Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody! Sorry I haven't been very active, but my top 10 of 2010 is on the way. I will post it some time before New Year's Eve.

Meanwhile, enjoy my favorite Christmas album: A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi Trio. It's a beautiful jazz interpretation of some classic Christmas carols, and also a couple Charlie Brown songs (this is the trio that made all the music for Charlie Brown). It even features a boys' choir!

Very good album, definite check out if you like jazz/Christmas carols (or both!).

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Shining - Blackjazz

Hey there. Weird (but awesome) album for ya today. Shining is this band from Norway and they've been pretty much been playing experimental jazz with electronic elements and other stuff their entire career.
But on this album they just went nuts. It's sounds like some sort of crazy mix of Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, industrial, jazz and metal. Seriously crazy shit. And really good too. This is just about as avant-garde and experimental metal gets.
It's gotten quite a lot of hype recently, and it deserves it (most of it, anyways).
Not much more to say, just check it out for yourselves, as it's pretty hard to describe this musical madness/genius with only words.

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Miles Davis - Sketches Of Spain

Hey people, here's some jazz for you. I'm not much of a jazz man myself (but I'm trying to be), but I just had to listen to this after reading a short description of it.
It went something like: "Davis taking a piece originally written for guitar and transcribes to be played by a trumpet, backed up by a minimal orchestra". I think it was something like that.
Anyway, that pretty much describes it very well. You can hear the guitar-like passages from time to time, with a bit of flamenco influence backed up by minimal orchestration/backup band.
I, for one, very much liked this, especially the last song, and Davis' trumpeting is as always amazing. A true legend.
If you're a jazz fan and haven't listened to this yet, you should probably check it out.

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Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin'

Okay, time for something a bit different. This is the oldest album I've posted so far (from 1958) and it is an awesome jazz album. I'm not much of a jazz guy myself, but every once in a while I feel in the mood for some sweet saxophone/trumpet/bass/guitar/whatver-wankery. To be fair, this is not a wanky album, it's just really good bebop/hard bop. For those of you who don't what that is, it's basically jazz that you can dance to (kinda like swing), with fast and upbeat, but still rather simple rhythms, focusing more on the tonal instrumentation (sax, trumpet, bass and whatnot).
Even if you're not very interested in jazz, I think you should listen to this. Jazz is hard to get into, but is really great once you do. This might not be your particular favorite of the countless jazz sub-genres but I guess it's still a fairly good starting point. If you're a prog rock/metal fan, you'll probably enjoy jazz (especially for its incredible technicality). Check it out!

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Squarepusher - Solo Electric Bass 1

Are you ready for some Squarepusher? You are? Good. This right here is an awesome album of live recording from a show where Tom Jenkinson (a.k.a Squarepusher) played solely on his six-string bass. So apparently he is both bass virtuoso and genius d'n'b producer. I know he's always had a thing for jazz and musique concrete, but I'd never thought he'd do something like this. It is feats like this that makes you question whether the a person is even mortal (like with Richard D. James, a.k.a Aphex Twin). Nevertheless, this is an album filled with brilliant bass guitar jazz-wank and it's just incredible to listen to, regardless of if you're a jazz fan or not.

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