Jazz listening: Is it about the music? Or is it about the sound?

Great to see us share a passion for quality Jazz pressings. I can also listen to Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans, Chick Corea for hours. Acoustical instruments, especially the Piano, is difficult to sound perfect due to the complex physics behind the harmonics. Some of you have very customized systems to deal with that, based on what I’ve read over time. As of me, I’m still saving-and-trading in this journey of a hobby. 

Americans are prone to binary thinking.

Is it this or that?  This is the reason, not that.  Blah blah blah...

Guess what - jazz lovers love both the music and great recordings.  We don't have to draw some kind of imaginary line between the two.

I am a big jazz appreciator. I have been listening to jazz for years. Both live and recorded. As an audiophile, like with any genre, it is about BOTH, the music and the quality of reproduction. Perhaps this is the case in classical, as well. But in jazz, it is especially important to me to have a highly resolving system which reproduces a very black background, so you not only hear the notes, but the spaces between the notes. Soundstage, imaging and depth also add a lot, because in some recordings there can be one or two or three instruments on the recording. This leads me also to the quality of the recording. That matters a lot and ads to the enjoyment of the music. My journey as an audiophile has led me from solid state to tubes. I have a PrimaLuna Dialogue Premium HP integrated that I had not given enough. listening time to. Well Steve Guttenberg recently reviewed the Boyuurange A50 Mk3 300B tube integrated amp. At the time it was about $760 on Amazon. I thought what the heck. I bought it. I listen to a lot of ECM jazz. Wow was I blown away at the soundstage imaging and depth of this amp! I never heard a ss amp do what this cheap little 300B tube amp did! The quality of sound recordings and reproduction ads so much to the enjoyment and appreciation of jazz. Please keep in mind that what constitutes jazz these days is very broad. Well I now am back to the PrimaLuna and “auditioning” it again. I am thinking if the Boyuurange can do the things I heard, I would love to hear what a high end tube integrated could do. Hence, my assessing Raven, VAC, Decware and perhaps other options for a high end, perhaps, “end game” tube integrated for ME. Right now I am circling around the possibility of a Raven Osprey Mk3 and the VAC Sigma 170i. 

Both!  

I think that jazz is one of the most diverse genres.  I say that I love jazz, about 1% of it anyway.  There is tons of jazz that will drive me out of the room, no matter how good the recording.  To illustrate I used to get a jazz magazine, Jazziz, I think, and there were well over a hundred album reviews in it every month.  So to talk about jazz as a single type of music that one enjoys in total is inaccurate.  I think it would be an accomplishment for someone to listen to 1% of all the jazz albums ever released just once.

One thing that jazz music has going for it is that most albums are recorded live in the studio over a couple of days, so you don't get all the "feel" or emotion or humanity lost before that final take, or because the musicians playing on the album never actually met each other.  Studio effects are usually kept to a minimum too.  Of course that is changing as time goes on, but a lot of jazz is still recorded that way.