To commemorate the 40th Anniversary of this magazine, we decided to come up with a list of jazz experiences to have before you die. A veritable jazz bucket list, if you will. Our thanks to readers, Facebook fans and friends and Twitter followers for their input. Here’s our Top 40. OK, get going.
Club-hop through NYC, starting uptown and continuing downtown and into Brooklyn. One drink per stop
Put on a house concert featuring local jazz artists
Take a tour of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens
Check out the Monterey Jazz Festival and buy a vintage festival poster
Visit the graves of famous jazz musicians in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City. Among the jazz greats buried there are Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Greer, W.C. Handy, King Oliver, Milt Jackson and Illinois Jacquet
Watch Ken Burns’ JAZZ from start to finish and make a list of all the people you think should have been included
Listen to every Miles Davis CD in chronological order and dress accordingly for each period
Attend a jazz fantasy camp like Tritone or Gerald Veasley’s Bass Bootcamp
Hang “backstage” in the bowels of Fort Adams at the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival
Visit the Village Vanguard and soak up the history from the bandstand and the walls
Listen and pay handsomely for a performance by a street musician playing jazz
Cough as quietly as possible during a Keith Jarrett concert, without getting lectured or
lambasted
Sit at the Tony Bennett table at the Blue Note and order the shrimp cocktail
Contribute a review of a favorite recent jazz CD to the Community section of JazzTimes.com
Walk on hallowed ground at Congo Square in New Orleans
Listen to Wynton Marsalis jam in a hotel lobby
Memorize at least one solo from a famous jazz record and hum it for someone who might actually recognize it
Attempt to catch at least a bit of every single act playing the West Village’s Winter Jazzfest or Undead Jazzfest
Spend a Saturday and $50 hunting for jazz albums at thrift stores and yard sales
Visit the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers
See Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman perform anywhere, any time
Enjoy the summer moonlight behind the stage at Jazz à Juan in Juan-les-Pins
Visit Preservation Hall in New Orleans
Tour the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City
Hit up one or more of the premier summertime European festivals: Umbria Jazz in Perugia, Italy; Heineken Jazzaldia in San Sebastián, Spain…
Go to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and hear the rest of the Carnegie Hall concert of 1957 that yielded 2005’s Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note). The remaining performances, so far unissued, include Sonny Rollins, the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Zoot Sims with Chet Baker, and Ray Charles playing jazz backed by Ed Blackwell
Listen to Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz religiously
Get your muck-proof white shrimper boots autographed by fans and artists at Jazz Fest in New Orleans
Go to Cuba to see Chucho Valdés perform with Irakere during the Havana International Jazz Festival
Buy the CD of a local jazz musician playing a gig where no one pays attention to the music, ever
Find a retired and unknown jazz musician living in your area and interview him or her for your local paper or a Web site
Wear your JazzTimes T-shirt and pace back and forth outside the offices of DownBeat in Elmhurst, Ill.
Sample the Big Easy barbecue and music of Kermit Ruffins with his Barbecue Swingers on a Thursday night at Vaughan’s in New Orleans
Experience A-list vocal jazz in concert: Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson or Kurt Elling should do it
Visit a local radio station and bring a gift for the likely underpaid and underappreciated jazz DJ
Take a picture of yourself standing on the stoop where the “A Great Day in Harlem” photo was shot
Travel to Cape Town, South Africa, for the annual jazz festival, and take a music tour through the townships
Take a son, daughter, niece or nephew to a children’s program at Jazz at Lincoln Center
Go on a jazz cruise and don’t gain 10 pounds
Record your memory of your first encounter with jazz for StoryCorps (storycorps.org), where it will be housed at the Smithsonian
How many have you done already? I’ve done exactly 27 of them, believe it or not, which either makes me feel very lucky or very old. I am also grateful that Keith Jarrett didn’t berate me for my respiratory distress. That’s one I’m not doing again.
