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

Both - but I think Jazz is especially amenable to sounding good. In terms of a system making a given genre sound better or worse, I think it is simply that good recordings benefit a lot more from a good system. But all recordings should benefit to varying degrees from a good system.

I lost my interest in mainstream jazz a while ago, but got turned on to so-called spiritual jazz a few years ago, starting with the Strata-East catalog- some amazing stuff there, and a lot of what I listen to and chase these days are in this more offbeat jazz area that is not so cacophonous to be free jazz but comes pretty close sometimes- Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil McBee are two of the great players among many. A lot of the records were originally released during a low point in vinyl in the U.S. but they still sound good. What is now limiting is price- some of the OGs are nutty money or pretty hard to find, let alone in first tier condition. I don’t know that there is a common thread to this sub-genre, since the term is applied loosely to a lot of private label and small label post bop jazz that uses eastern or African influences. Some of it is fabulous, sonically. One that was mainstream was Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, the El Daoud, on Impulse- now very hard to find in mint- condition and pricey even for beater copies- recorded in the family studio in their basement in Long Island. Ron Carter on that one. Lots to discover and learn. There is a movement among current younger musicians to tap into this vein too, so from relatively inexpensive to collector’s pieces, you can spend a fair amount of time doing a deep dive. Even the records Nathan Davis released on his return to the U.S. are pretty rare and made on some of the thinnest vinyl I’ve ever seen, but sound good. Usually pretty simple combos, very little in the way of string fills or heavy-handed production- some of the material, like Horace Tapscott- is fairly large ensemble playing. Worth checking out if you’ve lost interest in jazz or want to take a different path. Most all of it is attributed to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as inspiration.

The thread title says it all. I can listen to jazz recordings for hours on end but can scarcely name a dozen tunes.  My jazz collection is small but still growing.  Most recordings sound great.  On the other hand, I have a substantial rock, pop and country collection and like most of us, have a near encyclopedic knowledge of it.

We remember the rock, pop and country collections because this is what was played back in the days of no format FM radio stations.

To my ears acoustic music almost invariably sounds better than electronic on a high-quality system, and I suspect that the recording engineers (e.g. Rudy Van Gelder) who focussed on jazz were among the very best.

IMHO, with jazz you get both – good music and good sound. Like @whipsaw mentioned, Rudy Van Gelder (Blue Note) engineered tons of material from the bebop/hard bop/post-bop eras. Several other labels had good production quality as well, like Prestige, Riverside, Columbia, Verve, and Impulse.

@strateahed,

I noticed you left out the Rudy Van Gelder post strateahead CTI years! ☺
Which are some of my favorites to this day, but I do also love the above!

Off the top of my head I can't remember some of the Bill Evans session engineers but they were some of the sharpest ever!

Does anybody really listen to pure jazz with bad sound quality?

Thing is these days the most interesting music to me is that which cross or defy traditional genres, including traditional "Jazz", which alone is very wide and varied in styles to the point that "Jazz" has become almost a useless label except in the historical sense. That all started with fusion Jazz back in the late Miles Davis era. Most of what happened with Jazz as we traditionally know it in the modern recording era happened as a result of Miles Davis.

Even Ken Burns Jazz miniseries did not quite know what to say about Jazz as it had been traditionally defined anymore once they got past the fusion jazz era that Miles Davis started back in the latter sixties and after Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, the key figures that helped form, popularize and evolve traditional Jazz, had passed, which is a long time ago already baby, yeah!

I guess if there is a lot of group improvisation and extended solos going on, that is still the "essence" of Jazz. I know it when I hear it, especially when listening to an actual live performance. Oh and yes the sound quality better be good, right?

Having played professionally, it’s the quality of the recording AND the composition.  I never listen to some of my favorite rock recordings due to poor recording sq.  Jazz musicians know a lot of their commercial success is in the equipment/method of the recording, not mass appeal.