Rock and roll and country was in the air when I grew up. Radio was still a vibrant medium and not yet hamstrung by the demographics studies that have led to the tight playlists and complete destruction of today.
A wealth of great music was just there to sample, but other forms of music were hidden from me – primarily soul and jazz. It would require some education and digging from me to get to the good stuff. Television provided exposure for both soul and jazz in the early Seventies. To be an 8-year-old in 1974 meant you thought the world was always a funky place and that towering afro’s had always been the norm.
It was also a place where jazz was electric and dissonant. It’s not that I was some super hip kid making music snob type judgments at such a young age; if something sounded good to my ears I liked it. There was certainly innocence and naivety, but discoveries once made often lead to familiarity and cynicism.
One also learns how to make better use of the resources available and those exciting moments when you just happen to catch Sly and The Family Stone or Dizzy Gillespie on the tube vanish into memory replaced by a more sedate and esoteric path. The difference in unmapped exploring and GPS certainty.
As I grew older my musical quest for the good depended on songs, books, and tips from friends. For example: I heard “She Digs Ornette” on the Zeitgeist (later called The Reivers) album Translate Slowly which led me to finally buy an Ornette Coleman record, Kerouac’s On The Road was filled with jazz references so I bought a Charlie Parker record, and then I met a fellow student at Middle Tennessee State University who was a jazz fanatic and upon his advice I was buying jazz from artists I had barely heard of before.
While sacrificing spontaneity, this method of musical discovery does allow one to plan a methodology of listening, especially with artists that have a rich back catalog of releases you’ve never heard before. When I began to purchase Miles Davis albums I started from the beginning just to be able to approximate the impact of his evolution since I had heard enough to be familiar with his work. I did the exact opposite with John Coltrane, but there was no design intended. Like the chance moments of my youth, it just happened.
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