What other music do you like?

I grew up listening to rock, so I gravitated towards jazzy rock acts like steely Dan and dire straits’s sultans of Swing, Sultana, and Chuck Mangione, before getting into Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

There’s also jazzy hiphop, jazzy edm,…

A personal recommendation if you like Jazz Piano is see if you like Jazz guitar. Joe Pass is a legend. Grant green is more my style.

Last recommendation, Jazz more than rock is sometimes more oriented around composers than artists. There are “Jazz Standards,” songs that hundreds of artists have played and recorded their own version of. I recommend finding the songs you like, the standards you recognize like seeing an old friend in a crowd.

Among the classics from the 60s, I’d also add Thelonious Monk, Arts Bakey, then the Headhunters, and Sun Ra’s Arkestrs. That’s a period with a lot of diversification (free jazz, bebop, funk jazz, Afrofuturism…). Earth Wind and Fire is also funk jazz.

There also Tito Puente from Puerto Rico, which leads me to transition to the caribbeans. Outside of the US, you have of course Compay Secundo and the Buena Vista Social Club, and also Juan Pable Torres in Cuba. Caribbean Sextet in Haïti. While we’re in the Caribbeans, Ska is also derived from jazz and Rocksteady and Reggae are in turn derived from it, try older Ska bands like the Skatalites, that’s where it’s most obvious.

In Africa there’s Manu Dibango from Cameroon, who blends some trafitional music influence, also Mulatu Atatske from Ethiopia (who’s still alive and kicking), then you have the whole Afrobeat genre starting in Nigeria with Fela Kuti (early Afrobeat is still really close to jazz, though modern Afrobeat, which is closer to hip-hop).

That’s those I know best among the classics (I’m not sctually a huge expert despite my tirade, I may have been exagerating a bit because I got defendive and also as a joke). But if you search almost any country name and add “jazz” after it, you’ll certainly get a result (the only time I failed was when I tried Bhutan, and I still think they likely have jazz somewhere, it’s just hard to find).

My favorites among the recent ones are Shabaka Hutchings from the UK and, Thurgo Théodat from Haïti (not super famous, but really good, I’ve actually heard him play live). Mulattu Atatske has also done stuff recently, and sun Ra’s Arkestra still exists.

Also, since nobody plays jazz alone, once you found a jazz player you like, a good way to find more is to see who they’ve played with. If it’s a band, see the members and what other band they’ve played in!

I used to think that about hiphop. Luckily when I said “it all sounds the same to me,” the people I was with said I was being ignorant. And they were right.