Quantifying '70s jazz bounty

It isn’t often that jazz from outside the mainstream gets any press, so it was a pleasant surprise to read about ’70s and ’80s jazz in today’s New York Times. The piece deals with the many blogs that have sprung up that deal with that time period, particularly with a round of discussion among several of them that it was high time to create a canon of such works that might serve as evidence that, contrary to popular belief, the genre didn’t wither and die when the ’60s came to a close.

Included in the piece is a frequent stop of mine, Destination: Out, as well as many other sites that will join it among my music bookmarks. Of particular note are Do the Math, kept by Ethan Iverson, pianist for the Bad Plus, and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society (you’ll find his initial contribution to the discussion at the link). Their discussion revolved around listing worthy jazz albums from those two decades, an exercise that resulted in a greatly pared-down list of about 500 titles.

That led to the creation of a wiki, Ear of the Behearer (named for a 1973 Dewey Redman disc that is, of course, on the list), which lists the discs and allows users to add favorites of their own. It’s skeletal now, but with some effort from passionate participants, it could become a valuable resource.