I really appreciate people sharing their favorites. I am compiling them in a text file and will get some of them for certain (ask me in a year how I liked 'em).

I was wrong about the Don Ellis album....it's "Electric Bath," not "Turkish Bath." Brain fog.

A few more comments:

Not long ago I picked up a Miles Davis double-album called "Agharta" that I've found enjoyable. I also enjoy Bill Laswell's stuff under the band name Material. Their version of John Coltrane's "Naima" led me to track down the original, which is beautiful.

After exploring Miles Davis a while, enjoying everything from "In a Silent Way" to his '80s work with Marcus Miller, I decided to start checking out the Herbie Hancock albums from the early '70s. "Chameleon" is the obvious starting point but I really like "Thrust" which has some very sensuous pieces of funk-tinged, spacey-but-not-too-spacey music.

I've bought a few Charles Mingus albums but they haven't settled into my cranium yet. His early album (the one with the cool abstract-art cover) is very good. I really lament the loss of Tower Records where I used to go and just look at album covers and names and get a sense of what is available. Now it's all online and it's not nearly as fun.

Thanks again!

Jazz has been the soundtrack to my life since I moved to San Diego twenty-four years ago and discovered KSDS-FM (88.3). What I treasure about jazz is the endless opportunities for discovery. All day every day I listen to exceptionally creative music interspersed with moments of incandescence like McCoy Tyner's piano solo in Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," or Carmen McRae nailing "Black Coffee," or Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues." As old as it is, it is always new.

Great column. Great rock is often, IMO, a kind of jazz. That's not as silly as it sounds -- they both come from the blues. Cream, Hendrix, Steely Dan, Radiohead, Van Morrison, Santana -- there are so many examples -- where rock musicians rise above the simple three chord form and 4/4 rhythm to create freer, more expansive works. Jazz, blues, rock -- they all seek to create an underlying tension, whether rhythmic or harmonic or both -- and then resolve it.

There was a moment in rock, around the early '70s, when it sure seemed like rock might become a kind of jazz. Fusion usually refers to the jazz guys who were checking out rock (Weather Report). But what about the rock guys checking out jazz? Santana, Winwood, Allman Brothers, Jeff Beck, Steely Dan and so on? This was wonderful music, a nascent adult form of rock, but it got swamped by Led Zeppelin, on the one hand, and disco on the other. Still, it's exciting stuff and has never really died. Listen to Josh Redman or John Scofield and you can still hear it.

I really related to your personal music history. I had a similar voyage. Rock is very basic music; I think as we grow older, our brains both appreciate and crave more complexity. For some people, that means turning to classical. But for others, more complex versions of rock are attractive, and the giant gray area between jazz and rock can be an exciting place to dwell.

Some jazz musicians have their heads up their butts about this sort of thing. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played dance music. Today kids dance to rock and hip hop and so on. Why can't they dance to modern jazz? I was at a Redman concert at Berklee a couple of years ago and people were dancing in the aisles. More jazz musicians (not all, just more)need to think about putting that in their music, whether through rock, soul, hiphop, salsa, samba or whatever. That's why it was so cool that Caetano Veloso, a giant of Brazilian jazz, put out a rock album last year (it's called Ce).

When I was first getting into jazz, the most daunting part was the sheer size of the back catalog. Where to start? It's funny, but I can remember the exact order of the first few jazz albums that I bought, over the course of several years.

• Coltrane: My Favorite Things (At first I mostly liked it for McCoy Tyner's solos. It took me longer to appreciate Coltrane)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Cole Porter Songbook (best of the?)
• Chalie Parker: Savoy Masters vol 1 (loved it, but it sounded so odd!)
• Ornette Coleman: Ornette (took me literally years to appreciate)
• Charles Mingus: Changes One
• Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (instant love)
• Thelonious Monk: Solo Monk (ditto)
• Duke Ellington: At Newport
• Ellingont, Mingus, Roach: Money Jungle

After that I lose track, but by then I was hooked. It's funny, even though my selection was essentially random, I can see how it set the template for my current tastes. Slowly falling in love with Trane ... instant love for Miles Davis (spare and abstract but almost sensuous) and Mingus (the blues! yet weird and dissonant) ... initial incomprehension of Ornette (I finally "got" him when I heard "Shape of Jazz to Come", but by then I was ready, so to speak).

Anyway, to someone who is curious about jazz and doesn't know where to start, just dive in and listen to stuff. The internet makes this 100x easier than it used to be. If you find something you like, listen to more of that, eventually you will branch out (or not, it's all OK!)

I may have been a little premature in condemning Rahsaan Roland Kirk's recordings.

I have an early album Introducing Roland Kirk and it seems like pretty mediocre noodling 1960's fare to me. Some of his other stuff like We Free Kings or I Talk With The Spirits MAY be better.

As a general point, it seems to me that virtuosity on stage by no means always translates into ability to make great studio recordings. Playing a flute up your nostril does not alway create the same effect on CD.

The biggest problem with jazz is that there is too much of it. Another 1000 CDs and the basic outlines of my collection should be complete, but how will I find time to listen to it all?

Partly I resolve this dilemma by assigning different roles to elements of my jazz collection, having jazz to eat breakfast to, jazz for housework, jazz for cooking, jazz to browse the Internet to, jazz to go to sleep to, jazz to listen to while pumping gas outside my car, jazz for going to the bathroom to, jazz to listen to inside the car, and jazz to listen to at work.

Maybe the real problem is the number of hours in a day.