My Top 25 Favorite Jazz Songs (At the Moment), Vinyl Standard

01 Favorite

Paul Desmond · Time Out · 1959

Take Five

Dave Brubeck Quartet: Dave Brubeck, piano · Paul Desmond, alto saxophone · Eugene Wright, bass · Joe Morello, drums

One of the all-time classics, and a song that belongs in any conversation about the most important jazz records ever made. Joe Morello opens with that hi-hat and ride cymbal pattern, and four bars in you already know exactly where you are. It is one of the most instantly recognizable sounds in the music. Paul Desmond's alto floats over the top, Brubeck keeps the 5/4 unshakable, and the whole thing feels effortless even though almost nothing about it should. A record I never get tired of.

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02 Favorite

Miles Davis · Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud · 1958

Générique

Miles Davis, trumpet · Barney Wilen, tenor saxophone · René Urtreger, piano · Pierre Michelot, bass · Kenny Clarke, drums

Recorded in one night in December 1957 while Miles improvised directly to Louis Malle's noir film. One of the sexiest jazz tracks you will ever hear, and the perfect after-midnight listen. The trumpet hovers like a question with no answer, the room shrinks around it, and everything outside the music quietly disappears.

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03 Favorite

Neil Diamond · Got My Own · 1972

Play Me

Gene Ammons, tenor saxophone · Hank Jones, electric piano · Joe Beck, guitar · Ron Carter, bass · Idris Muhammad, drums · Ed Bogas, arranger

Silky smooth 1970s Ammons at his absolute best. "Play Me" is the Neil Diamond song, but in Jug's hands it turns into something else entirely: warm, slow, romantic, a tenor saxophone leaning into every phrase like there is no place else it would rather be. Hank Jones on electric piano, Ron Carter underneath, Idris Muhammad keeping the pulse, and Ammons up top making the whole thing feel like a slow exhale at the end of a long day. The track I keep reaching for when I want jazz to feel like coming home.

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04 Favorite

Duke Pearson · A New Perspective · 1964

Cristo Redentor

Donald Byrd, trumpet · Hank Mobley, tenor saxophone · Herbie Hancock, piano · Kenny Burrell, guitar · Donald Best, vibraphone · Butch Warren, bass · Lex Humphries, drums · choir directed by Coleridge Perkinson

Duke Pearson wrote this for Donald Byrd's A New Perspective, and it remains one of the most unusual records Blue Note ever issued: a jazz ensemble with a gospel choir, working out something that sounds genuinely sacred. The choir floats in like a sunrise, Byrd's trumpet answers from somewhere quieter and more reverent than anywhere else in his catalog, and the whole thing builds slowly toward something larger than any one player. Hank Mobley on tenor, Herbie Hancock at the piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Donald Best on vibraphone, the textures keep deepening as the track unfolds. I put this on when I want to feel small in a good way.

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05 Favorite

Ann Ronell · Scenery · 1976

Willow Weep for Me

Ryo Fukui, piano · Satoshi Denpo, bass · Yoshinori Fukui, drums

Ryo Fukui was a self-taught pianist from Hokkaido who recorded Scenery in 1976 with a tiny pressing nobody noticed at the time. Decades later it became one of the most sought-after Japanese jazz records in the world, and "Willow Weep for Me" is one of the reasons why. The Ann Ronell standard, played with a touch that belongs in the same conversation as Bill Evans but is unmistakably Fukui's own. Patient, internal, every phrase given exactly the space it asks for, the trio breathing as one. The kind of track that makes you stop whatever else you were doing.

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06 Favorite

Luiz Bonfá · Black Orpheus · 1976

Manhã de Carnaval

Isao Suzuki Trio: Isao Suzuki, bass and cello · Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, piano and electric piano · Donald Bailey, drums

Eleven minutes of Japanese jazz at its absolute most lyrical. Isao Suzuki plays the melody on pizzicato cello, his tone enormous and singing, Yamamoto's Fender Rhodes shimmers underneath, and Donald Bailey's brushwork holds the whole thing in mid-air. The Luiz Bonfá theme from the 1959 film, but Suzuki turns it into something quieter and more reflective, a midnight version of a song that started its life on a beach. Recorded in one session at Aoi Studio in Tokyo on February 20, 1976. The opening track on one of the most sought-after Three Blind Mice records, and worth every dollar people pay for an original pressing.

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07 Favorite

Benny Golson · The Other Side of Benny Golson · 1958

I Remember Clifford

Benny Golson, tenor saxophone · Curtis Fuller, trombone · Barry Harris, piano · Jymie Merritt, bass · Philly Joe Jones, drums

Benny Golson wrote this for Clifford Brown after Brown died in a car accident in June 1956 at age twenty-five. It is one of the most covered jazz ballads ever written, and the song that secured Golson's reputation as a composer for the rest of his life. This 1958 Riverside session is the version I keep coming back to: Golson's tenor and Curtis Fuller's trombone weaving the melody together, Barry Harris quiet at the piano, Philly Joe holding everything in suspension. Devastating in the best way. A piece of music that holds grief and beauty in the same breath without letting either one win.

