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References

1. , Jazz ,

ISBN 974-392-991-6

2. , , , ISBN 9747607-44-1

3. , , , ISBN 9747607-46-8

4. Verves Records
5. GRP Records
6. The Island of Jazz

Jazz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Jazz (disambiguation).

Jazz
Stylistic
origins

Cultural
origins

Typical
instrument
s

Derivative
forms

Blues, Folk, Marches, Ragtime

Early 20th century United States
Double bass, Drums, Guitar,
Piano, Saxophone, Trumpet,
Clarinet, Trombone, Vocals,
Vibraphone, Organ

Funk, Jump blues, Reggae,

Rhythm and blues, Rock and

roll, Ska
Subgenres

Avant-garde jazz

Bebop
Big band

Chamber jazz

Cool jazz

Free jazz
Gypsy jazz

Hard Bop

Latin jazz

Mainstream jazz

M-Base

Neo-bop

Post-bop

Soul jazz

Third stream

Swing

Traditional jazz

Fusion genres

Acid jazz

Afrobeat

Bluegrass

Bossa nova

Crossover jazz

Dansband

Folk jazz

Free funk

Humppa

Indo jazz

Jam band
Jazzcore

Jazz funk

Jazz fusion

Jazz rap

Kwela
Mambo

Manila Sound

Nu jazz

Nu soul

Punk jazz
Shibuya-kei

Ska jazz

Smooth jazz

Swing revival

World fusion

Regional scenes
Australia

Azerbaijan

Canada

Germany

Haiti

India

Italy

Netherlands

Poland

South Africa

Japan
Malawi

Cuba
France

Brazil

Spain

United Kingdom

Other topics

Jazz clubs
Jazz standard

Jazz (word)
2014 in jazz

Jazz is a genre of music that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century in the Southern United States. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation,
[1]

polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note,

[2]

harmony, American popular music,

as well as aspects of European

and African musical elements such as blue

notes. A musical group that plays jazz is called a jazz band.

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local
musical cultures, giving rise to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating

from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the
1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, Afro-Cuban jazz, West Coast jazz,
ska jazz, cool jazz, Indo jazz, avant-garde jazz, soul jazz, modal jazz, chamber

jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz, smooth jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, jazz funk, loft
jazz, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, M-Base and nu jazz.

Louis Armstrong, one of the most famous musicians in jazz, said to Bing Crosby
on the latter's radio show, "Ah, swing, well, we used to call it syncopation, then
they called it ragtime, then blues, then jazz. Now, it's swing."

[3][4]

In a 1988 interview, jazz musician J. J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless. It won't

stay put and it never will".

Contents

[5]

1 Definitions
o

1.1 Importance of improvisation

1.2 Debates

2 Etymology

3 Race

4 History
o

4.1 Origins

4.1.1 Blended African and European music sensibilities

4.1.1.1 Slave gatherings

4.1.1.2 The Black church

4.1.1.3 Minstrel and salon music

4.1.1.4 African rhythmic retention

4.1.2 "Spanish tinge"the Afro-Cuban rhythmic influence

4.2 1890s1910s

4.2.1 Ragtime

4.2.2 Blues

4.2.2.1 African genesis

4.2.2.2 W.C. Handy: early published blues

4.2.2.3 Within the context of Western harmony

4.2.3 New Orleans

4.2.3.1 Syncopation

4.2.4 Other regions

4.3 1920s and 1930s

4.3.1 The Jazz Age

4.3.2 Swing

4.3.3 Beginnings of European jazz

4.4 1940s and 1950s

4.4.1 "American music"the influence of Ellington

4.4.2 Bebop

4.2.3.2 Swing

4.4.2.1 Rhythm

4.4.2.2 Harmony

4.4.3 Afro-Cuban jazz (cu-bop)

4.4.3.1 Machito and Mario Bauza

4.4.3.2 Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo

4.4.3.3 African cross-rhythm

4.4.4 Dixieland revival

4.4.5 Cool jazz

4.4.6 Hard bop

4.4.7 Modal jazz

4.4.8 Free jazz

4.5 1960s and 1970s

4.5.1 Latin jazz

4.5.1.1.1 Guajeos

4.5.1.1.2 Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance

4.5.1.2 Afro-Brazilian jazz

4.5.2 Post-bop

4.5.3 Soul jazz

4.5.4 African inspired

4.5.4.1 Themes

4.5.4.2 Rhythm

4.5.4.3 Pentatonic scales

4.5.5 Jazz fusion

4.5.5.1 Miles Davis' new directions

4.5.5.2 Psychedelic-jazz

4.5.1.1 Afro-Cuban jazz

4.5.5.2.1 Bitches Brew

4.5.5.2.2 Herbie Hancock

4.5.5.2.3 Weather Report

4.5.5.3 Jazz-rock

4.5.6 Jazz-funk

4.5.7 Other trends

4.6 1980s

4.6.1 Resurgence of Traditionalism

4.6.2 Smooth jazz

4.6.3 Acid jazz, nu jazz and jazz rap

4.6.4 Punk jazz and jazzcore

4.6.5 M-Base

4.7 1990s2010s

5 See also
o

5.1 Lists

6 Notes

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

Definitions
Jazz spans a range of music from ragtime to the present daya period of over
100 yearsand has proved to be very difficult to define. Attempts have been

made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditionsusing the
point of view of European music history or African music for examplebut

critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition
should be broader.

[6]

Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which

originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with
European music"

[7]

and argues that it differs from European music in that jazz has

a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'", involves "a spontaneity and

vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a

"sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing
jazz musician".

[6]

Double bassist Reggie Workman, saxophone player Pharoah Sanders, and

drummer Idris Muhammad performing in 1978
A broader definition that encompasses all of the radically different eras of jazz
has been proposed by Travis Jackson: he states that "it is music that includes

qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual

voice', and being open to different musical possibilities".

[8]

An overview of the

discussion on definitions is provided by Krin Gabbard, who argues that "jazz is a

construct" that, while artificial, still is useful to designate "a number of musics
with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition".

[9]

In

contrast to the efforts of commentators and enthusiasts of certain types of jazz,

who have argued for narrower definitions that exclude other types, the musicians
themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one
of jazz's most famous figures, summed up this perspective by saying, "It's all
music".

[10]

Importance of improvisation

Main article: Jazz improvisation

While jazz is considered difficult to define, improvisation is consistently regarded
as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is

attributed to its presence in influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a
form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of
the African-American workers on plantations. These were commonly structured
around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly
improvisational. Although European classical music has been said to be a

composer's medium in which the performer is sometimes granted discretion over

interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment, the performer's primary goal is

to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as
the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, that places varying
degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and
performers.

[11]

In jazz, therefore, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very

individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice.
Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with
other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter
melodies, harmonies or time signature at will.

The approach to improvisation has developed enormously over the history of the
music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing
the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By the swing era, big

bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either
written or learned by ear and memorized, while individual soloists would

improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop the focus shifted back
towards small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody would be stated

briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance would be
the series of improvisations. Later styles such as modal jazz abandoned the strict
notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise

even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. In many forms of

jazz a soloist is often supported by a rhythm section that accompanies by playing

chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.

[12]

In avant-garde and free jazz idioms, the separation of soloist and band is reduced,
and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales,
and rhythmic meters.
Debates

Since at least the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially
oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized by purists.

According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a
commercial music and an art form".

[8]

Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed

bebop, free jazz, the 1970s jazz fusion era, and much else as periods of

debasement of the music and betrayals of the tradition; the alternative viewpoint

is that jazz is able to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles,
[13]

and that, by avoiding the creation of 'norms', other newer, avant-garde forms

of jazz will be free to emerge.

