For some reason I'm a bit suspicious about letting Spotify pick new
music for me to listen to with its radio feature; I guess it's just
that it feels like such a personal thing so I don't want a machine
to do it. So I have a couple of ways of finding new music to listen
to; they're probably very obvious but I've found some of my favourite
musicians with them so I thought I'd put them here.
i) Find out who else is in the band and listen to them. For example
I was listening to a great Antonio Sanchez album called Migration,
on which it turns out Scott Colley plays bass (I hadn't heard of
Scott Colley before). Looking up Scott Colley I found another great
album he played on with a pianist called Edward Simon - who I also
hadn't heard before - who immediately became on of my favorite
pianists. So it goes. In principle you could think of a graph of
everyone who's played with everyone else, but even this I don't
want to do - just an edge between two musicians doesn't really seem
to do a relationship justice and I don't want to formalize it (maybe
this is irrational). So I just mentally keep track of where I am.
This works well for jazz because people play in all sorts of
combinations all the time.
ii) Look at who's playing at various jazz clubs I like. This I do
just by looking at the programme on the websites of the clubs. It
would work for any clubs but for sentimental reasons I end up looking
at ones I have fond memories of. This works pretty well for finding
new people who I wouldn't have heard of before or found looking at
people who've played together (it lets you jump into disconnected
components of the graph...). Practically I end up getting through
the programme too quickly so I end up doing this in bursts then
going back weeks/months later. I like looking at the programmes
from e.g. Smalls, the Village Vanguard, and the Jazz Standard just
from happy memories there - it would work with any clubs though.
Just doing these two things I've found so much that I really love
listening to, e.g. Edward Simon two days ago. And it feels like
exploring.
