40 Jazz Albums to Celebrate Eastside’s 40th Birthday

Eastside FM has been on air for 40 years.  As part of our 40th birthday celebrations  we’ve selected 40 jazz albums to illustrate the wonderful music we have been playing over those four decades.

Phil James, who presents the Philosophy of Jazz each week on Eastside, and Mick Paddon from Time and Space, have curated the 40 albums with a lot of help from their friends.  Their challenge was to select just 40 albums to represent 40 years of jazz.  To make sure they covered all the decades equally and included Australian and international albums, they were aiming for 10 albums for each decade, half Australian and half from elsewhere.

To get things started they looked at albums which had won international and Australian awards.  They scoured magazine jazz-album-of-the-year lists, guides to jazz albums, listings such as  the Jazzwise “100 jazz albums that shook the world.  They asked other Eastside FM jazz presenters  to nominate albums.  They put their own suggestions into the mix.  And they put out an on-air call to listeners.  All their searching identified a lot of musicians who everyone suggested should be included.  There wasn’t so much agreement on the  albums.  They ended up with over 280 suggestions from which to chose the 40.

To help whittle this down they set some guidelines. Only one album per musician as the named leader no matter how good the albums, or important the musician. The international albums would not only be from the USA and would include music drawing on different cultural and musical traditions. The list had to reflect the growing importance of female musicians, particularly in the past decade.

Then sifted through the long list of albums with all this in mind; they listened to the music; talked a lot; bent the guidelines a little; and finally got it down to 40.

Are they the best or most influential jazz albums from the past forty years? “That’s a great conversation starter which should keep us going for the next forty” say Phil and Mick . “Some of them certainly are. Whatever else, we hope everyone will agree with us that we have identified 40 great albums from Australian and international musicians which illustrate the wonderful jazz music we have been playing and sharing with our listeners on Eastside Radio for the past 40 years”

The 40 albums were the feature of Eastside’s 24 hour  broadcasting  on International Jazz Day on April 30th