[8]

Another debate that gained a lot of attention at the birth of jazz was how it

would affect the appearance of African-Americans, in particular, who were a part

of it. To some African-Americans, jazz has highlighted their contribution to

American society and helped bring attention to black history and culture, but for
others, the music and term 'jazz' are reminders of "an oppressive and racist
society and restrictions on their artistic visions".

[14]

Etymology
Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition pour Jazz, gouache on cardboard, mounted on
Masonite, 73 x 73 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Main article: Jazz (word)

The origin of the word jazz has had widespread interestthe American Dialect
Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Centurywhich has resulted in

considerable research, and its history is well documented. The word began [under
various spellings] as West Coast slang around 1912, the meaning of which varied
but did not refer to music. The use of the word in a musical context was
documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune.

[15]

Its first

documented use in a musical context in New Orleans appears in a November 14,

1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."

[16]

Race
Imamu Amiri Baraka argues that there is a distinct "white jazz" music genre
[17]

expressive of whiteness.

The first white jazz musicians appeared in the early

[18]

1920s in the Midwestern United States.

prominent white jazz musicians.

Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most

[19]

History
Originating in the late 19th - early 20th century as interpretation of American
and European classical music entwined with African and slave folk songs and the
cultural nfluences of West African culture,

[20]

Jazz, its composition and style has

changed many times throughout the years with each performers personal

interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the
genre.

[21]

Origins
Blended African and European music sensibilities

By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Sub-Saharan

Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and the

greater Congo River basin. They brought strong musical traditions with them.

[22]

The rhythms had a counter-metric structure, and reflected African speech patterns.
African music was largely functional, for work or ritual.

[23]

The African traditions

primarily made use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern.

Slave gatherings

Dance in Congo Square in the late 1700s, artist's conception by E. W. Kemble

from a century later.

In the late 18th-century painting The Old Plantation, African-Americans dance to

banjo and percussion.

Lavish festivals featuring African-based dances to drums were organized on

Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843.

[24]

There

are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the

southern United States. Robert Palmer commented on percussive slave music:

Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop
was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a
traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned
headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered

"gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the
auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states
and Louisiana dating from the period 18201850. Some of the earliest

[Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where

drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums
were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.

[25]

The Black church

Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of
[26]

hymns of the church, and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals.
The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the

secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out,

whereas the spirituals are homophonic, rural blues and early jazz "was largely
based on concepts of heterophony."

[27]

Minstrel and salon music

The blackface Virginia Minstrels in 1843, featuring tambourine, fiddle, banjo and
bones.

During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to
play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody

European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American

minstrel show performers in blackface popularized the music internationally,

combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave
rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands, into piano salon

music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African
American cultures.

African rhythmic retention

In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans
jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music" similar to what was played in the
Caribbean at the time.

[28]

A fundamental rhythmic figure heard in Gottschalk's

compositions such as "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859), many different slave

musics of the Caribbean, as well as Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in

New Orleans Congo Square, is the three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as

tresillo. Tresillo is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in
[29][30]

sub-Saharan African music traditions, and the music of the African Diaspora.

Tresillo.

[31][32]

Play (helpinfo)

The "Black Codes" outlawed drumming by slaves. Therefore, unlike in Cuba,

Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, African drumming traditions were not

preserved in North America. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the

United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping,
[33]

and patting juba.

In the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain
surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes. As a result, an original
African American drum and fife music arose, featuring tresillo and related

syncopated rhythmic figures.

[34]

With this emerged a drumming tradition that was

distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African American

sensibility. Palmer observes: "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated

cross-rhythms," and speculates"this tradition must have dated back to the latter
half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first

place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture

it nurtured."

[35]

Tresillo is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music, and in other

forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the twentieth century to
present.

[36]

Jazz historian Gunther Schuller commented on its retention in jazz: "by

and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they

could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions. Some survived,

others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed."

[37]

"Spanish tinge"the Afro-Cuban rhythmic influence

African American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the

nineteenth century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international
popularity.

[38]

Habaneras were widely available as sheet music. The habanera was

the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (1803).

[39]

From the perspective of African American music, the habanera rhythm (also
known as congo,

[40]

tango-congo,

[41]

or tango.

[42]

) can be thought of as a

[43]

combination of tresillo and the backbeat.

Habanera rhythm written as a combination of tresillo (bottom notes) with the

backbeat (top note).

Play (helpinfo)

Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry
between both cities to perform and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took

root in the musically fertile Crescent City. The habanera was the first of many
Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States, and
reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African American
music.
John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S.
twenty years before the first rag was published."

[44]

The piano piece "Ojos

Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) by New Orleans native Louis Moreau

Gottschalk, was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba. The habanera

rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand.

[45]

With Gottschalk's symphonic work "A

Night in the Tropics" (1859), we hear the tresillo variant cinquillo extensively.

[46]

The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.

Cinquillo.

Play (helpinfo)

For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz
were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African
American popular music.

[47]

Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music

of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave", a

Spanish word meaning 'code,' or 'key'as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery.

[48]

Although technically the pattern is only half a clave, Marsalis makes the point

that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll

Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge, and considered it an essential
ingredient of jazz.

[49]

1890s1910s
Ragtime

Main article: Ragtime

Scott Joplin in 1903

The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for the education of
freed African Americans. Although strict segregation limited employment

opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment.

Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows,

and in vaudeville, by which many marching bands formed. Black pianists played
in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed.

[50][51]

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African American musicians

such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two

years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo, "Rag
Time Medley".

[52][53]

Also in 1897, the white composer William H. Krell

published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime

piece, and Tom Turpin published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an
African-American.

The classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in the
following year, then in 1899 had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag". The
latter is a multi-strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes
and a bass line with copious seventh chords. Its structure was the basis for many
other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition
between the first and second strain, were novel at the time.

[54]

Excerpt from "Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin (1899). Seventh chord resolution.
[55]

Play (helpinfo). Note that the seventh resolves down by half step.

African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variantsthe habanera

rhythm and cinquilloare heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin, Turpin,

and others. Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is generally considered to be within the
habanera genre,

[40][56]

and both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion,

completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that
the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk,"

[57]

while Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what
freed black music from ragtime's European bass."
Blues

Main article: Blues

African genesis

[58]

Play blues scale (helpinfo) or

pentatonic scale (helpinfo)

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre

[59]

that

originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the

United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field
[60]

hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.

The African

use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of blue notes in blues and
[61]

jazz.

As Kubik explains:

Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and
merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west
central Sudanic belt:

A strongly Arabic/Islamic song style, as found for example among

the Hausa. It is characterized by melisma, wavy intonation, pitch

instabilities within a pentatonic framework, and a declamatory voice.

An ancient west central Sudanic stratum of pentatonic song

composition, often associated with simple work rhythms in a regular

meter, but with notable off-beat accents (1999: 94).
W.C. Handy: early published blues

[62]

WC Handy age 19, 1892

W.C. Handy became intrigued with the folk blues of the Deep South while

traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this form, the singer improvised freely,
and the melodic range was limited, sounding like a field holler. The guitar

accompaniment was not strummed, but was instead slapped, like a small drum
that responded in syncopated accents. The guitar was another "voice".

[63]

Handy

and his band members were formally trained African American musicians who
did not grow up with the blues, yet he was able to adopt the blues to a larger

band instrument format, and arrange them in a popular music form. Handy wrote
about his adopting of the blues:
The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third
and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the
cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the

same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated
Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect ... by introducing flat

thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing
key was major ..., and I carried this device into my melody as well.

[64]

The 1912 publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music introduced the 12-bar

blues to the world (although Gunther Schuller argues that it is not really a blues,

but "more like a cakewalk"

[65]

). This composition, as well as his later "St. Louis

Blues" and others, included the habanera rhythm,

[66]

and became jazz standards.

