The Essential Records

Every track on this album is in an unusual time signature and none of them feel like a gimmick. "Take Five" is in 5/4 and is the best-selling jazz single of all time. "Blue Rondo a la Turk" opens in 9/8. The fact that all of this sounds as natural as it does is a credit to how deeply Brubeck and his quartet had internalized these meters: they don't feel performed, they feel inevitable. Paul Desmond's alto tone is one of the most distinctive in jazz- airy, slightly detached, impossibly clean. Joe Morello's drumming on "Take Five" holds one of the most recognizable grooves in the music's history. This is a record that works equally well as background music and as something you sit down and listen to carefully. Both versions are worth your time.

Monk live is a different animal from Monk in the studio. The recordings on this album catch the quartet on a 1963 tour, and there's a looseness and an unpredictability to the performances that the studio versions of these compositions don't always have. Monk's piano playing has always been described as "wrong" by people who don't understand it, but what he's doing is using space and dissonance as deliberately as anyone who ever sat at a piano. The silences are as important as the notes. Charlie Rouse was Monk's perfect tenor voice for years: not flashy, not competing, just inside the music completely. "Misterioso" (a blues in parallel sixths) is one of Monk's most direct and swinging compositions and this version is among the best. This record captures why seeing Monk live was considered one of the essential jazz experiences.

This was recorded on a portable machine plugged into the wall at the Sunset School auditorium in Carmel, California in September 1955. The recording quality is warm and slightly boxy in a way that somehow adds to the intimacy. Erroll Garner was completely self-taught and never learned to read music, and it produced a playing style unlike anyone else's: a left hand that lags slightly behind the beat creating a constant rhythmic tension, right-hand melodies that transform standards into something more than themselves. "I'll Remember April" is the track everyone knows from this record. The audience response is captured on the tape and you can hear their delight at specific moments. Columbia almost didn't release this because the recording quality wasn't up to their usual standards. They were wrong to hesitate.

The title is not modest and the album earns it. Rollins in 1956 was already working out the thematic improvisation approach that would define his best work: building solos from a small set of motivic cells and developing them obsessively rather than just running changes. "St. Thomas" is a calypso melody he'd heard from his mother and it's one of the most joyful things in the hard bop catalog. "Moritat" (Mack the Knife) is completely transformed by his treatment. Max Roach was Rollins's ideal drum partner at this point, both rhythmically demanding and intellectually matched. Tommy Flanagan plays with the elegance and precision he brought to everything. The whole record was recorded in one afternoon. One afternoon.

Gene Ammons had one of the biggest, warmest tenor sounds in jazz: the kind of sound that fills a room without effort. Boss Tenor is his best-known record and one of the great hard bop sessions. Pepper Adams on baritone is the inspired addition, where Ammons is warm and full, Adams is gruff and cutting, and the contrast between the two horn players gives every track a push-pull tension. Wynton Kelly swings beautifully in the middle of it all. Ray Barretto on congas adds a Latin pulse that's loose enough not to feel like a genre exercise. "Canadian Sunset" is the ballad highlight. This is the kind of record that makes you want to be in a smoky room listening to a live band, which is exactly the effect it should have.

Mingus wrote liner notes for this album that consist almost entirely of his therapist's analysis of his psychological state, which tells you something about the kind of record it is. This is not background music. It's a six-part suite that has no real precedent in jazz history: extended, orchestral, deeply personal, and by turns furious, tender, anguished, and ecstatic. Charlie Mariano's alto sax carries most of the melodic weight and he plays with an intensity that sounds almost physical. Dannie Richmond was Mingus's longtime drummer and the only person who could follow his direction in real time without losing the thread. Jaki Byard adds harmonic complexity and occasional wildness. This is the most fully realized large-scale jazz composition from the 1960s and it still sounds unlike anything else.

Mingus performed at Monterey in 1964 with a large ensemble and the results were captured here in a way that the studio environment could never fully replicate. "Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk" is one of the most stunning pieces in the Mingus catalog: a long, shape-shifting composition that starts as a ballad and evolves into something dense and raucous over the course of its duration. Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone: he shows up on all the best records from this period: adds something crystalline to the ensemble. John Handy plays with ferocity and beauty in roughly equal proportions. The crowd response is part of the recording and they're clearly hearing something they know is significant.

Before this record came out in 1962, bossa nova was something that happened in Brazil. Afterward, it was something that happened everywhere. Stan Getz had a perfect instrument for the music: his tone was cool and floating, exactly the right vehicle for the light syncopation and bittersweet harmonies of Jobim and Gilberto. Charlie Byrd's classical guitar technique gave the record a clean, precise quality that the looser Brazilian recordings didn't have. "Desafinado" and "Samba de Uma Nota So" broke into the pop charts, which was not supposed to happen with jazz records. This is one of those records that created a genre and then remained the best thing in it.

The follow-up to Jazz Samba is better in every way. João Gilberto is finally on the record and his voice and guitar bring the music closer to its Brazilian source. Jobim plays piano rather than appearing purely as a composer. And then there's Astrud Gilberto on "The Girl from Ipanema": she'd never recorded before, her English was imperfect, her voice is barely more than a whisper, and the result is one of the most recognizable vocal performances in the history of recorded music. Getz plays over all of it with characteristic understatement, letting the melody breathe rather than ornamenting it to death. The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1965, the first jazz album to do so. It earned it.

Peterson's technical ability on piano is so overwhelming that it can actually distract from how musical he is. The Silent Partner, recorded for Norman Granz's Pablo label, captures him in a trio format that gives his playing room to breathe rather than just dazzle. Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen was one of the great jazz bassists of any era: his lines are melodic and precise, and he and Peterson had a conversation-like rapport that made their duo and trio recordings consistently exceptional. Martin Drew is a solid, swinging drummer who keeps things moving without competing. The repertoire here mixes originals with standards and Peterson treats all of it with the same level of commitment and technical investment. There's a relaxed confidence to this record that comes from knowing exactly who you are.

Yusef Lateef was playing what he called "autophysiopsychic music": music drawn from the whole of the human experience: and that meant incorporating world instruments and non-Western scales decades before it became fashionable. This archival live recording from Sweden in 1967 captures him in a period when he was deeply engaged with that project and playing with extraordinary imagination. The oboe and flute appearances are not decorative: he plays them with the same fluency and depth he brings to the tenor saxophone. The Swedish audiences of the 1960s embraced adventurous American jazz in a way that made recordings from this period particularly intimate and well-documented. A recent discovery for anyone who missed it the first time.