all-time classics like Porgy and Bess and Kind of Blue. Among jazz musicians and lovers, Kind of Blue is credited as the highest-selling jazz album because everyone at that time had a copy of it. It sold more than 2 million copies.
Late-life
Miles Davis worked all his life to deliver something new and innovative to the listeners and musicians. He was awarded Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1990. In the coming year, he also performed with Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He played some of his best classics and some of them he had not played for over 20 years. In the same year, Davis died due to pneumonia on Sep 28, 1991. His final recording with Quincy Jones brought him his final Grammy in 1993.
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