Handy's music career began in the pre-jazz era, and contributed to the codification
of jazz, through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music.
Within the context of Western harmony

The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, is characterized by specific chord

progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues progression is the most common. The
blue notes that, for expressive purposes, are sung or played flattened or gradually

bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also
an important part of the sound. The blues were the key that opened up an entirely
new approach to Western harmony, ultimately leading to a high level of harmonic
complexity in jazz.
New Orleans

Main article: Dixieland

The Bolden Band around 1905.

The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz.
Many early jazz performers played in venues throughout the city; the brothels and
bars of the red-light district around Basin Street, called "Storyville"

[67]

was only

one of numerous neighborhoods relevant to the early days of New Orleans jazz.
In addition to dance bands, numerous marching bands played at lavish funerals,
later called jazz funerals, arranged by the African American and European

American communities. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands
became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12tone scale and drums. Small bands mixing self-taught and well educated African

American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of

New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of

early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from
around 1914 on, Afro-Creole and African American musicians playing in
vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.

[68]

Syncopation

The cornetist Buddy Bolden led a band often mentioned as one of the prime

movers of the style later to be called "jazz". He played in New Orleans around
18951906, but became mentally ill and there are no recordings of him playing.
Bolden's band is credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass
drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march.

[69]

As the example

below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.

Buddy Bolden's "big four" pattern.

[70]

Play (helpinfo)

Morton published "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915, the first jazz work in print.
Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904,
he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago
and New York. His "Jelly Roll Blues", which he composed around 1905, was
published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more
musicians to the New Orleans style.

[71]

Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be

an essential ingredient of jazz.

[72]

In his own words: "Now in one of my earliest

tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you

can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get
the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."

[49]

Excerpt from Jelly Roll Morton's "New Orleans Blues" (c. 1902). The left hand
plays the tresillo rhythm. The right hand plays variations on cinquillo.
Play (helpinfo)

Some early jazz musicians referred to their music as ragtime. Morton was a

crucial innovator in the evolution from ragtime to jazz piano. He could perform
pieces in either style.

[73]

Morton's solos were still close to ragtime, and were not

merely improvisations over chord changes, as with later jazz. His use of the blues
was of equal importance however.
Swing

Bottom: even duple subdivisions of the beat. Top: swung correlative

contrasting of duple and triple subdivisions of the beat.
pattern (helpinfo) or

Play straight drum

Play swung pattern (helpinfo)

Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments,

and employing a swing feeling.

[74]

Swing is the most important, and enduring

African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz. An oft quoted definition of swing

by Louis Armstrong is: "if you don't feel it, you'll never know it."

[75]

The New

Harvard Dictionary of Music states that swing is: "An intangible rhythmic

momentum in jazz ... Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire

arguments." However, the dictionary does provide the useful description of triple
subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions.

[76]

Swing

superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four
subdivisions. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African American
music than in Afro-Caribbean music. One aspect of swing, which is heard in

more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple
and duple-pulse "grids".

[77]

New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence contributing horn players to the

world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city while helping black
children escape poverty.

[78]

The leader of the Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma

Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet. Armstrong popularized the New
Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expanded it. Like Jelly Roll Morton,

Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness, in favor of

swung notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, codified the

rhythmic technique of swing in jazz, and broadened the jazz solo vocabulary.

[79]

The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917,
[80][81][82][83]

and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record.
[84][85][86]

That year numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the

title or band name, mostly ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In

February 1918 James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to
[87]

Europe during World War I,

then on return recorded Dixieland standards

including "Darktown Strutters' Ball".

[88]

Other regions

In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed,

notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York which
played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912.

[88][89]

The Baltimore rag style

of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of stride piano

playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides
the rhythm and bassline.

[90]

In Ohio and elsewhere in the midwest, ragtime was the major influence until

about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in,
the musicians began to improvise the melody line, but the harmony and rhythm
remained unchanged. A contemporary account states that blues could only be

heard in jazz, in the gut-bucket cabarets, which were generally looked down upon
by the Black middle-class.
1920s and 1930s
The Jazz Age

Main article: Jazz Age

Jazz Me Blues

[91]

Menu
0:00

The Original Dixieland Jass Band performing "Jazz Me Blues",

an example of a jazz piece from 1921.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong was a much-imitated innovator

of early jazz.

The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January
1921.

Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic
drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age",
an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and

show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members
of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and

promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Professor Henry van
Dyke of Princeton University wrote "... it is not music at all. It's merely an

irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical

passion."

[92]

Even the media began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times took stories and
altered headlines to pick at jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in

Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was jazz that scared
the bears away. Another story claims that jazz caused the death of a celebrated
conductor. The actual cause of death was a fatal heart attack (natural cause).

[92]

From 1919 Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans
played in San Francisco and Los Angeles where in 1922 they became the first
black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings.

[93][94]

However, the

main center developing the new "Hot Jazz" was Chicago, where King Oliver

joined Bill Johnson. That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the
most famous of the 1920s blues singers.

[95]

Bix Beiderbecke formed The

Wolverines in 1924.
Also in 1924 Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as
featured soloist for a year. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with
theme variation, and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a

master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he
was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on

arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went well beyond the themeimprovisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies.

According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates

(including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky

rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality."

[96]

The following example

shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind"

by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo
improvisations (below) (recorded 1924).

[97]

The example approximates

Armstrong's solo, as it doesn't convey his use of swing.

Top: excerpt from the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by
George W. Meyer & Arthur Johnston. Bottom: corresponding solo excerpt by
Louis Armstrong (1924).

Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true twentieth-century

language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot
[98]

Five band, where he popularized scat singing.

Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early
mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers. There was a
larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras, such as Jean
Goldkette's orchestra and Paul Whiteman's orchestra. In 1924 Whiteman

commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was premiered by Whiteman's

Orchestra. Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson's band,

Duke Ellington's band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Club
in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines' Band in Chicago (who opened in The

Grand Terrace Cafe there in 1928). All significantly influenced the development
of big band-style swing jazz.

[99]

By 1930, the New Orleans-style ensemble was a

relic, and jazz belonged to the world.

[100]

Swing

Main articles: Swing music and 1930s in jazz

Benny Goodman (1943)

The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists
became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz

band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and
Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl
Hines, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw.

Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio 'live' nightly across
America for many years especially by Earl Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe
Orchestra broadcasting

[101]

coast-to-coast from Chicago, well placed for 'live' US

time-zones. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual

musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at
times be very complex and 'important' music.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in

America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black
bandleaders white ones.
In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist
Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. An early
1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos,

uptempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie
from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor

saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop
influence of the 1940s.
Beginnings of European jazz

Since only a limited amount of American jazz records were released there,
Europe's jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese

Europe, Paul Whiteman, and Lonnie Johnson who visited Europe during and after
World War I. It was their live performances and others like theirs that inspired

European audiences' interest in jazz, as well as the interest in all things American,
and therefore exotic, that accompanied the economic and political woes of Europe
during this time.

[102]

The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to

emerge in this interwar period.

This distinct style entered full swing in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de
France, which began in 1934. Much of this French jazz was a combination of

African-American jazz and the symphonic styles in which French musicians were
well-trained; in this, it is easy to see the inspiration taken from Paul Whiteman,
since his style was a fusion of the two.

[103]

Belgian guitar virtuoso Django

Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance

hall "musette" and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel. The main
instruments are steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one

player to another as the guitar and bass play the role of the rhythm section. Some
music researchers hold that it was Philadelphia's Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti who
pioneered the guitar-violin partnership typical of the genre,

[104]

which was brought

to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.
[105]

1940s and 1950s

"American music"the influence of Ellington

Duke Ellington at the Hurricane Club (1943)

By the 1940s, Duke Ellington's music transcended the bounds of swing, bridging
jazz and art music in a natural synthesis. Ellington called his music "American
Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as
"beyond category."

