Sorry, Dizzy is on the list…. hehehe

I agree. I listen to more european jazz than anything else.

But it made me think, what would be my top ten of musicians which influenced my jazz listening.
That’s (maybe) a bit easier, because it’s not directly a judgement about who is the better player 🙂

I’ll try.

1. Miles Davis, he is my great inspirator to look for jazz. His great choice of musicians made this possible.
Miles made me curious (what first caught my attention were his amazing LP covers!) , and I looked for music of all his interesting companions. And so I learned my first jazz music.
I got to know him by his 70s music. I became curious for his earlier work, wanted to know where he came from, and so he brought me back to his roots and to earlier stages of the jazz.
Furthermore, I admire Miles’ great managing of timing and use of silence, which makes it always an adventure to listen to his music.

2. Although Miles certainly brought me to the jazz, I still doubted now about place 1. It was rather late in my listening history that I dared to listen to Duke Ellington. I was not so in for “Big Bands” and I only associated him with this kind of music. But inevitably I came to listen to him, and then I fell for his enormous variety of original sounds and tunes. And since then I listened a lot to him, also to his “Big Bands”. And now I think that in all his greatness he is still an underestimated figure (in lists like this one).
Maybe more people have the difficulties I had with him (not “cool”, not “modern”, “too traditional”), but I learned to listen to him, and he became the one who connected “my jazz” with the origins of jazz in the early years.

3. One of the first jazz musicians I got acquainted with (in this case without the help of Miles! I just loved the cover of an lp) was Ben Webster. Certainly one of the first of the “older jazz” guys. I loved the intimacy of his smaller bands. He turned my small attic room in my parent’s house into a jazzy, smokin’ café 🙂

4. Another early “older” guy (although he is the only jazz giant I’ve ever seen alive, drumming in a café at about 3 meters ahead of my nose) Art Blakey, he developed my love for rhythmic sessions. Another great band leader!

5. Gato Barbieri, just because of his album “The Third World”, an album in which I learned to dive into chaotic free jazz sounds, enjoying the waves I went under but emerged again.
Music that for me represented a struggle, a wrestling, a search for and finding of a way out. Liberation is the word. Fitting my young age 🙂 And fortunately nobody knew him in my environment, so he was really “my guy” 🙂

6. Jimmy Witherspoon (especially At the Renaissance) connected the blues (my other music love) and jazz for me and made the singing in jazz more accessible for me. Before, that was not really my kind of jazz, although in the blues I appreciated the singing (especially the parlando kind).

7. Charles Mingus, who lets the instruments talk and quarrel, and in that way shows how to listen to jazz and to music in general. Those fantastic dialogues in sounds. That game of Question and Answer.

8. Ella Fitzgerald. At first, especially because of her scat singing, which I adore very much (another way of talking in music :D). But ohhhh, what is she an energetic lady and how good is she at timing and giving just that bit of extra in a song which makes it special. She became my front door to the other (great) Ladies of Jazz.

9. I hesitate, was it Keith Jarrett or in the end yet Thelonious Monk or Bill Evans who brought me to piano jazz and who made me try to learn to play the keyboard myself. I think Keith was the one I heard by far the most, because I had his Köln Concert album, so I have to give him this honour. Although later on, Monk became a top favourite of mine, as did Bill Evans in another way.

10. And last but not least and maybe even first ….. Louis Armstrong. It lasted quite a long time before I could really listen to his music. In my own collection at that time, I only had a few tracks. But of course I also knew him from a few films I’d seen on television. And there he was the one who gave jazz his sympathic, enjoyable big smile.

Of course , even this personal list is not without (inner) discussion. See number 9 . In my first years when I developed my preference for jazz I also listened a lot to Eric Dolphy, Clifford Brown, Willem Breuker, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Jasper van ‘t Hof, Johnny Griffin, Wynton Kelly, Joe henderson to mention a few ….. :lol

Maybe they didn’t all shape the development of the jazz music as meant in your posting, but I don’t feel to know enough about this to be a judge. But I do know, these were the jazz folks who had a tremendous influence on my love for jazz. As explained here above 🙂