Jazz-

I was first turned on to jazz by much of what was on Soft Machine Vol. 4, definitely a crucial album to me. I realised there was more to life than pop songs and heavy rock. I'd not really heard anything like it before, in fact it was a year or two before I really understood what was going on or what generated the sounds. Organ, piano, alto sax, bass and drums were credited on the sleeve, but they'd never sounded like this. For instance I thought Mike Ratledge's organ sound was some sort of effect on Elton Dean's sax, and Hugh Hopper's fuzz bass, especially on Virtually Part 3, was some sort of keyboard effect. I had a lot to learn, it's been a marvellous journey.

I began to investigate jazz, usually via artists I already knew like Billy Cobham, John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea's Return to Forever etc. who had crossed over into that peculiar hybrid known as jazz rock. I always had great difficulty deciding where the jazz ended and the rock started, most people seemed to think jazz rock was blindingly fast playing with funny chords whose pulse was basically 4/4 or a similar variant. Personally I hate the term and cringe when I am forced to use it, in fact I hate all this pigeon holing of music, but I suppose I have to concede that it is necessary for marketing purposes.

One of the questions I most dread when somebody discovers I am something of a music enthusiast is "So what sort of music do you like?" Or almost as bad "Who is your favourite artist/group?" I find these questions almost impossible to answer, or if I do I end up sounding like some sort of incoherent pseudo intellectual. Perhaps that's what I am.

	Anyway back to jazz, it was not until the early to mid 80s that I was really able to broaden my jazz horizons courtesy of the music library in Oxford where I was living at the time. Suddenly there was an awful lot more music out there, and I drank it in. This enthusiasm lasted into the early 90s when I began to grow tired of the formula, theme / solos / theme reprise as performed by the standard line up of sax / piano / double bass / drums. Don't get the impression that I listened to nothing but jazz from the mid 80s to the early 90s it's just that it was a major growth area.

The sort of jazz I listen nowadays could certainly be described as uneasy listening, sometimes totally improvised. Horizons were broadened by the likes of Coltrane, Dolphy and Mingus in the sixties, their power and influence is still felt today.