[106]

These included many of the musicians who were members

of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their
own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most well-

known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz. He often composed specifically
for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Johnny
Hodges, "Concerto for Cootie" for Cootie Williams, which later became "Do

Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics, and "The Mooche"
for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley. He also recorded songs written by his
bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido" which brought the

"Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained

there for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s,
when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers

wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity.

[107]

Bebop

Main article: Bebop

See also: List of bebop musicians
Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, 1947, New York City.

Earl Hines 1947

In the early 1940s bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable
popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." The most

influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud

Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and
drummer Max Roach. Composer Gunther Schuller wrote:

In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those

other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the
modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet

section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of
modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings.

[108]

Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form,
thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal. Dizzy Gillespie wrote:
People talk about the Hines band being 'the incubator of bop' and the leading
exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the

erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved
from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how
you got from here to here to here ... naturally each age has got its own shit.

[109]

Rhythm

Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster
tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the

ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for
accents. This led to a highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity.

[110]

Harmony

Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Max Roach (Gottlieb 06941)
Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices not typical of previous jazz,
engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. Bebop scales
are traditional scales, with an added chromatic passing note.

[111]

Bebop also uses

"passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. New forms of

chromaticism and dissonance were introduced into jazz; the dissonant tritone (or
"flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop"

[112]

Chord

progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era
songs and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new

compositions. This practice was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came
to be central to the bebop style. Bebop made use of several relatively common

chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I-IV-V, but infused with II-V motion)
and 'rhythm changes' (I-VI-II-V), the chords to the 1930s pop standard "I Got
Rhythm." Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a

departure from pop and show tunes. The harmonic development in bebop, is often
traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by Charlie Parker while

performing "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early

1942.

I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used, ... and I
kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I

couldn't play it.... I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by
using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with

appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came
aliveParker.

[113]

Gerhard Kubik postulates that the harmonic development in bebop sprang from
the blues, and other African-related tonal sensibilities, rather than twentieth

century Western art music, as some have suggested. Kubik states: "Auditory
inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the

experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western

diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional

harmony in their music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as
a basis for drawing upon various African matrices."

[114]

Samuel Floyd states that

blues were both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about three
main developments:

A new harmonic conception, using extended chord structures that led to

unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety.

A developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity

and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was
established as an important melodic-harmonic device.

The reestablishment of the blues as the music's primary organizing and

functional principle.

[110]

While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear

to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from Claude Debussy

to Arnold Schoenberg, such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a
cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did have some influence on jazz, for

example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing. And it is also true that Duke
Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European

contemporary music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several
forms of cool jazz, but bebop has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct
borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop was a strong statement of

rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate something

deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted

through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically nonWestern harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the

experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to African-American music

several structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditionsKubik
(2005).

[115]

These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a

divided, sometimes hostile, response among fans and fellow musicians, especially
established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile
critics, bebop seemed to be filled with "racing, nervous phrases".

[116]

Despite the

initial friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz
vocabulary.

Afro-Cuban jazz (cu-bop)

Main article: Afro-Cuban jazz

Machito (maracas) and his sister Graciella Grillo (claves)

Machito and Mario Bauza

The general consensus among musicians and musicologists is that the first original
jazz piece to be overtly based in-clave was "Tanga" (1943), composed by Cubanborn Mario Bauza and recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York
City. "Tanga" began as a spontaneous descarga (Cuban jam session) with jazz
solos superimposed on top.

[117]

This was the birth of Afro-Cuban jazz. The use of clave brought the African

timeline, or key pattern, into jazz. Music organized around key patterns convey a
two-celled (binary) structure, which is a complex level of African cross-rhythm.
[118]

Within the context of jazz however, harmony is the primary referent, not

rhythm. The harmonic progression can begin on either side of clave, and the

harmonic "one" is always understood to be "one". If the progression begins on the

"three-side" of clave, it is said to be in 3-2 clave. If the progression begins on
the "two-side", its in 2-3 clave.

[119]

Clave: Spanish for 'code,' or key,' as in the key to a puzzle. The antecedent half
(three-side) consists of tresillo. The consequent half consists of two strokes (the
two-side).

Play (helpinfo)

Bobby Sanabria mentions several innovations of Machito's Afro-Cubans; they

were the first band to: wed big band jazz arranging techniques within an original
composition, with jazz oriented soloists utilizing an authentic Afro-Cuban based
rhythm section in a successful manner; explore modal harmony (a concept
explored much later by Miles Davis and Gil Evans) from a jazz arranging

perspective; and to overtly explore the concept of clave conterpoint from an

arranging standpoint (the ability to weave seamlessly from one side of the clave
to the other without breaking its rhythmic integrity within the structure of a
musical arrangement). They were also the first band in the United States to

publicly utilize the term Afro-Cuban as the band's moniker, thus identifying itself

and acknowledging the West African roots of the musical form they were playing.
It forced New York City's Latino and African American communities to deal with
their common West African musical roots in a direct way, whether they wanted
to acknowledge it publicly or not.

Dizzy Gillespie, 1955

Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo

[120]

Mario Bauz introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to the Cuban conga
drummer and composer Chano Pozo. Gillespie and Pozo's brief collaboration
produced some of the most enduring Afro-Cuban jazz standards. "Manteca"

(1947) is the first jazz standard to be rhythmically based on clave. According to

Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal guajeos (Afro-Cuban ostinatos)

of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge. Gillespie
recounted: "If I'd let it go like [Chano] wanted it, it would have been strickly
Afro-Cuban all the way. There wouldn't have been a bridge. I thought I was

writing an eight-bar bridge, but ... I had to keep going and ended up writing a
sixteen-bar bridge."

[121]

The bridge gave "Manteca" a typical jazz harmonic

structure, setting the piece apart from Bauza's modal "Tanga" of a few years
earlier.
Gillespie's collaboration with Pozo brought specific African-based rhythms into

bebop. While pushing the boundaries of harmonic improvisation, cu-bop, as it was

called, also drew more directly from African rhythmic structures. Jazz

arrangements with a "Latin" A section and a swung B section, with all choruses
swung during solos, became common practice with many "Latin tunes" of the

jazz standard repertoire. This approach can be heard on pre-1980 recordings of

"Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia", "Tin Tin Deo", and "On Green Dolphin Street".
African cross-rhythm

Mongo Santamaria (1969)

Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria first recorded his composition "Afro Blue"
in 1959.

[122]

"Afro Blue" was the first jazz standard built upon a typical African
[123]

three-against-two (3:2) cross-rhythm, or hemiola.

The song begins with the

bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of 12/8, or 6 cross-beats

per 4 main beats6:4 (two cells of 3:2). The following example shows the

original ostinato "Afro Blue" bass line. The slashed noteheads indicate the main
beats (not bass notes), where you would normally tap your foot to "keep time."

"Afro Blue" bass line, with main beats indicated by slashed noteheads.
When John Coltrane covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric
hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a 3/4 jazz waltz with duple cross-beats

superimposed (2:3). Originally a Bb pentatonic blues, Coltrane expanded the

harmonic structure of "Afro Blue."

Perhaps the most respected Afro-cuban jazz combo of the late 1950s was

vibraphonist Cal Tjader's band. Tjader had Mongo Santamaria, Armando Peraza,
and Willie Bobo on his early recording dates.
Dixieland revival

Main articles: 1940s in jazz and 1950s in jazz

In the late 1940s there was a revival of "Dixieland" music, harkening back to the
original contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record
company reissues of early jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong

bands of the 1930s. There were two types of musicians involved in the revival.

