So You Don't Like Jazz

Thirty Essential Transformative Guitarists

by Alan Bryson
September 9, 2026

"Best guitarist" lists are inherently subjective--often nonsensical. They rank the unrankable, folding popularity, technique, cultural impact, sales, and personal taste into a single hierarchy. This list takes a different approach, acknowledging thirty guitarists who transformed the instrument itself: they created new techniques, pioneered fresh concepts, expanded its sonic vocabulary, and changed how those who followed them played. Each left the guitar different from how they found it. Thirty names could easily be a hundred, so a word on a ...

Jimi Hendrix: Showman and Sculptor

by Alan Bryson
August 12, 2026

When you think of Jimi Hendrix, chances are something flamboyant or incendiary comes to mind. His Stratocaster in flames at Monterey, or kneeling before a wall of amps at Woodstock. Those are in my memory bank too, but I'm one of a small group of people alive today who actually experienced The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The spectacle I witnessed was a vastly different, and it took place at a most unlikely venue: the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton, yes, ...

Iconic Music in Film: Boomer Edition

by Alan Bryson
July 1, 2026

One of the pleasures of looking back at film music from the boomer years is realizing how quickly the walls were coming down. Classical themes turned into jazz-funk hits. Soul records won Oscars. Rock songs became character development. Bluegrass, blues, disco, Latin jazz, and spaghetti-western minimalism all found their way onto the screen, and in the process changed what movie music could do. Before the 1960s, a “serious" film score usually meant orchestral sweep--Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós ...

Sonic Loops: Eight Miles High on the Psychedelic Trane

by Alan Bryson
May 15, 2026

In the popular music of the '50s, the landscape revolved around individual vocalists, vocal harmony groups, and instrumental ensembles. In the early '60s, something radical emerged: self-contained groups--a collective of individuals with a group dynamic and identity. They wrote, sang, played instruments, and performed as a unified artistic whole. This represented a structural revolution in how music was conceived, recorded, and experienced. This group dynamic helped shift popular music away from the dance-oriented 45-rpm single back toward the ...

5 Epic Jazz Songs That Forever Changed the World

by Alan Bryson
April 9, 2026

So You Don't Like Jazz normally focuses on ways to turn people on to jazz, but this column focuses on five jazz songs whose impact profoundly changed modern music. In the process they also demonstrated that jazz could be successful in a modern culture dominated by pop, rock & roll, and rhythm & blues. Arguably the two most powerful examples were released in 1959, on the cusp of the '60s, followed by another in 1961, and then two more examples ...

All About Music—My AAJ Experience

by Alan Bryson
September 8, 2025

Music & Taste Music and food have a lot in common. Variety is the key--without it, even the best prepared food loses its appeal. It is telling that we speak of “musical taste," even though we experience music through our ears. Genres like jazz and classical music weave together themes, patterns, harmonies, and mathematical relationships that usher the mind into a world of stimulating complexity. These genres are like a fine, multi-course meal--each movement and variation unfolding to ...

The Unlikely Story of Cannonball Adderley's Rise to the Top

by Alan Bryson
August 13, 2025

For me, the most gripping music stories are the tales of “overnight sensations." In the jazz sphere, we have our share. There is the story of an eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday, discovered by producer John Hammond while she was a hostess in a Harlem club. There is the tale of a seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald, whose triumphant debut at an Apollo talent contest soon landed her a spot as the vocalist for Chick Webb's orchestra. Even more remarkable is the sheer chance ...

Don't Like Jazz? Give Me Six Minutes And Forty-Two Seconds

by Frank Housh
February 20, 2025

Don't like jazz? I think I understand. For many, jazz seems hyper-intellectual and inaccessible and, to be fair, it too often is. At its best, however, jazz represents the heart of the creative instinct; it began by taking popular songs and changing their harmony and melodies. This “variations on a theme" is nothing new. What jazz added was a unique, improvisational approach that discarded existing rules of interpretation, transforming familiar tunes into something new and different. Let's take ...

Michael Jackson & Jimmy Smith to Stevie Wonder & Dizzy Gillespie — My Top Ten Jazz/Pop Encounters

by Alan Bryson
November 27, 2021

It's a good bet that most of us have heard people say they don't like jazz, or even worse, drop the H-bomb, “I hate jazz." If you choose to engage, the key is to tread lightly and tailor an approach that considers the tastes and sensibilities of the other person. The “So You Don't Like Jazz" column explores ways to do just that. One of my go-to approaches is finding common ground, and pop music is perhaps the ...

Gulda: Classic Bad Boy

by Alan Bryson
October 15, 2021

It's a good bet that most of us have heard people say they don't like jazz, or even worse, drop the H-bomb, “I hate jazz." If you choose to engage, the key is to tread lightly and tailor an approach that considers the tastes and sensibilities of the other person. The “So You Don't Like Jazz" column explores ways to do just that. Imagine Mozart had been born in 1930 in Austria, instead of 1756. Would he have ...