anyone like jazz?

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I'm a fan of "Hot Jazz" such as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, the stuff that came out in the 20s and 30s, which is really lively and fun. Another kind I like is Acid-Jazz, which is a relatively new, electronicaly mixed, very melodic jazz - sort of the opposite of bebop. As Vince said on the first page of the thread, Jazz is a hugely varied category. I'd say it's more varied than any other music category.

Im a big fan of Jazz, both traditional and modern and I love Swing and music from the early 1900's thru to the 1940's.
I am also a big fan of Classical Music which helps me chill out and relax

It might have something to do with the swinging pulse of most Jazz music. As an aspie musician, it has always been difficult for me to play 'straight,' meaning to have all pulses within a beat last for exactly the same ammount of time.

It could also have something to do with the way that, in many types of Jazz, chords function relative to surrounding chords, as opposed to the overall key of the song (heavy use of secondary dominants, tritone substitutions and the like). Most popular music is based on the I-IV-V progression in a given key, or does not contain functional harmony at all.

Also, Jazz, like classical music, places great emphasis on voice leading - the various notes in a chord all move in certain ways that are both smoothe and harmonically strong when shifting to a new chord. However, most popular music guitarists either use open chords or slide one chord shape up and down the neck. These techniques seldom offer the same strong/smoothe voice leading that is found in Jazz and Classical music.

Ah... Jazz. Given that he listens to classical as well, I'm going to go with the complexity and patterns that exist within both. Even in the most freeform jazz exist rules (to be broken, of course) that guide and influence the flow and sound. There are rich tonal hues that exist only away from the simple requirements of popular music that may be stimulating, or the sheer variance in instrumentation. It also tends to have an external emotional influence on me; he may be finding something in that as well.


M.

I LOVE jazz. I have Miles and various others.

Pretty spot-on. I can respect classical music for the skill involved in playing it. And there is very little music I dislike. But Jazz has always been my favorite for its organic. Just feels alive, has its own life.

the Bebop era of the late 50s/60s is the best for it. Theloneous Monk, Miles Davis, Coltrane.

Herbie Hancock is still very active in the jazz scene and producing some amazing stuff.

Actually, while I (being Vince) obviously agree with myself that Jazz is extremely varied (and often amazingly awesome, so don't take this little tangent as anti-jazz), I'd say there are plenty of categories with if not more then at least pretty much the same amount of variation. Rock, for example, is a very loose term, spanning everything from The Beatles to speed metal to who knows what. Hip hop as well (provided you look beyond MTV, where it's not a wide category at all, and often barely even identifiable as music), being often based on recutting and mixing samples of old records of all genres (and thus incorporating elements of all categories), and putting more focus on lyrical experimentation and individual style than probably any other category (again, provided you're looking in the right places and not the mainstream, where experimentation and individual style appear to be completely forbidden for some reason...but I digress). Not to mention pop, a term which can describe any music that has been or even tried to emulate what's popular at any given point in time (including bad generic "hip hop"). That's actually a lot of variation, if you think about it.