My, my, where has the time gone?

After writing just over thirty thousand words for Fifty Weeks of Jazz, I feel I'm overdue for some self-indulgent pontification. Frankly, much like an octogenarian marathoner, I'm amazed I made it to the finish line at all—now, with the celebrations long since wrapped, I'd like to reflect on what I've learned throughout the year.

What I learned about jazz

It's a small club, and you ain't in it

Coming into this project, I was worried that the depths of jazz ran so deep that I'd barely be able to scratch the surface—after all, Wikipedia lists over 50 subgenres of jazz, and I was coming in with zero knowledge. It didn't take long to realize those worries were unfounded: jazz was only a commercial colossus for two decades, give or take, and while many (most?) important developments happened after its heyday, it only takes a handful of names to get pretty respectable coverage: listen to some Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Monk, Davis, and Coltrane,¹ and you'll have a decent grasp of what the whole thing's about.

If you listen enough, you start to hear

Sometime in 2025, I was listening to a podcast when something peculiar happened: the host's pre-roll yammering faded away in my awareness, because my attention was utterly transfixed by a line in the generic jazz background music. I couldn't give you any insightful musical analysis of what was being played exactly, but it felt like after a lifetime of nearsightedness I had finally put on glasses—something that would've previously been relegated fuzzy background shapes suddenly snapped clearly into focus. I've had this experience many times since: idly chatting with my wife at a café, only to suddenly snap to attention like a musical meerkat that just caught wind of the faintest blue note on the horizon. From day one, my plan was "[…] to listen to the albums, binge some Wikipedia pages, and see where that gets me in a year;" clearly that wasn't the optimal strategy for arriving at an intellectual understanding of jazz, but if it gave me a far sharper awareness of jazz, I'll take it.

De gustibus non est disputandum

Leafing through these pages you'll find no shortage of trivia and curios that I've squirreled away into the dark crevasses of my cerebellum—but equally important to me is the self-knowledge I've gained along the way. Do I even like jazz? In January 2025 I couldn't answer that with any confidence. Now not only can I give an enthusiastic "yes" overall, I can also trace the contours of which parts of jazz truly speak to me: Armstrong is undeniable; I have a fondness for swing and Ellington in particular is masterful. Bebop I still don't quite get yet: I've had fun with the (limited) Parker on offer, but I fail to appreciate the genius; similarly, many of Monk's compositions are enchanting, but I find they go down much smoother via McRae's crooning rather than the composer's own angular assault of the piano keys. I'm mixed on cool jazz and Davis overall (but keen to further explore his collaborations with Gil Evans and his later electronic turn), though Brubeck reliably appeals to me. Hard bop, post-bop and beyond is a wide-ranging world that I have yet to fully explore, but I'd be remiss not to single out Charles (not Charlie!) Mingus as my personal jazz G.O.A.T. I've loved basically all the jazz fusion I've listened to (unsurprising given my general prog proclivities), and while we didn't get any true free jazz in this set, I'm eager to follow up there. Another notable omission is Coltrane, from whom we've heard devastatingly little—I've since supplemented with some outside listening and I'd be hard-pressed to pick a better saxman.

Album rankings

No, I won't debase myself with an inane "ranking" of all 50 albums—the most pathetic form of all SEO slop—so you'll have to content yourselves with this pseudo tier list.

First, a disclaimer: I'd say that pretty much every album in this collection is "good," in that it's quality music and certainly worth a listen. The categories below are only to highlight the albums that stood out to me in particular.

Fondly return to

These are albums I've listened to many times throughout the year (well beyond what my review required). I'm always happy to hear these albums and recommend them highly.

• Sonny Meets Hawk!
• The Best of Two Worlds
• Jazz Goes to College
• The Sound of Jazz
• Romantic Warrior
• School Days
• Round Midnight: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
• Carmen Sings Monk

Lifelong companion

These are albums I'll carry with me for the rest of my life: like cherished companions, they'll always have a privileged position by my side.

• Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy
• Concert by the Sea
• Heavy Weather
• Ellington Uptown
• Straight Life
• Birds of Fire
• Carnegie Hall Concert
• Native Dancer

Self-revealing

These albums have rewritten my DNA and fundamentally changed how I see music.

