How many jazz albums are in your music library?

[Calexico]

13
Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Dave Weckl Band, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Gong.

 

[jsaliga]

I have about 1,500 jazz albums. About 900 of those are on CD and most of the rest are on vinyl. I have a few titles on 1/4" 4-track stereo tape but not many.

I enjoy and appreciate most jazz sub-genres but I have a particular affinity for music recorded between 1945 and 1965. That covers a lot of music, styles, and artists, but it is fair to say that my interests are largely in bebop, hard bop, and small group trad and swing from that period. Verve is probably my number one record label, followed by Blue Note and Columbia. Favorite artists from that period for me are Billie Holilday, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O'Day, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Buck Clayton, Coleman Hawkins, Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, John Coltrane, Miles Davis...the list goes on and on.

I am also a huge Big Band fan. Historically it was an important period, at a time when jazz was "Amercia's music." I have recently undertaken a serious effort to thoroughly study this music. Not that I wasn't familiar with it to begin with. I have a pretty exhaustive collection of Count Basie's stuff, going all the way back to 1936 with Lester Young and Jimmy Rushing to some of the last albums he cut for Pablo shortly before he died in the early 1980s -- and nearly everything in between. I am working on the Duke Ellington stuff now. It's pretty easy to get the material he did for Columbia as it has never gone out of print and I have been listening to that for many years. But it is a much more difficult proposition to get Duke's early material because he recorded for a lot of different labels through 1940.

And I also dig the avant garde and modern creative scene. Though I wish I had more time to get into this music.

Jazz is so vast that even with a relatively large collection of albums, getting to the tip of the iceberg is really the best that one can hope for. And this is one of the truly incredible things about jazz: the more you listen the more you learn that you will never run out of music to explore.

--Jerome

 

[Kees]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Calexico /img/forum/go_quote.gif 13 Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Dave Weckl Band, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Gong.

So you took Steely Dan off your list, but there are still 13 albums on it?

 

[buddhashenglong]

I'm not ready to count, but I would guess 500 - 1000. Many gems I own were my father's records and he had great taste. Mingus, Dolphy, Coltrane, Chico Hamilton, Blue Mitchell, and then some. I'll give it a good tally this week.

 

[blazeops]

I currently only have 30 in my library but it is increasing.

 

[singular]

Probably around 150 - a lot of Miles, Mingus, Monk, Brubeck, Coltrane etc. Mostly 50s-60s stuff Recently been in to a bit of Django, though it's hard to find good recordings, if anyone can make recommendations I'd appreciate it.

 

[jsaliga]

For Django Reinhardt look to the series of five boxed sets put out by the British reissue label JSP. The two you will probably be most interested in are The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order and Postwar Recordings 1944-1953.

The sound quality is probably the best you are going to find for this material.

--Jerome

 

[Zanth]

I'm close to 500 albums, 1/6 of my collection.

 

[PB&J]

950 albums and growing. Everything from Louis Armstrong, to Ellington, to Dolphy and into fusion/post bop.

 

[tattoou2]

I have a modest CD collection of about 200. A quick look earlier gave me an estimate of about 60% Jazz.

 

[TwoFiveOne]

I'm probably right around 2,500 and about evenly split between CD and vinyl. Jazz is about 75% of my library but surely 90% of my listening. I don't listen to the vinyl much any more since it's, um, a bit "worn," plus I listen on-the-go much more than I used to.

For the past 3 weeks I've spent all my time sitting at the foot of a hospital bed waiting for someone to get better. I have 1400 CDs ripped into a little netbook that I dropped a 500GB drive into. I've connected with some music I haven't listened to in years and can honestly say I think I could live with this rig permanently (PC-Pico-HD25.)

Hospital Wi-Fi rocks. Through a blog, I discovered this youtube video of Rhoda Scott and Barbara Dennerlein (who??) and they are just all over a pair of Hammond B3s. Moments later I had downloaded Dennerlein's 1995 release "Take Off" - all her stuff with a killin' band. Check it out...

Jim aka 251

 

[intoart]

I estimated between 500 and 1000. I have over 3000 CDs, and somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of them are jazz (with the largest portion being smooth jazz.)

 

[Faust2D]

About 300 albums, about 2/3 of these are experimental jazz (Zorn, Brötzmann etc.) and 1/3 a medley of fusion, hard-bop and 30's, 40's, 50's standards. Half on CD/LPs and half digital.

 

[progo]

Of my CD collection, about 25% is jazz of some kind. Art Blakey, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, Angelo Badalamenti and co decorate the shelves

 

[milkweg]

Anyone who has > 2,500 is probably sick of hearing 'Round Midnight by now.