I am always more attracted to music by people like Miles Davis, Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and all their contemporary descendants such as Diana Krall, Jamie Cullum, Jane Monheit and a few other jazz quartets. This might be why. In addition to all the wonderful sounds, their works share a kind of lamentation and melancholy about life. They all sing about or sound a certain broken-heartedness, not in despair but in a moody and therapeutic way.
However sad the songs or the music sometime could be, they all sing with a theme of hope, the inner strength of human spirit, or the light at the end of the tunnel. It is that soul-searching aspect of the music that I enjoyed very much. They are not very different from the Ecclesiastes writings, my favorite part of the Bible, about the universal and time-less human soul yearning.