• Time Out
• Tijuana Moods
• Head Hunters
• Mingus Ah Um

What I learned about writing

You can't write 50 bad posts in a row

I'm cribbing from Ray Bradbury on this one, who advised aspiring writers to start cranking out a short story per week for a year, since nobody can possibly write 52 bad short stories in a row. Well, I am pleased to provide some (unwitting) experimental validation for the regimen: Bradbury may have underestimated for just how many weeks I can churn out sheer drivel, but even I must admit that somewhere along the way I ended up with a number of posts I'm somewhat proud of. I have long been sympathetic to the tale of the apocryphal pottery professor—who teaches that quantity begets quality—but this project has me feeling the moral more acutely than ever before.

The best swim coach is a piranha

So, how can we reach our proverbial fifty pounds of pots? Well, in an extracurricular activity, it's easy to grow complacent: a late blog post doesn't put me at risk of missing rent (a fact to which my shameful backlog of half-finished drafts can attest). Fifty Weeks of Jazz was my most ambitious blogging project yet, and I think it was only successful because of the definite, rigid structure: one album per week, no excuses.² That's not to say I was perfectly punctual—I was consistently a couple weeks tardy in the second half—but when I fell behind schedule, I knew it and could feel it. Without that (self-imposed) pain, I never would have gotten caught up.

One more point on that pain: there's an old aphorism that I'm now ready to have tattooed on my soul—"painters love to paint, authors love having written." Reader, naïve child that you are, perhaps you imagine that this weekly exercise was nothing more than a fanciful lark with which to end my Sundays; after all, how hard could it be to listen to jazz and write some harebrained jokes? Well yes, while there certainly were carefree weeks, there were also often times where my hebdomadal labour was an exercise in frustration: cursing myself for not starting earlier, cursing myself for not having anything to say, occasionally cursing myself for having too much to say, and just generally cursing myself for starting this thing in the first place. Now of course I'm thrilled to have gone through with it—I have a giant bag of trinkets to look back upon fondly, and it was some poor sod in the past who had to put in the time to create them.

My process

That covers motivation, but what about logistics? As the old saying goes: critics talk of form and structure; artists talk of where to get the best turpentine. Well, nobody asked, but for personal posterity, here's how a post typically came together:

• I went into each week as blind as possible, avoiding reading anything about the album in advance.
• My top focus was to listen to the album in full, start to finish, multiple times (at least three, ideally five or more).
  • It's rare that I listen to music with nothing else going on, so most of these listens were at work, while writing, or while otherwise somewhat preoccupied—I decided early on to make peace with that, lest the project wither prematurely.
  • While listening, I tried to keep written notes on anything that caught my ear, though I wasn't 100% consistent with doing so.
  • My main goal was to always form my own impression of the album before consulting any outside sources.
• After I felt I had my own grip on the album, any other resource was fair game.
  • I usually started with the Wikipedia page for the album (assuming it existed!), then the band/artist's.
  • Oftentimes that was enough information, but if not, a little bit of internet sleuthing usually turned up fascinating pieces (like altrockchick's review of Mingus Ah Um).
• I consistently re-listened to the album while researching (asking myself: did new information change my understanding of the album? If so, how and why?)
• I insisted that every post needed to respond directly to the music somehow, but that side quests were fair game, and if they ended up dominating a write-up (ahem), that was fine—the golden rule was to "find the fun" wherever it may be (according to my idiosyncratic measure of fun).
• Routine: Sundays were "new album" days (a gift to unwrap each week!).
  • Concretely, that meant ripping the new album and trying to get one "good" (i.e. relatively undistracted) listen in that day.
    • Shout-out to the flea market vendor who sold me these box sets: all 50 ripped perfectly on the first try.
  • The actual writing itself typically happened late in the evenings, especially on weekends.
    • A frequent late-night companion was JAZZ.FM, which added further variety to my jazz diet.

Where do we go from here?

How far has journeying fifty weeks into the jazzverse gotten us? Well, it's a good start, but the adventure has only just begun; there's still massive gaps in our coverage, both old and new. In terms of classics, we haven't heard a single album with Coltrane as frontman for goodness' sake (presumably legal realities rearing their ugly heads: these box sets were produced by Sony, so all constituent albums come from their catalog). Furthermore, the sets don't contain a single album released this millennium, which leaves listeners intent on listening to living artists somewhat adrift. I'm still catching up on the contemporary scene, but I caught Isaiah Collier³ on a side stage at a festival last year and felt he completely outshone the main act. (If you're reading near the date of publication, he's on a tour of North America with a program celebrating Coltrane's centennial.) I eagerly await discovering new favourites among the scores of jazz musicians I have yet to encounter—both those of yesterday, and those of today.

Well, it's been a hell of a set, but we've exhausted the encores, the barkeep is itching to get home, and sunrise looms just around the corner—time to call it a night. Thank you for joining me on this jazzventure.