Best Sax Jazz

The three best, in my opinion, are:

John Coltrane (e.g., with Johnny Hartman or "Bags and Trane")

Eric Dolphy (e.g., "Out to Lunch")

James Carter (e.g., "Chasin' the Gypsy")

I note that there have been some very recent posts to this old thread, so I guess people are still looking through the archives. In response to Phasecorrect: no, I'm not a music scholar, just someone who has loved jazz for more than 40 years. Many years ago, while in high school in Washington, DC, I did get to know the great jazz and classical guitarist, Charlie Byrd, and jazz has been a part of my life since then. During the mid-1980's, I developed a college course in jazz appreciation as part of a continuing credits program for high school teachers in the Seattle, WA, area, and during that time I really got serious about studying jazz as an art form. Some jazz critics refer to jazz as America's classical music, and that's probably a fair statement.

My real concern is that jazz is becoming a "museum" music. During the early decades of jazz, almost all musicians learned their craft by playing (clubs, orchestras, dances, etc.), whereas today most of the young jazz musicians develop their playing skills in classes (high school, college, music academies). For jazz to flourish again, it needs lots of new blood, more listeners (particularly in the African-American community), and wider air play by radio stations. Unfortunately, I think the reverse pattern is true.

One way to spread the jazz "message" is for people who love the music to share their knowledge with younger listeners, and I've tried to do that here on Audiogon. I appreciate the positive feedback I've gotten from other A-gon members.

Coming from Montreal, I am happy to report that the Montreal Jazz Festival is doing better every year. On the other hand the music presented cannot, in very many cases, be even remotely called "jazz". I am not hung up on nomenclature, believe me, but the powers-that-be at the Festival are stretching it every year. Sting has been presented last year as part of the Festival... I know, to use the words of a jazz immortal, there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. However, it's hard to get younger people interested in jazz when it is often so ill defined. The one thing is that when you go back in time, the defining lines are way easier to recognize. One last point, in a very European way, the Festival has always considered that the blues are a part of the greater realm of jazz. Maybe because I like the blues and "roots" music generally, I am very happy that this is the case. I know that when rock was closer to its blues roots, one way for a young person to reach jazz was by way of the blues; the progression being, let's say the Rolling Stones to Muddy Waters, to B. B. King to T-Bone Walker and then to Charlie Christian. I may be dreaming... Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no handy stepping-stones to jazz nowadays. In my case, if I remember, insofar as records go, inadvertently my older sister introduced me to jazz by getting a copy of "The Sound of Jazz" from the CBS record club and declaring it unlistenable before giving it to me. My other sister did the same with Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" so hand-me-downs are not always bad! Aside from the fact that I have always been curious and loved all kinds of music, never minding whether it was "in" or "out", being rejected by my seniors couldn't hurt. One point is that it is very hard to impose things like a type of music on young people (or any age group for that matter) especially so if it is seen as complicated, elitist, intellectual. In the past jazz was seen as fun and alive. That's the only hope to bring new blood in. Make it fun and alive, without losing its essential qualities.

Pbb:

Your mention of "The Sound of Jazz" is very interesting -- you are one of the very few people I have encountered that knows of this recording done by Leonard Bernstein, done as part of the "Omnibus" TV series in the mid-1950's. I have used this recording in a jazz appreciation class that I used to teach, and it provided a great "bridge" for classical music fans to understand some of the compositional and performance elements of jazz. About two years ago, I talked about "The Sound of Jazz" in this forum, and several people asked me to make CD copies from the LP for them. One of those people was a man from Texas, whose son was about to leave for college where he would have a classical music scholarship. He wrote me several months later to say that his son had learned a lot about jazz from the recording, and planned to take some jazz classes while in college. So, Lennie still continues to influence people years after his passing...

Sd ... your comment that jazz is dying. I can only give a personal perspective, and I really have a limited exposure to jazz, but to my ears since the 60s jazz has just sounded more and more like musicians showing off technical prowess, rather than creating music. Almost all modern jazz I've heard turns me off completely ... it's musician's music (hey, and I'm a tenor sax player so I do appreciate the technical brilliance).
Give me Dexter Gordon, Gerry Mulligan, or Sonny Rollins .. to me that was inventive music. Hey, I even like the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller big band stuff ... so musical, with bands working as a superb team. But more up to date stuff just sounds like Joe Satriani has taken up the sax.

Perhaps it's related to how people are learning jazz now, per your comments, perhaps I'm just a jazz luddite.
You know, I could say the same about classical music ... modern classical just seems to be an exercise in musical mathematics, and has lost the emotion of Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky.