9 jazz tunes that expanded my musical universe

Plus, the backstory of my ongoing love affair with the genre.

Jan 02, 2023

Jazz music must be among America’s greatest cultural achievements.

Unlike many musical genres, jazz seems capable of capturing the entire spectrum of human emotions in the space of a single 4-minute song—even, I’d venture, a single chord progression.

Below, I have linked to some of my all-time favorite jazz tunes to help you welcome in the new year with vim. But first, a bit of backstory.

Surprised by jazz

Most of the music I listened to growing up in the late 90s came from a radio. My parents played the Christian station in the house, my dad played a country station in his truck, and I (secretly) played the secular pop station in my bedroom, like the cool kids.

In high school I discovered folk and bluegrass, which got me closer to traditional blues music, out of which Jack Teagarden, Bix Beiderbecke, and others would emerge. But it wasn’t until college that my ears were somewhat mysteriously opened to the joys of jazz.

I remember it as a series of revelations:

sitting at a winter wedding rehearsal when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong began singing “White Christmas” overhead;
waiting for coffee in a crowded Portland cafe when John Coltrane’s saxophone suddenly sliced through the hubbub from a turntable behind the counter, followed by the buttery voice of Johnny Hartman;
eating dinner at an Italian restaurant when Django Reinhardt’s radiant acoustic riffs came soaring down from some overhead speaker.

Of course, I had no idea who these artists were at the time, only that their songs struck me as ethereal, epiphanic. Before long, I created a Spotify playlist to house all the new jazz songs I found interesting, which I began researching, collecting, and listening to obsessively. Today the playlist contains 1,160 tracks.

Jazz and poetry

As it happens, I fell upon jazz music around the same time I began writing poetry in earnest, my junior year of college. That was either happenstance or some kind of artistic destiny, given the many similarities between jazz and poetry I have since come to discover.

(Which, by the way, is why I’ve decided to include a post about jazz on Conversant; when I say this is a newsletter about building a “poetic life,” I don’t mean a poet’s life. I mean the life of creativity, connectivity, pattern-making. Read more about that here.)

To generalize, jazz and poetry share deep roots in human experience and emotions; they often rely on sophisticated schemes of rhythm, harmony, and dissonance; and they sustain complex relationships to form and improvisation, among other things.

Unfortunately, jazz, like poetry, has also come to be regarded as a highbrow hobbyhorse—or since about the 80s, kitschy filler music for waiting rooms and elevators.

This should not be! Hence, whether or not you presently consider yourself a jazz fan, I’d like to share a few special songs that continue to enrich and galvanize my creative life.