Jazz music recommended

Sbank is right! You listen to a few cats here and there. This guy played with that guy whose also on so-and-so's album. Next thing you know, you have yourself a library. However, if you're looking for "the more simple format", I don't think Mingus is what you want.
Buy a few Ray Brown albums, Bill Evans (Waltz for Debbie), Chet Baker (Chet), Wes Montgomery, Stan Getz. Of course, no jazz collection is complete without Kind of Blue. Just don't go too late into Miles's carreer-stay away from the fusion stuff (Bitches Brew). That was my first jazz album ever and I hated it. I decided to give Miles another chance. My next album was Kind of Blue, and the rest as they say....

Kieth Jarrett, Tomasz Stanko, Bobo Stenson, Gene Ammons, Dave Holland, Herbie Hancock, Chet Baker, Tommy Flannagan... This might be a very long thread.

Im a newbie...but Art Blakey is great harp bop

You know what you should do, take a whole lot of CD's out from the library and decide what you really like. Then buy them.

If I were you, trying to get into a new genre, I'd take some of the names people provided here, plug them into Pandora, and see if you like what it spits out. Then you can use the "more of that"/"don't like that" feedback option to hone in on things. I've found Pandora to be an excellent tool to learn about new genres where I may know a couple artists I like, but about which I'm not terribly familiar.