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08 Favorite

Miles Davis & Bill Evans · Kind of Blue · 1959

Blue in Green

Miles Davis, trumpet · John Coltrane, tenor saxophone · Bill Evans, piano · Paul Chambers, bass · Jimmy Cobb, drums

The slowest and smallest moment on Kind of Blue, and the one that sounds most like a private conversation. Miles plays muted, Bill Evans leans in around him, Coltrane comes in with three sentences and is gone again, and the whole thing is over in five and a half minutes. Authorship has been argued about for decades, Miles got the writing credit on the label, Bill Evans always quietly maintained that he wrote most of it, and you can hear why he made the claim: it is the most Evans-sounding piece on the album. The one track from Kind of Blue I put on by itself when the house is asleep.

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09 Favorite

John Coltrane · Giant Steps · 1960

Naima

John Coltrane, tenor saxophone · Wynton Kelly, piano · Paul Chambers, bass · Jimmy Cobb, drums

Coltrane wrote this for his first wife, Juanita Naima Grubbs, and recorded it twice in 1959 before getting the version he wanted, the one with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb (the same rhythm section that had just cut Kind of Blue a few months earlier). On a record otherwise built on the most demanding harmonic vocabulary in jazz, "Naima" is the exhale. No sheets of sound. No "Coltrane changes." Just a melody and a man who means every note of it. After everything that comes before it on Giant Steps, the simplicity is devastating.

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10 Favorite

Duke Ellington · Night Train · 1963

C Jam Blues

Oscar Peterson, piano · Ray Brown, bass · Ed Thigpen, drums

Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard wrote this in 1942: a riff so simple it is barely a tune, two notes repeated until they become something else. Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen take it and turn it into a master class in how a piano trio is supposed to sound. Brown's bass is mixed almost shoulder to shoulder with the piano, Thigpen's brushes glide underneath, and Peterson plays with the kind of swing that makes you understand why people called him one of the greatest of his generation in pure mechanical terms. Night Train was cut in a single session in December 1962. It still feels like that night is happening every time the needle drops.

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11 Favorite

Thelonious Monk · Conversations with Myself · 1963

’Round Midnight

Bill Evans, piano (three overdubbed tracks, recorded on Glenn Gould’s Steinway CD 318)

Thelonious Monk wrote this around 1944 and it became one of the most recorded songs in jazz. Bill Evans's version on Conversations with Myself is unlike any other: he plays three separate piano tracks, layering them on top of each other on Glenn Gould's Steinway, and the song builds from a sparse first take to an orchestral density by the third layer. Three Bill Evanses in conversation, each one listening to the others through headphones, none of them redundant. Monk's ballad turned into a chamber piece that only one pianist could have made.

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12 Favorite

Gerry Mulligan · Night Lights · 1963

Night Lights

Gerry Mulligan Sextet: Gerry Mulligan, piano (on this track) · Art Farmer, flugelhorn · Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone · Jim Hall, guitar · Bill Crow, bass · Dave Bailey, drums

Mulligan wrote this and plays piano on it, not the baritone saxophone he is known for. Art Farmer on flugelhorn carries the melody, Bob Brookmeyer's valve trombone shadows underneath, Jim Hall's guitar hangs in the corners of the room, and Mulligan's piano frames everything in the kind of harmonic restraint only a wind player would think to write. Recorded at Nola Penthouse Studios in New York in September 1963. Late-night cool jazz at its most distilled. The whole album takes its name from this one track, and you understand why the first time you hear it.

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13 Favorite

Kenny Burrell · Midnight Blue · 1963

Soul Lament

Kenny Burrell, solo guitar (no rhythm section, no Stanley Turrentine, no congas, the only solo-guitar track on the record)

The only solo-guitar track on a record otherwise built around a tight ensemble blues, and one of the most quietly devastating two and a half minutes on any Blue Note album. Kenny Burrell alone, no Turrentine, no Major Holley, no Bill English, no Ray Barretto. Just an electric guitar playing a slow blues with so much warmth and inflection that you stop noticing how much space he is leaving between the notes. Recorded January 8, 1963 at Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs. Two minutes and forty-three seconds, and over too soon.

