(1986, Atlantic Records)
I do not pretend to be anything more than a casual jazz fan. Like most white assholes who came of age in the '80s, my first forays into the jazz genre were the massively-proclaimed genius of Miles Davis. He was the guy you were supposed to like if you were into all sorts of wacky music, showing how intelligent and open-minded you were, to find pleasing rhythms in rhythmless blasts of horn and snare all jumbled together in chaotic meanderings. I didn't really stay with Miles Davis though, but once I was culling for samples for boom bap hip hop beats, I dug deep through the jazz bins of Plan 9's used records, before they even had a basement in Carytown. Mostly, I acquired and admired a ton of jazz fusion stuff, that wacky intelli-funk nonsense spearheaded by Herbie Hancock, but I found a lot of stuff I dug just by reading the musicians and buying other cheap jazz records featuring the same players. That's how I knew what the fuck Diamond D was talking about when he'd always say "Willie Bobo". I'm so old school and smart and hip and have a bunch of records and am awesome, aren't I?
Anyways, this record is a compilation of Atlantic jazz, and was probably the first John Coltrane or Charles Mingus I ever had on vinyl. Oddly enough, neither of those dudes are the ones who cracked my skull on this comp. First off, back when I'd make mixtapes for friends like us older folks used to do back in the days, Rahsaan Roland Kirk's "Black Mystery Has Been Revealed" was a great thing to throw in the mix, best at the end of side A, to hear Kirk's freak out to kind of wrap up one side of a cassette mix and leave you hanging wildly if you were about to bolt without flipping the tape (because we didn't have autoflip tape players that often back then, just the dual cassette thing where you could put the second one on play with the pause button and when the first one ended, it bumped the pause button so you could listen to ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MINUTES OF MUSIC IN A ROW!), and also set you up nicely to get into the other side, which knowing me back then, probably would've started out with either Redman or Eddie Harris if I wanted to continue the crazy theme.
But this album has "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman on it as well, and was where I came into knowledge of that song even existing. This is one of the greatest songs ever, and really, helped me understand that I don't understand jazz music, because it's like wacky retard black man way of trying to create soothing wonderful feelings in you, but doing in a convoluted back alley direction where you think you won't get there. "Hey, let's make a bunch of crazy sounds with all these big band instruments and just generally fuck shit up, but something awesome might happen if we're junked up enough." I can tell you this, along with "Central Park West" by Coltrane (not on this record), are my two all-time no doubt about it greatest most favorite jazz genre songs of forever. And they are two of the most unexplainably beautiful songs I've ever heard. You've got to understand, I'm a genetic redneck from rural southside Virginia. Just the fact I've willingly listened to jazz music makes me a gay in my ancestors' eyes. But to not only just listen, but to find just miraculous songs like "Lonely Woman" in that wacky genre, that makes me really really gay. And now I've written about it on the internet, to score the trifecta. Word up.
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