Sleep Walker? Hmm. Japanese jazz is interesting because it's as close as we can get to aliens from outer space laboring to create a facsimile of American music. It's still firmly rooted in the jazz idiom and all, but something is just sort of
off because it's not really coming from the same place, both figuratively and literally. The same can probably be said about various other foreign takes on other genres. Anyway, I perceived this from your youtube clip, and figured you might like some Terumasa Hino.
Orgy in Rhythm has no shortage of Hino, as I recall, with one of my favorites being
Hip Seagull, a sort of Japanese simulacrum of
In a Silent Way or
Bitches Brew. Actually, those are required listening and you should get those first before you dick around with Terumasa Hino fercryinoutloud.
If you want "Weather Channel music," the two best examples I have from that dubious genre are called
Reachin' by Roger Glenn, and
Night Talk by Doug Richardson. I grabbed these off a jazz blog that may now be defunct, so best of luck tracking them down, but if you really want to feel like you're watching Prevue Guide circa 1990, PM me for sendspace links.
But before you mess around with the fringe stuff, like I said, grab a handful of Miles Davis albums. It doesn't totally matter which you pick, since you have to really think hard about how to go wrong (hint: I wouldn't get stuff after
Get Up With It). In addition to the big two Electric Miles ones I mentioned, I'd start with, say,
Miles Ahead,
Kind of Blue,
Porgy and Bess, and all four of the Prestige albums, really, wherein Miles, Coltrane, and the rest of the First Great Quintet holed up in a storefront studio in Jersey and knocked out four albums over the course of like a day.
Cookin' and
Workin' are the first two you should get, then proceed to
Relaxin' and finally the comparatively weak
Steamin', which is still incredibly good. *The only problem is that they might be
too good: there's a subset of jazz purists who insist that jazz reached its one and only apex with the style of music exemplified by these recordings, with any progress made (especially by Miles) forever ruining jazz, and anything before being worthless primordial ooze. Wynton Marsalis is the biggest proponent of this jazz-trapped-in-amber approach, to which he adds some grumbling about how brothers should pull up their pants.
Other fairly canonical stuff:
Charles Mingus -
Mingus Ah Um
Dave Brubeck -
Time Out
Duke Ellington -
Ellington at Newport
John Coltrane -
Giant Steps
Ornette Coleman -
The Shape of Jazz to Come
Eric Dolphy -
Out to Lunch!
