Every Album I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every album that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

For reasons too boring to explain here, I recently found myself alone in Peterborough for 24 hours with no particular place to go. Peterborough is not a town blessed with an abundance of entertainment options, but it does have a monthly jazz night at the local theatre. Even ten years ago I doubt I would even have considered a jazz gig as a way to spend my evening, but nowadays it is exactly what I wanted. Somewhere along the line I had unexpectedly become a jazz fan.

Rewinding to when I was a teenager, jazz was, to me and my friends at least, a joke. My friends dad was in a jazz group and to us this was roughly equally uncool as another friends dad who was a Morris dancer, laughably anachronistic. The jazz club sketches on The Fast Show didn’t help either, portraying jazz as ridiculous, pretentious and highly mockable. And for me, and most of my generation, that’s how it stayed.

Looking back, there were a few little signs that my contempt of this genre of music was misplaced. I loved the heavily jazz influenced tracks on Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums, such as The National Anthem and Living In A Glasshouse. I loved Laurent Garnier’s techno jazz crossover ‘The Man With The Red Face’. I enjoyed some of the jazz-house that was popular around the turn of the millennium. I bought Miles Davis – A Kind of Blue because it was always appearing on those 100 best albums of all time lists as the token jazz album. I enjoyed it, but not so much that I went searching for more. So, whilst some signs were there, any nascent interest in jazz remained hidden within me for now.

Until, that is, 2015 and the release of Kamasi Washington’s album The Epic. I can’t even remember now where I heard about it, or what prompted me to listen to it. Possibly it cropped up on 6Music which I was listening to a lot at the time. Or, I may have read of or heard his collaborations with other artists I was more familiar with, such as Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. Whatever the reasons, it changed my views on jazz completely.

It wasn’t just the quality of the album, although it’s a wonderful record, which had me hooked from the opening track ‘Change Of The Guard. It was also the breadth of it. Over 3 hours it covers many styles of jazz, from the intensity of Coltrane-style hard bop to smooth soul-jazz, also taking in influences from outside the world of jazz from classical to funk to afro-beat. I loved individual tracks, such as the version of ‘Claire De Lune’, ‘Re Run’ and ‘Askim’, but equally important to me was the story it told, the history of jazz. It taught me to truly appreciate this art form for the first time.

After hearing the record, I watched Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series (also an epic, at 18 hours or so), introducing me to more artists, filling in gaps in my knowledge, then started to explore jazz for myself. I listened to the greats artists, such as Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, but also found contemporary artists like Rosie Turton and Jaime Branch on Bandcamp, who previously I would have passed over and ignored.

I found albums that I loved as much or more than The Epic, such as Art Blakey’s ‘A Night In Tunisia’ and Max Roach’s ‘Members, Don’t Git Weary’, and started to understand The Epic’s place in jazz history, to understand where it had borrowed from, and who it had been influenced by. This made The Epic feel less like a miracle that had appeared out of nowhere, but I didn’t love it any less. It reminded me of my Britpop days, and realising how much Elastica had taken from Wire, or Suede had borrowed from Bowie. I still loved those bands too. .

There are many, many albums I’ve loved over the years. Some of them more, or even much more than The Epic. But few that have had such a profound influence on my taste in music. Only Nevermind springs to mind. The Epic opened up a whole new world to me, a world that even nearly a decade after I first heard The Epic I have barely started to explore. I expect that for the rest of my life I will be finding new jazz records to love, and to Kamasi Washington and The Epic, I am forever grateful.