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14 Favorite

Ronnie Foster · Two Headed Freap · 1972

Mystic Brew

Ronnie Foster, organ · Gene Bertoncini, guitar · George Devens, vibes & percussion · George Duvivier, double bass · Gordon Edwards, bass guitar · Jimmy Johnson, drums · Arthur Jenkins, congas · Wade Marcus, arranger

Ronnie Foster's Blue Note debut, recorded at Van Gelder's in two days in January 1972. "Mystic Brew" is the track everyone knows even if they don't know they know it: J Dilla pulled the loop for A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" twenty years later, and Vijay Iyer, BadBadNotGood, and Kendrick Lamar have all gone back to it since. The original is a slow, hazy groove built on Foster's organ chords, Gene Bertoncini's guitar weaving through the changes, Arthur Jenkins's congas keeping it loose. Jazz-funk in the exact pocket where Blue Note was pointing in the early 1970s, and one of the most consequential samples in hip-hop history.

See the sample story on the Jazz Hip-Hop page ›

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15 Favorite

Vince Guaraldi · A Charlie Brown Christmas · 1965

Linus and Lucy

Vince Guaraldi Trio: Vince Guaraldi, piano · Fred Marshall, bass · Jerry Granelli, drums · recorded September 17, 1965 at Whitney Studio, Glendale, CA

Guaraldi wrote this in 1964 and it became one of the most recognizable jazz piano riffs in American culture. The version everyone knows is the September 1965 re-recording for the A Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, with Fred Marshall on bass and Jerry Granelli on drums, sharper and more percussive than the 1964 original. The bouncing left-hand bass line, the right-hand melody every kid in America knew by the time the special aired that December, and an arrangement clean enough that a child can pick out the tune and serious enough that a jazz pianist can spend a lifetime listening to it. A jazz piano trio piece that turned into national folklore.

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16 Favorite

Joseph Kosma / Johnny Mercer · Somethin’ Else · 1958

Autumn Leaves

Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone · Miles Davis, trumpet · Hank Jones, piano · Sam Jones, bass · Art Blakey, drums

It is Cannonball's date in name only. Miles was under exclusive contract to Columbia and could not record for Blue Note as a leader, so he came in as a sideman and quietly took over the session. The version of "Autumn Leaves" that opens Somethin' Else is one of the most recorded performances in jazz history. Miles's muted trumpet states the melody with the kind of economy he had spent a decade learning, every note placed where it needs to be and nowhere else. Cannonball's solo is full and singing, riding Art Blakey's drums like a surfer on a perfect wave. Hank Jones at the piano quietly holds it all together. Recorded March 9, 1958. Side one, track one, and a master class in what a horn melody can do.

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17 Favorite

Lee Morgan · The Sidewinder · 1964

The Sidewinder

Lee Morgan, trumpet · Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone · Barry Harris, piano · Bob Cranshaw, bass · Billy Higgins, drums

Recorded at Van Gelder's on December 21, 1963 and released the following year, this is the boogaloo blues that saved Blue Note from bankruptcy. The title track hit number eighty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 and broke the label's all-time sales record. Lee Morgan was twenty-five. Joe Henderson's tenor solo arrives a couple of minutes in and locks the whole thing into place, Barry Harris's piano keeps the gospel feel underneath, Billy Higgins drives a backbeat hard enough to feel danceable but loose enough to still be jazz. Ten minutes you can put on any time you need a record to start a party.

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18 Favorite

Miles Davis · Face to Face · 1982

All Blues

Oscar Peterson, piano · Freddie Hubbard, trumpet (duo session, no bass, no drums)

Miles Davis wrote "All Blues" for Kind of Blue in 1959, the six-eight modal blues that closes side one of that record. Twenty-three years later Peterson and Hubbard sat down at Group IV Studios in Hollywood for a duo session, just piano and trumpet, no bass, no drums, no rhythm section. The opener was "All Blues," and they take it slow, eleven and a half minutes of two musicians thinking out loud at each other. Peterson plays sparser than usual without a trio to lean on; Hubbard's tone is as clean and lyrical as it ever was in his late career. Recorded May 24, 1982 on Pablo, produced by Norman Granz. Late-career duo jazz at its most exposed.

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19 Favorite

Duke Ellington · Duke Ellington & John Coltrane · 1963

In a Sentimental Mood

Duke Ellington, piano · John Coltrane, tenor saxophone · Aaron Bell, bass · Elvin Jones, drums

Duke Ellington wrote this in 1935 as an instrumental, and after Manny Kurtz added lyrics it became a swing-era standard. Twenty-seven years later Ellington and Coltrane sat down at Van Gelder's on September 26, 1962, with Aaron Bell on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, and made a version of it that almost every other recording has had to be measured against. Coltrane's tenor barely lifts above a whisper. Ellington's piano voicings are spare and deliberate, the elder statesman at the keyboard listening as much as playing. Four and a half minutes that prove how two musicians from different generations can meet on a song so completely that the distance between them stops mattering.