One group consisted of players who had begun their careers playing in the
traditional style and were returning to it or continuing what they had been playing
all along. This included Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon,
[124]

and Wild Bill Davison.

Most of this group were originally Midwesterners,

although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved. The
second group of revivalists consisted of younger musicians, such as those in the
Lu Watters band, Conrad Janis, and Ward Kimball and his Firehouse Five Plus
Two Jazz Band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong's Allstars band became a

leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most
commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics
paid little attention to it.

[124]

Cool jazz

Main article: Cool jazz

By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced
with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz,

which favoured long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, and
dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point was a collection
of 1949 and 1950 singles by a nonet led by Miles Davis, released as the Birth

of the Cool. Later cool jazz recordings by musicians such as Chet Baker, Dave

Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually
had a "lighter" sound that avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction
of bebop.

Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene, but

also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where figures

such as baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin and pianist Bengt Hallberg emerged.

The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were set out by the Chicago pianist

Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as bossa
nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz.
"Take The 'A' Train"

Menu
0:00

This 1941 sample of Duke Ellington's signature tune is an example of the swing
style.

"Yardbird Suite"

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Excerpt from a saxophone solo by Charlie Parker. The fast, complex rhythms and
substitute chords of bebop exhibited were of pivotal importance to the formation
of Jazz music.
"Mr. P.C."

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This hard blues by John Coltrane is an example of hard bop, a post-bebop style
which is informed by gospel music, blues and work songs.
"Birds of Fire"

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This 1973 piece by the Mahavishnu Orchestra merges jazz improvisation and
rock instrumentation into jazz fusion
"The Jazzstep"

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This 2000 track by Courtney Pine shows how electronica and hip hop influences
can be incorporated into modern jazz.
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Hard bop

Main article: Hard bop

Hard bop is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music that incorporates influences
from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and
piano playing. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to

the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s. The hard bop style coalesced in 1953
and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis' 1954

performance of "Walkin'", at the first Newport Jazz Festival, announced the style
to the jazz world.

[citation needed]

The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers,

fronted by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford
Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.
Modal jazz

Main article: Modal jazz

Modal jazz is a development beginning in the later 1950s which takes the mode,
or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Previously, a
solo was meant to fit into a given chord progression, but with modal jazz the

soloist creates a melody using one or a small number of modes. The emphasis in
this approach shifts from harmony to melody.

[125]

Pianist Mark Levine states:

"Historically, this caused a seismic shift among jazz musicians, away from

thinking vertically (the chord), and towards a more horizontal approach (the
scale)."

[126]

The modal theory stems from a work by George Russell. Miles Davis introduced

the concept to the greater jazz world with Kind of Blue (1959), an exploration of
the possibilities of modal jazz and the best selling jazz album of all time. In

contrast to Davis' earlier work with hard bop and its complex chord progression
[127]

and improvisation,

the entire album was composed as a series of modal

sketches, in which each performer was given a set of scales that defined the
parameters of their improvisation and style.

[128]

Davis recalled: "I didn't write out

the music for Kind of Blue, but brought in sketches for what everybody was

supposed to play because I wanted a lot of spontaneity."

has only two chords: D-7 and E-7.

[129]

The track "So What"

[130]

Chord changes for "So What" by Miles Davis (1959).

[131]

Other innovators in this style include Jackie McLean,

and two musicians who

also played on Kind of Blue John Coltrane and Bill Evans.

By the 1950s, Afro-Cuban jazz had been using modes for at least a decade, as a
lot of it borrowed from Cuban popular dance forms, which are structured around
multiple ostinatos with only a few chords. A case in point is Mario Bauza's

"Tanga" (1943), the first Afro-Cuban jazz piece. Machito's Afro-Cubans recorded
modal tunes in the 1940s, featuring jazz soloists such as Howard McGhee, Brew
Moore, Charlie Parker, and Flip Phillips. There is no evidence however, that

Davis or other mainstream jazz musicians were influenced by the use of modes in
[clarification needed]

Afro-Cuban jazz, or other branches of Latin jazz.

Free jazz

Main article: Free jazz

Free jazz and the related form of avant-garde jazz broke through into an open
space of "free tonality" in which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all

disappeared, and a range of World music from India, Africa, and Arabia were
melded into an intense, even religiously ecstatic or orgiastic style of playing.

[132]

While loosely inspired by bebop, free jazz tunes gave players much more latitude;
the loose harmony and tempo was deemed controversial when this approach was

first developed. The bassist Charles Mingus is also frequently associated with the

avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw from myriad styles and
genres.

A shot from a 2006 performance by Peter Brtzmann, a key figure in European

free jazz
The first major stirrings came in the 1950s, with the early work of Ornette
Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, performers included Archie Shepp, Sun
Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, John Coltrane, and others. In developing his
late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio

with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed
with Cecil Taylor as leader. Coltrane championed many younger free jazz

musicians, (notably Archie Shepp), and under his influence Impulse! became a
leading free jazz record label.
A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show
Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of
devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo

register, as well as a mutated return to Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio,

he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In

addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom.

The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings The John Coltrane

Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition (both June 1965), New Thing at Newport
(July 1965), Sun Ship (August 1965), and First Meditations (September 1965).

In June 1965, Coltrane and ten other musicians recorded Ascension, a 40-minute
long piece that included adventurous solos by the young avant-garde musicians
(as well as Coltrane), and was controversial primarily for the collective

improvisation sections that separated the solos. After recording with the quartet
over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in
September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional

exclamation-point, Sanders would opt to overblow his entire solo, resulting in a

constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.

Free jazz quickly found a foothold in Europein part because musicians such as
Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy and Eric Dolphy spent extended periods there. A

distinctive European contemporary jazz (often incorporating elements of free jazz

but not limited to it) flourished also because of the emergence of musicians (such
as John Surman, Zbigniew Namyslowski, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler

and Mike Westbrook) anxious to develop new approaches reflecting their national
and regional musical cultures and contexts. Ever since the 1960s various creative
centers of jazz have been developing in Europe. A good example of this is the

creative jazz scene in Amsterdam. Following the work of veteran drummer Han
Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg, musicians started to explore free music

by collectively improvising until a certain form (melody, rhythm, or even famous

song) is found by the band. Jazz Critic Kevin Whithead documented the free jazz
scene in Amsterdam and some of its main exponents such as ICP (Instant

Composers Pool) orchestra in his book New Dutch Swing. Keith Jarrett has been
prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in the 1990s
and 2000s.

1960s and 1970s

Main articles: 1960s in jazz and 1970s in jazz

Latin jazz

Main article: Latin jazz

Latin jazz is jazz with Latin American rhythms. Although musicians continually

expand its parameters, the term Latin jazz is generally understood to have a more
specific meaning than simply jazz from Latin America. A more precise term

might be Afro-Latin jazz, as the jazz sub-genre typically employs rhythms that
either have a direct analog in Africa, or exhibit an African rhythmic influence

beyond what is ordinarily heard in other jazz. The two main categories of Latin
jazz are Afro-Cuban jazz and Brazilian jazz.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz musicians had only a minimum understanding
of Cuban and Brazilian music. Jazz compositions using Cuban or Brazilian

elements were often referred to as "Latin tunes", with no distinction between a

Cuban son montuno and a Brazilian bossa nova. Even as late as 2000, in Mark

Gridley's Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, a bossa nova bass line is referred to
as a "Latin bass figure."

[133]

It was not uncommon during the 1960s and 1970s to

hear a conga playing a Cuban tumbao, while the drumset and bass played a

Brazilian bossa nova pattern. Many jazz standards such as "Manteca", "On Green
Dolphin Street", and "Song for My Father", have a "Latin" A section, and a

swung B section. Typically, the band would only play an even-eighth "Latin" feel
in the A section of the head and swing throughout all of the solos. Latin jazz

specialists like Cal Tjader tended to be the exception. For example, on a 1959
live Tjader recording of "A Night in Tunisia", pianist Vince Guaraldi soloed
[134]

through the entire form over an authentic mambo.

