free legal download of joe jackson jumpin' jive album Live 1980 / 86. Purchase and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs. Buy the album Starting at 20.99€ A double-disc live collection, Live. 1980-1986 manages to effectively trace the development of Joe Jackson's diverse career. Drawing from four different periods in the songwriter's career -- with each period featuring a new backing band -- Live captures Jackson with his original new wave trio, a 1983 quintet that was dominated by keyboards, a horn-driven group from 1984, and a 1986 quartet that specialized in straight-ahead rock & roll. The resulting album highlights his musical diversity, not his songwriting, which means the record is more intriguing as a historical document than as casual listening © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo. ""free"" legal download of joe jackson jumpin' jive album. In a lot of ways, the 1980s were a strange decade. Speaking specifically to the musical output there was a lot to like, but it was dominated by fads and failed experiments. As someone who had limited access to music other than what my parents played or what popular radio had to offer, the 80s were a kind of dark period for me until much later in life. But during those dark times some names were always part of the conversation, even if they just skirted around the fringe. One of those names was Joe Jackson. I feel like I’ve always known Jackson’s name. I knew that he had some radio hits but I absolutely could not name one of them. I knew he had a few hit records, one was Look Sharp, the other had a white and blue cover, maybe with a drawing of a piano or something on it. This is about as much as I knew about Joe Jackson. In my pursuit to fill in some holes in my fabric of music information I decided it was time to see what Joe Jackson was all about. You might remember in May I started looking at albums and artists that people have recommended to me over the years or that are considered essential listening. I established a few key rules for myself: I have to listen to the album at least three times through before writing anything, and I cannot research the record or artist before writing. I picked up a dollar bin copy of Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul LP, hoping it would be representative of his work. That being said, one of the only things I remember people telling me about Joe Jackson is that each album is pretty different from the others. I also remember hearing that Body and Soul had some sort of jazz theme to it. When seeing the cover’s replication of a classic Blue Note LP this seemed likely to be true. The first few songs of the record made me cringe a bit as they are loaded with 80s pop hooks that I couldn’t get into much then and haven’t warmed up to in the last 25 years. As the record progressed, I could at least appreciate Jackson’s writing ability. Overall, the first listen left me pretty flat. The next two times through, things started to blossom a bit. There is a jazz influence here; however, it is the smooth jazz sound of the 80s that permeates these songs, not the mid-century sound implied by the album cover. The second track “Cha Cha Loco” has become my favorite song on the record. There is a bit of a cha-cha sound, as the title indicates, but there is an 80s pop vibe as well. The two really shouldn’t work at all but Jackson has crafted this song in such a way that makes the two seem like a natural match. The big radio hit that I remember is “You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)” and I can safely say I still really don’t like this song. The 80s meets the worst of smooth 80s sax and isn’t even ironically good. I was pretty excited when I recognized “Be My Number Two,” but that excitement faded when I realized it’s a staple at my dentist’s office. As the record wound down for the last time, I read through the liner notes and discovered that Joe Jackson and producer David Kershenbaum wanted to make this album differently than a lot of records being made in the mid-80s. They wanted to use more traditional technology and gear, find a great room to record in rather than a stuffy modern studio….any of this sounding familiar? While the trend at the time was for heavy production, digital recording and lots of effects and overdubs, Joe Jackson wanted to get back to a classic style of recording. With that in mind, I would call Body and Soul a success. Ok, so after spending some time with this record I can’t say I’m a Joe Jackson fan. I can see why he would appeal to a lot of people. He is a solid songwriter, has a voice that can hold its own against most, and is not afraid to try new things. One thing I do really like about him is how he manages to take the 80s pop sound and make it a lot more interesting than most of his contemporaries, and that alone makes him worth knowing…..knox rd……. A chameleon. A classically trained race musician. A bridge builder. Yes, when Joe Jackson blended pure, unfiltered jazz with some of the finest songs from the history of pop music in 1984 with his sublime Body and Soul , every true music lover knew that he had only one thing to do: hurry to the record store. Not surprising: Jackson, together with Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, has been labeled as one of the most talented angry young men in the late seventies . That loft thinking, however, the gentlemen critics were soon put in the fridge. Joe Jackson has practically swallowed all the musical water - he has even recorded some classic albums. Not surprising, given Jackson's conservatory background. At the age of eleven, Jackson, born in 1954, began to follow violin lessons, initially to be able to miss the gym classes. Soon the young Jackson exchanges the violin for piano, he exchanges classical music for jazz and rock and learns to compose - at the age of sixteen he performs in the local bars of Portsmouth, sometimes as a permanent pianist, sometimes as group member of local bands. But Jackson had to invent himself. And so that scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London when he was eighteen is more than welcome. Jackson, eternally a bit of a sleeper, graduates as a composer, but not in piano, but in violin and percussion. "A struggling rock songwriter and keyboardist with a degree in percussion, it was too ridiculous." After that, a whole series of performances and a much needed first demo, which ends up in a favorable wind on the desk of A & M Records manager David Kershenbaum, will follow. The rest is history. All from debut albums Look Sharp and I'm The Man , both from 1979, and successor Beat Crazy(1980) you feel that Jackson is something special, a composer pur sang that can sometimes get razor sharp from the corner. But Joe Jackson is also synonymous with versatile, and so he jumps with Jumpin Jive (1981) on old swing, blues and jazz compositions, while the follow-up Night & Day (1982) mostly beckons to Latin American salsa. But it is not until he turns to classical jazz with Body and Soul in 1984 that all pieces of the puzzle fall fully in place. Because let's face it: from the opening track "The Verdict", Jackson grabs you by your scruff, holds the unsuspecting listener for an entire album with some of the most beautiful melodies that ever crept out of someone's pen. Heavy, bombastic brass instruments combine seamlessly with thunderous drums, a sparing dash of piano and Jackson's voice into a threatening cocktail that we still have not recovered from all those years. 'Cha Cha Loco' may not be more than a little spielerei with the chachacha, do not forget those masterly brass players, that aptly coined backing vocals and the finger-cutting vocals of Jackson. But the real goose bumps still have to come. "Not Here, Not Now" is therefore a chillingly beautiful ode to nothing less than life and love itself. The song is, due to its very heavy subject, the sophisticated variety between quiet strophes, choruses that pull out all the stops and another sublime melody that Jackson seems to have a patent on, maybe a bit heavy on the stomach, so what ? You do not always order the lightest meal at restaurant? What's more, Jackson was smart enough at the time for his pièce de résistanceto give a sophisticated sequence, and so the last two songs from the A-side - single "You can not get what you want" and last minute "Go for it" - even a lame dance again, we dare a camel to bet on. Those bass that swing the pan! That masterly symbiosis between percussion and brass players! That total sound! In "Loisada", the first song on the B-side, it begins to dawn on the listener: Jackson has to hide somewhere a teletime machine with which he secretly smuggled some jazz originals from the first half of the 20th century into the eighties and then immersed in his idiom.