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20 Favorite

Fragos / Baker / Gasparre · Undercurrent · 1962

I Hear a Rhapsody

Bill Evans, piano · Jim Hall, guitar (duo, no bass, no drums)

Bill Evans and Jim Hall: piano and guitar, no bass, no drums, no one else in the room. Recorded across April and May 1962 for United Artists. Two chordal instruments that should crowd each other and instead leave each other oceans of space. The 1941 standard becomes something quieter and more transparent than the swing-era arrangements ever made of it. Each note arrives knowing the next one is coming. The kind of duo record you put on when you want jazz to feel like overhearing a conversation between two people who finish each other's sentences.

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21 Favorite

Duke Pearson · Idle Moments · 1965

Idle Moments

Grant Green, guitar · Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone · Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone · Duke Pearson, piano · Bob Cranshaw, bass · Al Harewood, drums

The title track is a fifteen-minute slow burn. Grant Green's guitar opens at a tempo so unhurried it almost dares you to walk away. Then Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone slides in, and Joe Henderson's tenor arrives a few minutes later, and you realize you have been listening to one of the most patient and accumulating performances in the Blue Note catalog. Duke Pearson wrote it and is sitting at the piano. Recorded November 4, 1963 at Van Gelder's, released in 1965. The whole record is essential, but this track alone is the reason Idle Moments belongs in any conversation about the greatest hard bop albums ever made.

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22 Favorite

George & Ira Gershwin · Easy Living · rec. 1962

I’ve Got a Crush on You

Ike Quebec, tenor saxophone · Sonny Clark, piano · Milt Hinton, bass · Art Blakey, drums

George Gershwin wrote this in 1928 and Ira Gershwin added lyrics that everyone from Sinatra to Sarah Vaughan would later wrap a voice around. Ike Quebec's instrumental version, cut at Van Gelder's in January 1962 with Sonny Clark on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Art Blakey on brushes, finds the melody and just stays there. Quebec's tenor is huge and conversational, a horn tone that sounds like a man reading a letter out loud. He died of lung cancer in January 1963, barely a year after this recording. The Easy Living LP that contains the track did not see release until 1987. Worth the wait.

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23 Favorite

Gil Mellé · Patterns in Jazz · 1956

Weird Valley

Gil Mellé, baritone saxophone · Eddie Bert, trombone · Joe Cinderella, guitar · Oscar Pettiford, bass · Ed Thigpen, drums

This is the second track on Patterns in Jazz, which is a record with a real claim to fame: it was Blue Note’s very first 12-inch LP in the 1500 series, BLP 1517, recorded April 1, 1956 at Rudy Van Gelder’s with Alfred Lion producing. The title fits the tune. The melody moves in a way that feels a little off-center and patient, almost like chamber music, but the swing is right there underneath it. Joe Cinderella’s clean guitar and Mellé’s dark baritone trade the line, Eddie Bert’s trombone fills it out, and Oscar Pettiford and Ed Thigpen keep the whole thing loose and smart. It is not West Coast cool and not New York hard bop, just its own thing. Mellé was a composer first, and this is one of my favorite things he wrote.

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24 Favorite

Mal Waldron · Blue Gene · 1958

Blue Greens and Beans

Gene Ammons, tenor saxophone · Idrees Sulieman, trumpet · Pepper Adams, baritone saxophone · Mal Waldron, piano · Doug Watkins, bass · Art Taylor, drums · Ray Barretto, congas

The opening track on Blue Gene, the May 1958 Prestige date where Mal Waldron wrote every tune and Ammons brought in a septet built around contrast: Idrees Sulieman's lean trumpet on top, Pepper Adams's thick baritone on the bottom, Ray Barretto's congas adding a Latin undertow, and Ammons's tenor in the middle holding both extremes together. "Blue Greens and Beans" is a minor blues with the dark, angular feel that Waldron's writing carries everywhere it goes. Ammons opens up against that backdrop and the contrast is electrifying. The album that pointed directly toward Boss Tenor two years later.

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25 Favorite

Fred Wesley · Live at The Lighthouse · 1972

Jan Jan

Grant Green, guitar · Shelton Laster, organ · Claude Bartee, tenor saxophone · Gary Coleman, vibraphone · Wilton Felder, electric bass · Greg Williams, drums · Bobbye Porter Hall, percussion

Fred Wesley wrote this for The J.B.'s in 1971, and Grant Green covered it the next year at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. The version on Green's Live at The Lighthouse stretches out for over fifteen minutes, the West Coast funk band locked into a groove that does not let go: Shelton Laster's organ sitting low in the mix, Claude Bartee's tenor riding over the top, Wilton Felder on electric bass laying down a pocket deep enough to fall into. This is the Grant Green that hip-hop producers spent the 1990s sampling: patient, melodic, completely in service of the rhythm. The funk-period live record that, alongside Alive!, makes the strongest case for the second half of his career.

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