Afro-Cuban jazz

Main article: Afro-Cuban jazz

Afro-Cuban jazz often uses Afro-Cuban instruments such as congas, timbales,

giro, and claves, combined with piano, double bass, etc. Afro-Cuban jazz began
with Machito's Afro-Cubans in the early 1940s, but took off and entered the

mainstream in the late 1940s when bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and
Billy Taylor began experimenting with Cuban rhythms. Mongo Santamaria and

Cal Tjader further refined the genre in the late 1950s. Although a great deal of
Cuban-based Latin jazz is modal, Latin jazz is not always modal. It can be as

harmonically expansive as post-bop jazz. For example, Tito Puente recorded an

arrangement of "Giant Steps" done to an Afro-Cuban guaguanc. A Latin jazz

piece may momentarily contract harmonically, as in the case of a percussion solo

over a one or two-chord piano guajeo.
Guajeos

Guajeos are the typical Afro-Cuban ostinato melodies, which originated in the
genre known as son. Guajeos provide a rhythmic/melodic framework that may be
varied within certain parameters, while still maintaining a repetitive, and thus

"danceable", structure. Most guajeos are rhythmically based on clave. Guajeos or

guajeo fragments are commonly used motifs in Latin jazz compositions.

Guajeos are one of the most important elements of the vocabulary of Afro-Cuban

descarga (jazz-inspired instrumental jams), providing a means of

tension/resolution, and a sense of forward momentum, within a relatively simple

harmonic structure. The use of multiple, contrapuntal guajeos in Latin jazz

facilitates simultaneous collective improvisation, based on theme variation. In a

way, this polyphonic texture is reminiscent of the original New Orleans style of
jazz.
Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance

Afro-Cuban jazz has been for most of its history a matter of superimposing jazz
phrasing over Cuban rhythms. However, by the end of the 1970s, a new

generation of New York City musicians emerged who were fluent in both salsa
dance music and jazz. The time had come for a new level of integration of jazz

and Cuban rhythms. This era of creativity and vitality is best represented by the
Gonzalez brothers Jerry (congas and trumpet) and Andy (bass).

[135]

During 1974-

1976 they were members of one of Eddie Palmieri's most experimental salsa

groups. Salsa was the medium, but Palmieri was stretching the form in new ways.
He incorporated parallel fourths, with McCoy Tyner-type vamps. The innovations
of Palmieri, the Gonzalez brothers and others, led to an Afro-Cuban jazz
renaissance in New York City.

This occurred in parallel with developments in Cuba

[136]

The first Cuban band of

this new wave was Irakere. Their "Chkere-son" (1976) introduced a style of
"Cubanized" bebop-flavored horn lines that departed from the more angular

guajeo-based lines typical of Cuban popular music and Latin jazz up until that
time. It was based on Charlie Parker's composition "Billie's Bounce", jumbled
together in a way that fused clave and bebop horn lines.

[137]

In spite of the

ambivalence of some band members towards Irakere's Afro-Cuban folkloric/jazz

fusion, their experiments forever changed Cuban jazz: their innovations are heard
in the high level of harmonic and rhythmic complexity in Cuban jazz, and in the
jazzy and complex contemporary form of popular dance music known as timba.
Afro-Brazilian jazz

Nan Vasconcelos playing the Afro-Brazilian Berimbau

Brazilian jazz such as bossa nova is derived from samba, with influences from

jazz and other 20th century classical and popular music styles. Bossa is generally
moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English. The style was
pioneered by Brazilians Joo Gilberto and Antnio Carlos Jobim. The related

term jazz-samba describes an adaptation of street samba into jazz. Bossa nova

was made popular by Elizete Cardoso's recording of "Chega de Saudade" on the

Cano do Amor Demais LP. The initial releases by Gilberto and the 1959 film
Black Orpheus achieved significant popularity in Latin America, and this spread

to North America via visiting American jazz musicians. The resulting recordings
by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented bossa nova's popularity and led to a

worldwide boom with 1963's Getz/Gilberto, numerous recordings by famous jazz

performers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the entrenchment of the
bossa nova style as a lasting influence in world music.
Brazilian percussionists such as Airto Moreira and Nan Vasconcelos also
influenced jazz internationally by introducing Afro-Brazilian folkloric instruments

and rhythms into a wide variety of jazz styles and attracting a greater audience to
them.

[138][139][140]

Post-bop

Main article: Post-bop

Post-bop jazz is a form of small-combo jazz derived from earlier bop styles. The
genre's origins lie in seminal work by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans,

Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. Generally, the term post-

bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-sixties onward that assimilates influence
from hard bop, modal jazz, the avant-garde, and free jazz, without necessarily
being immediately identifiable as any of the above.

Much post-bop was recorded on Blue Note Records. Key albums include Speak

No Evil by Shorter; The Real McCoy by McCoy Tyner; Maiden Voyage by

Hancock; Miles Smiles by Davis; and Search for the New Land by Lee Morgan
(an artist not typically associated with the post-bop genre). Most post-bop artists

worked in other genres as well, with a particularly strong overlap with later hard
bop.

Soul jazz

Main article: Soul jazz

Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences
from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the

organ trio, which partnered a Hammond organ player with a drummer and a tenor
saxophonist. Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves

and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in other jazz
styles. Horace Silver had a large influence on the soul jazz style, with songs that
used funky and often gospel-based piano vamps. It often had a steadier "funk"
style groove, different from the swing rhythms typical of much hard bop.

Important soul jazz organists included Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith and

Johnny Hammond Smith, and influential tenor saxophone players included Eddie
"Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine.
African inspired

Randy Weston
Themes

There was a resurgence of interest in jazz and other forms of African American

cultural expression during the Black Arts Movement and Black nationalist period
of the 1960s and 1970s. African themes became popular. There were many new

jazz compositions with African-related titles: "Black Nile" (Wayne Shorter), "Blue
Nile" (Alice Coltrane), "Obirin African" (Art Blakey), "Zambia" (Lee Morgan),
"Appointment in Ghana" (Jackie McLean), "Marabi" (Cannonball Adderley),
"Yoruba" (Hubert Laws), and many more. Pianist Randy Weston's music

incorporated African elements, for example, the large-scale suite "Uhuru Africa"
(with the participation of poet Langston Hughes) and "Highlife: Music From the

New African Nations." Both Weston and saxophonist Stanley Turrentine covered
the Nigerian Bobby Benson's piece "Niger Mambo", which features AfroCaribbean and jazz elements within a West African Highlife style. Some

musicians such as Pharaoh Sanders, Hubert Laws and Wayne Shorter began using

African instruments such as kalimbas, bells, beaded gourds and other instruments
not traditional to jazz.
Rhythm

During this period, there was an increased use of the typical African 12/8 crossrhythmic structure in jazz. Herbie Hancock's "Succotash" on Inventions and

Dimensions (1963) is an open-ended modal, 12/8 improvised jam. Hancock's

pattern of attack-points, rather than the pattern of pitches, is the primary focus of
his improvisations, accompanied by Paul Chambers on bass, and percussionist

Osvaldo Martinez playing a traditional Afro-Cuban cheker part, and Willie Bobo
playing an Abaku bell pattern on a snare drum with brushes.

Abaku bell pattern played on a snare with brushes by Willie Bobo on Herbie
Hancock's "Succotash" (1963).
The first jazz standard composed by a non-Latino to use an overt African 12/8
cross-rhythm was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1967).

