Where to Start with Jazz on Vinyl

Ask the internet where to start with jazz and it will tell you to buy Kind of Blue. It is not wrong. Miles Davis made a near-perfect record in 1959 and half the planet owns it for good reason. But "start with Kind of Blue" is the jazz equivalent of telling someone who wants to read to start with Shakespeare. True, unhelpful, and a little lazy.

Jazz is not one thing. It is bebop and it is ambient drift, it is a saxophone screaming at God and it is a piano trio playing so quietly you lean in. Telling everyone to enter through the same door ignores the obvious fact that people arrive wanting different things. So here are a few doors, sorted by what already moves you. Walk through whichever one fits.

If you want a melody you can hold onto

Start with Somethin' Else, Cannonball Adderley's only record for Blue Note, cut in a single day in March 1958 with Miles Davis sitting in as a sideman, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Art Blakey on drums. The opening treatment of "Autumn Leaves" is one of the most gorgeous things in recorded jazz, and it is completely welcoming. There is nothing to decode. Two horn players who clearly loved each other's playing, taking their time over tunes you half-recognise.

It is warm, it swings, and it asks nothing of you except that you listen. If you have ever worried that jazz is homework, this record quietly proves it isn't. From here, follow the players. Adderley's own bands. Miles across the rest of the decade. Blakey's Jazz Messengers, which were a finishing school for half the great musicians of the era.

If you want it big and cinematic

Start with The Epic, Kamasi Washington's three-hour statement from 2015 on Brainfeeder. Choirs, strings, a double band, and a saxophonist who plays like he is trying to move a mountain. It is jazz with the scale of a film score, and it converted a whole generation who thought jazz was small and polite.

Washington came up through the West Coast Get Down, the Los Angeles collective that also gave us bassist Miles Mosley and a run of players who treat jazz, funk and hip-hop as one continuous language. If your ear was raised on records that fill a room and swing for the fences, this is your door, and it opens onto a thriving present-day scene rather than a museum. From here, the current London and Los Angeles jazz worlds are wide open.

If you want stillness and depth

Start with Journey in Satchidananda, Alice Coltrane's 1971 record for Impulse!, made with Pharoah Sanders on soprano saxophone. Harp, drone, a bass line that circles like a prayer. It is spiritual jazz in the fullest sense, music that is trying to get somewhere beyond entertainment, and it is one of the most beautiful records ever made in any genre.

This is a different kind of listening. Less about the tune, more about the atmosphere and where it carries you. If you love records that create a whole world and hold you inside it, this is the way in, and spiritual jazz has become one of the most chased corners of the collecting world for exactly this reason. From here: Pharoah Sanders as a leader, later Coltrane, the deep spiritual catalogue that collectors now hunt hard for.

If you want something homegrown

Start with Sex, the 1989 debut by The Necks, the Sydney trio of Chris Abrahams on piano, Lloyd Swanton on bass and Tony Buck on drums. One track, an hour long, built from almost nothing into something hypnotic. They have spent thirty-five years refusing to repeat themselves and remain one of the best bands Australia has ever produced, in any genre.

The Necks are proof that jazz did not stop being invented, and that some of the inventing happened here. If you want an entry point that is ambitious, patient and unmistakably local, this is it. From here, the rest of the long Necks catalogue, and the broader Australian jazz scene that our best Australian jazz albums of the century so far maps out.

When you are ready for the deep end

Eventually, go to A Love Supreme. John Coltrane's 1965 suite for Impulse!, recorded with the classic quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, is the record people mean when they talk about jazz as a spiritual and physical event at once. It is not difficult, exactly, but it asks more of you than the others here, and it gives back more too.

Come to it once a couple of the other doors have opened. It hits differently when your ear has done a little travelling, and it will still be waiting, the way the very greatest records always are.

The only real advice

Pick the door that sounds like you and stop worrying about the canon. You will get to Kind of Blue eventually, and it will be there when you do. The point of starting is to start with something you actually want to hear, on a pressing that does it justice, and to let one record lead you to the next. That is how every serious collection was ever built.

Most of the records above are in the shop across original pressings, Japanese imports and current reissues. If one of these doors is calling, that is the record to start with.