The different genres of Jazz appear bewildering to the newcomer, but again we can help with simple explanations. Although subjective, we can describe if it is 'tuneful' or 'demanding', 'relaxing' or 'exciting' (in quotes because beauty in music is in the ear of the listener as art is in the eye of the beholder).
Like Classical Music - in which modernist composers used older styles to re-create the past but with a modern edge ('a dash of mustard', as someone succinctly put it about Stravinsky), Jazz has had its revivals too. For example, the UK Trad Jazz boom in the late fifties and early sixties paid homage to the 1920s and 1930s music of Louis Armstrong and others.
We stock musicians as stylistically divergent as Chet Baker and Archie Shepp, Duke Ellington and Henry Threadgill. I am wondering if a natural bias towards my favourites - Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington - is a good or bad thing. You had better let me know!
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