[141]

On the version

recorded on Miles Smiles by Miles Davis, the bass switches to a 4/4 tresillo

figure at 2:20. "Footprints" is not, however, a Latin jazz tune: African rhythmic

structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums)
via the rhythmic sensibilities of swing. Throughout the piece, the four beats,

whether sounded or not, are maintained as the temporal referent. In the example
below, the main beats are indicated by slashed noteheads, which do not indicate
bass notes.

Ron Carter's two main bass lines for "Footprints" by Wayner Shorter (1967). The
main beats are indicated by slashed noteheads.
Pentatonic scales

The use of pentatonic scales was another African-associated trend. The use of
pentatonic scales in Africa probably goes back thousands of years.
Tyner perfected the use of the pentatonic scale in his solos.

[143]

[142]

McCoy

Tyner also used

parallel fifths and fourths, which are common harmonies in West Africa.

[144]

The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues improvisation. Like a blues

scale, a minor pentatonic scale can be played over all of the chords in a blues.
The following pentatonic lick was played over blues changes by Joe Henderson
on Horace Silver's "African Queen" (1965).

[145]

C minor pentatonic phrase played by Joe Henderson on "African Queen" by

Horace Silver (1965).
Jazz pianist, theorist, and educator Mark Levine refers the scale generated by
beginning on the fifth step of a pentatonic scale, as the V pentatonic scale.

[146]

C pentatonic scale beginning on the I (C pentatonic), IV (F pentatonic), and V (G

pentatonic) steps of the scale.

[clarification needed]

Levine points out that the V pentatonic scale works for all three chords of the
standard II-V-I jazz progression.

[147]

This is a very common progression, used in

pieces such as Miles Davis' "Tune Up." The following example shows the V
pentatonic scale over a II-V-I progression.

[148]

V pentatonic scale over II-V-I chord progression.

Accordingly, John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (1960), with its 26 chords per 16
bars, can be played using only three pentatonic scales. Coltrane studied Nicolas
Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which contains material
that is virtually identical to portions of "Giant Steps".

[149]

The harmonic

complexity of "Giant Steps" is on the level of the most advanced twentiethcentury art music. Superimposing the pentatonic scale over "Giant Steps" is not
merely a matter of harmonic simplification, but also a sort of "Africanizing" of
the piece, which provides an alternate approach for soloing. Mark Levine

observes that when mixed in with more conventional "playing the changes",
pentatonic scales provide "structure and a feeling of increased space."
Jazz fusion

[150]

Main article: Jazz fusion

Fusion trumpeter Miles Davis in 1989

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was
developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric

instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi
Hendrix. Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures,

syncopation, complex chords and harmonies. All Music Guide states that "until
around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate.

[However, ...] as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and

as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play
strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and
occasionally combine forces."

[151]

Miles Davis' new directions

In 1969 Davis fully embraced the electric instrument approach to jazz with In a

Silent Way, which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two

side-long suites edited heavily by producer Teo Macero, this quiet, static album
would be equally influential upon the development of ambient music. As Davis

recalls: "The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great
guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit
record, "Dance to the Music," Sly and the Family Stone... I wanted to make it

more like rock. When we recorded In a Silent Way I just threw out all the chord

sheets and told everyone to play off of that."

[152]

Two contributors to In a Silent

Way also joined organist Larry Young to create one of the early acclaimed fusion
albums: Emergency! by The Tony Williams Lifetime.
Psychedelic-jazz
Bitches Brew

Davis's Bitches Brew (1970) was his most successful of this era. Although

inspired by rock and funk, Davis's fusion creations were original, and brought
about a type of new avant-garde, electronic, psychedelic-jazz, as far from pop
music as any other Davis work.
Herbie Hancock

Davis alumnus, pianist Herbie Hancock, released four albums of the short-lived

(19701973) psychedelic-jazz sub-genre: Mwandishi (1972), Crossings (1973),

and Sextant (1973). The rhythmic background was a mix of rock, funk, and
African-type textures.

Musicians who worked with Davis formed the four most influential fusion groups:
Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra emerged in 1971 and were soon
followed by Return to Forever and The Headhunters.
Weather Report

Weather Report's debut album was in the electronic, psychedelic-jazz vein. The
self-titled Weather Report (1971) caused a sensation in the jazz world on its

arrival, thanks to the pedigree of the groups members (including percussionist

Airto Moreira), and their unorthodox approach to their music. The album featured
a softer sound than would be the case in later years (predominantly using acoustic
bass, with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone, and with no

synthesizers involved) but is still considered a classic of early fusion. It built on

the avant-garde experiments which Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles

Davis on Bitches Brew (including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition

in favour of continuous rhythm and movement) but taking the music further. To

emphasise the group's rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with
the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece "Milky Way" (created by Shorter's
extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul's piano strings while
the latter pedalled the instrument). Down Beat described the album as "music

beyond category" and awarded it Album of the Year in the magazine's polls that
year. Weather Report's subsequent releases were creative funk-jazz works.

[153]

Jazz-rock

Although some jazz purists protested the blend of jazz and rock, many jazz

innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion. In
addition to using the electric instruments of rock, such as the electric guitar,
electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer keyboards, fusion also used the

powerful amplification, "fuzz" pedals, wah-wah pedals, and other effects used by
1970s-era rock bands. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis,
Eddie Harris, keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock,

vibraphonist Gary Burton, drummer Tony Williams, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty,

guitarists Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Frank Zappa,

saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassists Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. Jazz
fusion was also popular in Japan where the band Casiopea released over thirty
fusion albums.

In the twenty-first century, almost all jazz has influences from other nations and
styles of music, making jazz fusion as much a common practice as style.
Jazz-funk

Main article: Jazz-funk

Developed by the mid-1970s, jazz-funk is characterized by a strong back beat

(groove), electrified sounds,

[154]

and often, the presence of electronic analog

synthesizers. Jazz-funk also draws influences from traditional African music, AfroCuban rhythms and Jamaican reggae, notably Kingston bandleader Sonny

Bradshaw. Another feature is the shift of proportions between composition and

improvisation: arrangements, melody and overall writing were heavily emphasized.
The integration of funk, soul and R&B music into jazz resulted in the creation of
a genre whose spectrum is wide and ranges from strong jazz improvisation to
soul, funk or disco with jazz arrangements, jazz riffs and jazz solos, and
sometimes soul vocals.

[155]

Early examples are Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band and the Miles Davis

album On the Corner. The latter, from 1972, began Davis' foray into jazz-funk

and was, he claimed, an attempt at reconnecting with the young black audience
which had largely forsaken jazz for rock and funk. While there is a discernible

rock and funk influence in the timbres of the instruments employed, other tonal
and rhythmic textures, such as the Indian tambora and tablas, and Cuban congas
and bongos, create a multi-layered soundscape. The album was a culmination of

sorts of the musique concrte approach that Davis and producer Teo Macero had
begun to explore in the late 1960s.
Other trends

Musicians began improvising jazz tunes on unusual instruments, such as the jazz
harp (Alice Coltrane), electrically amplified and wah-wah pedaled jazz violin

(Jean-Luc Ponty), and bagpipes (Rufus Harley). Jazz continued to expand and
change, influenced by other types of music, such as world music, avant garde

classical music, and rock and pop music. Guitarist John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu
Orchestra played a mix of rock and jazz infused with East Indian influences. The
ECM record label began in Germany in the 1970s with artists including Keith

Jarrett, Paul Bley, the Pat Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, Kenny
Wheeler, John Taylor, John Surman and Eberhard Weber, establishing a new

chamber music aesthetic, featuring mainly acoustic instruments, and sometimes

incorporating elements of world music and folk.
1980s

Main article: 1980s in jazz

In 1987, the US House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by
Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of

American music stating, among other things, "... that jazz is hereby designated as
a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our

attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and

promulgated." It passed in the House of Representatives on September 23, 1987
and in the Senate on November 4, 1987.

