I finally just finished a CD compilation that I have meant to do for years. The theme is "happy jazz", so I thought I'd share it with you all in the spirit of promoting happiness. Here's the playlist:
1. the spanish flea - trudy pitts
2. the preacher - horace silver
3. cariba - wes montgomery
4. joy spring - clifford brown
5. hallelujah, i love her so - groove holmes
6. flying home - lionel hampton
7. the cat - jimmy smith
8. skad my to znamy? - krzystof sadowski
9. take your pick - hank mobley
10. island lady - sonny rollins
11. in the mood (bis) - rhoda scott
12. happy people - kenny garrett
13. change - donald byrd
14. cold bear - the gaturs
15. be young, be foolish, be happy - booker t & the mg's
16. flute thing - seatrain
17. summer samba (samba de verão) - walter wanderley
In my selection process, "happy" didn't necessarily mean "not blues" or "in a major key". I basically just decided whether the overall "mood" of the piece was happy. It was hard because there were plenty of tracks on my original list that make me happy because I like them, but if I really thought about someone else listening to them I had to admit that they wouldn't necessarily inspire instant happiness. There were also tunes that are pretty happy-sounding but have non-happy names, like Filthy McNasty (Horace Silver), so I eliminated those. And there were some that are super-happy but not really jazz, like Whipped Cream (Herb Alpert) and Soul Finger (Bar-Kays), so those were out.
This whole thing started because one day several years ago, I got home from school and the Admiral said he was feeling kind of depressed. I asked if he knew why, and he said maybe it was because he'd been listening to jazz all day. That got me thinking that, yeah, a lot of jazz is kind of vaguely depressing, but surely there was plenty of jazz out there that could make you happy. Offhand I could only think of a handful of jazz numbers that could legitimately be called "happy", I started collecting them up. I ended up with over 3 hours of happy jazz, but these 17 tracks were among the happiest. I'm listening to them now... and yeah, I'd say they are making me pretty happy.
3 comments:
Ah yes, I remember some of these from the pad. I think it's time to expand my organ jazz collection beyond richard groove holmes...
Man! I really want to hear this - is there supposed to be a download link somewhere? Thanks in advance.
Sorry William, but I don't think I am really allowed to post the actual songs here. :-/
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