Prepare for Jazz Guy Summer

Be the hep cat you want to see in the world

Hello! This one is on the house, but if you’re so moved, I’m still offering 30 percent off for paid subscriptions. I’m generally always going to do this special and want to figure out a way to charge even less to give readers more, but that’s tricky. So if you can pay now and I end up figuring out a way to bring the price down, then I’ll make a T-shirt or patch or something that says “I was a founding member of The Melt.” You’ll be the envy of all your friends, enemies, and ex-lovers.

If you pay enough attention to these things, you’ll notice something like a Mt. Rushmore of style icons that menswear enthusiasts always go back to. Ralph Lauren is an obvious one since he has defined so much style over the last 50+ years. David Letterman, Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, and Harrison Ford, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s are also on the list. But I’m always interested in the ones with the crossover appeal, like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, and how they can appeal to guys who post fit pics but also watch obsessives, as well as gearheads who respect the late movie stars for their deep connections to car culture. But the one that stands out over all of them is Miles Davis. He’s the style guy in my mind, partially because he was always trying out new things and could appeal to the Ivy Style set, as well as people who worship at the altar of Issey Miyake. There’s a deep well of Davis looks from his bop and cool jazz days in the 1940s, all the way until his later years in the 1980s, he’s got something for everybody and is the embodiment of the Jazz Guy look to me. But he’s not the only Jazz Guy. Not by a long shot.

Absolute god-level turtleneck, pants, socks combo.

I always think of Jazz Guy looks. Around October or so, when the temperatures start to dip and I begin bringing out the fall and winter clothes, the first thing I go for is the thick, cable-knit blue cardigan. I call that my Eric Dolphy sweater. Styles change, but ever since I saw images of Dolphy wearing one with a beanie on his head from 1964, that’s been one of my favorite looks. Whenever I’m looking for a new pair of trousers, I have a specific Jazz Guy fit in mind. I like pleated, a little baggy, but also a little room between the cuff and shoe. I like sunglasses with lenses that aren’t too dark; I attribute that to seeing a photo of a guy in a nightclub wearing a pair with a certain tint and thinking how cool it was. I know it’s truly cliche, but the Jazz Guy is always the coolest-looking motherfucker to me. Part of it is because they get dressed, but also because, like Davis, there’s not one type of look that is uniform for the entire history of the art. Now, thankfully, the Jazz Guy has reentered the contemporary style discussion, and I think we’re all the better for it.

First, given the history of jazz and the art form’s way of reinventing itself over and over, there’s really no one single Jazz Guy look. For instance, I couldn’t see an actual jazz musician on stage in an Online Ceramics Bill Evans or Alice Coltrane shirt, but I wouldn’t be surprised, either. Still, the existence of Evans and Coltrane shirts and hats being made and sold by a popular designer does say something to me. It syncs up with André 3000’s “flute music” sounding like some lost new age record done by some midcentury Rudy Van Gelder-produced artist who gave up performing and went to live in an ashram and feels like John Coltrane exploring the cosmos through music in his later years. Add in the fact that the former(?) Outkast member kicked off his current “jazz era” playing live sets at New York City’s famed Blue Note, and you start to see the evolution of the Jazz Guy. It’s been happening now for a few years (just look at Kamasi Washington turning into the guy everybody from Kendrick to the Red Hot Chili Peppers wants to play with) and has continued both musically and stylistically

The modern stuff is there, but the past is never very far behind. The amount of people I see geeking out over Japanese jazz record reissues you can order from places like Light in the Attic has been growing day after day, and major publications are publishing stories about the “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love John Coltrane.” I think there are a lot of jazz-curious people, but I also believe there are people who might think Charlie Parker was Dorothy’s husband who will still incorporate bits of Bird or other jazz musicians into the way they dress. Maybe it’s boxier suits with jacket lapels like Parker was fond of in the 1940s and that came back in the 1980s (I like to say that some ‘80s Armani is “bop-coded”), or maybe it’s from a different era. The beret has a real Dizzy Gillespie influenced by Cuban music or hep cat beatnik feel, while Scott Fraser recently showed off some pieces from their collection that look very Chet Baker—modeled by a guy named Nicholas Baker. The two guys aren’t related, but I was pleasantly surprised to realize I was familiar with some of the modern Baker’s work and his band La Lom. The group blends Cuban and South American rhythms with a sort of 1960s soul feel, but looks like a group of guys who just listened to On the Corner and realized their future lies in fusion. 

Ryo Fukui’s “Scenery” is on my turntable a lot

Speaking of fusion, the Jazz Dispensary Instagram account has over 340k followers, and their whole thing is making memes urging people to listen to more far-out sounds by McCoy Tyner or Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy. All of these things could be unrelated, but I’m not so sure, and I think there is something to this re-emergence of all things jazz slowly coming to the surface. You could go back and watch the 2001 Ken Burns documentary and pick out any pithy quote you’d like about what jazz is no matter which era you’re talking about. But one thing that’s hammered home throughout the doc and any discussion of the art whether it’s Louis Armstrong or Albert Ayler is the spontaneity and realness of a group of jazz musicians playing together. How a live session really works as one of the great one-offs in music since there’s so much improvising and playing around. In our collab-obsessed culture, it makes sense that something that involves artists working together to create sounds would appeal to some. But I also think jazz benefits from the time we’re in, where so much culture is accessible. After years of people writing the music off as “complicated” or saying it’s a dead art form, people have the chance to figure out how they feel about literally thousands of albums on their own time. And when they do, whether or not they care about Out to Lunch, A Love Supreme, or Chick Corea’s early-1970s work, they’ll at least come away with the understanding that these guys have always dressed great.