[156]

Resurgence of Traditionalism

Wynton Marsalis
While the 1970s had been dominated by the fusion and free jazz genres, the
early 1980s saw a re-emergence of a more conventional kind of acoustic or

straight-ahead jazz. Perhaps the most prominent manifestation of this resurgence

was the emergence of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who strove to create music

within what he believed was the tradition, rejecting both fusion and free jazz and

creating extensions of the small and large forms initially pioneered by such artists
as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as the hard bop of the 1950s.

Several musicians who had been prominent in the fusion genre during the 1970s
began to record acoustic jazz once more, including Chick Corea and Herbie

Hancock. Even the early-80s music of Miles Davis, although still recognisably
fusion, adopted a far more conventional approach than his abstract work of the
1970s. A similar reaction took place against free jazz: according to Ted Giola,
the very leaders of the avant garde started to signal a retreat from the core

principles of Free Jazz. Anthony Braxton began recording standards over familiar
chord changes. Cecil Taylor played duets in concert with Mary Lou Williams,

and let her set out structured harmonies and familiar jazz vocabulary under his
blistering keyboard attack. And the next generation of progressive players would
be even more accommodating, moving inside and outside the changes without

thinking twice. Musicians such as David Murray or Don Pullen may have felt the
call of free-form jazz, but they never forgot all the other ways one could play
African-American music for fun and profit.
Smooth jazz

Main article: smooth jazz

David Sanborn, 2008

[157]

In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called "pop fusion" or
"smooth jazz" became successful and garnered significant radio airplay in "quiet

storm" time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S. This helped to
establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau, Anita Baker,

Chaka Khan and Sade, as well as saxophonists including Grover Washington, Jr.,
Kenny G, Kirk Whalum, Boney James and David Sanborn. In general, smooth
jazz is downtempo (the most widely played tracks are of 90105 beats per

minute), and has a lead, melody-playing instrument; saxophonesespecially

soprano and tenorand legato electric guitar are popular.

In his Newsweek article "The Problem With Jazz Criticism"

[158]

Stanley Crouch

considers Miles Davis' playing of fusion as a turning point that led to smooth

jazz. Critic Aaron J. West has countered the often negative perceptions of smooth
jazz, stating:

I challenge the prevalent marginalization and malignment of smooth jazz in the

standard jazz narrative. Furthermore, I question the assumption that smooth jazz is
an unfortunate and unwelcomed evolutionary outcome of the jazz-fusion era.

Instead, I argue that smooth jazz is a long-lived musical style that merits multidisciplinary analyses of its origins, critical dialogues, performance practice, and
reception.

[159]

Acid jazz, nu jazz and jazz rap

Acid jazz developed in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by jazz-funk
and electronic dance music. Jazz-funk musicians such as Roy Ayers and Donald
Byrd are often credited as forerunners of acid jazz.

[160]

While acid jazz often

contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including sampling or

live DJ cutting and scratching), it is just as likely to be played live by musicians,
who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance.

Nu jazz is influenced by jazz harmony and melodies; there are usually no

improvisational aspects. It ranges from combining live instrumentation with beats
of jazz house, exemplified by St Germain, Jazzanova and Fila Brazillia, to more
band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements, such as that of The

Cinematic Orchestra, Kobol, and the Norwegian "future jazz" style pioneered by
Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist, Nils Petter Molvr, and others. Nu jazz can be
very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept.

Jazz rap developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and incorporates jazz

influence into hip hop. In 1988, Gang Starr released the debut single "Words I
Manifest", sampling Dizzy Gillespie's 1962 "Night in Tunisia", and Stetsasonic
released "Talkin' All That Jazz", sampling Lonnie Liston Smith. Gang Starr's

debut LP, No More Mr. Nice Guy (1989), and their track "Jazz Thing" (1990),
sampled Charlie Parker and Ramsey Lewis. Groups making up the Native

Tongues Posse tended towards jazzy releases; these include the Jungle Brothers'
debut Straight Out the Jungle (1988), and A Tribe Called Quest's People's

Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990) and The Low End Theory
(1991).

Rap duo Pete Rock & CL Smooth incorporated jazz influences on their 1992

debut Mecca and the Soul Brother. Beginning in 1993, rapper Guru's Jazzmatazz
series used jazz musicians during the studio recordings. Though jazz rap had

achieved little mainstream success, Miles Davis' final album, Doo-Bop (released

posthumously in 1992), was based around hip hop beats and collaborations with

producer Easy Mo Bee. Davis' ex-bandmate Herbie Hancock returned to hip hop
influences in the mid-nineties, releasing the album Dis Is Da Drum in 1994.
Punk jazz and jazzcore

John Zorn performing in 2006

The relaxation of orthodoxy concurrent with post-punk in London and New York
City led to a new appreciation for jazz. In London, the Pop Group began to mix
free jazz, along with dub reggae, into their brand of punk rock.

[161]

In NYC, No

Wave took direct inspiration from both free jazz and punk. Examples of this style
include Lydia Lunch's Queen of Siam,

[162]

the work of James Chance and the

[162]

Contortions, who mixed Soul with free jazz and punk,

[162]

Lizards,

Gray, and the Lounge

who were the first group to call themselves "punk jazz."

John Zorn began to make note of the emphasis on speed and dissonance that was
becoming prevalent in punk rock and incorporated this into free jazz. This began

in 1986 with the album Spy vs. Spy, a collection of Ornette Coleman tunes done
in the contemporary thrashcore style.

[163]

The same year, Sonny Sharrock, Peter

Brtzmann, Bill Laswell, and Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album
under the name Last Exit, a similarly aggressive blend of thrash and free jazz.
These developments are the origins of jazzcore, the fusion of free jazz with
hardcore punk.

[164]

In the 1990s, punk jazz and jazzcore began to reflect the increasing awareness of
elements of extreme metal (particularly thrash metal and death metal) in hardcore
punk. A new style of "metallic jazzcore" was developed by Iceburn, from Salt

Lake City, and Candiria, from New York City, though anticipated by Naked City
and Pain Killer. This tendency also takes inspiration from jazz inflections in
technical death metal, such as the work of Cynic and Atheist.
M-Base

Main article: M-Base

Steve Coleman in Paris, July 2004

The M-Base movement was started in the 1980s by a loose collective of young
African-American musicians in New York who had a new sound and specific

ideas about creative expression. With a strong foothold in the tradition represented
by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and in contemporary African-American

groove music, musicians such as saxophonists Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, and
Gary Thomas developed complex but grooving

[165]

music. In the 1990s most M-

Base participants turned to more conventional music, but Coleman, the most

active participant, continued developing his music in accordance with the M-Base
concept.

[166]

Coleman developed philosophical and spiritual concepts from aspects of culture

he found around the world that express fundamental facets of nature and human
existence in a holistic way. He used these to give his music a meaning similar to

the intentions of religious music, European composers like J.S. Bach and Ludwig
van Beethoven, and musicians in the tradition represented by Coltrane.

[167]

Coleman's audience decreased but his music and concepts influenced many
musicians
[170]

[168]

both in terms of music technique

[169]

and of the music's meaning.

Hence, M-Base changed from a movement of a loose collective of young

musicians to a kind of informal Coleman "school",

already originally implied concept.

[172]

[171]

with a much advanced but

1990s2010s

Jazz concert

Main articles: 1990s in jazz and 2000s in jazz

Harry Connick, Jr. in 2014

Jazz since the 1990s has been characterised by a pluralism in which no one style
dominates but rather a wide range of active styles and genres are popular.

Individual performers often play in a variety of styles, sometimes in the same

performance. Pianist Brad Mehldau and power trio The Bad Plus have explored

contemporary rock music within the context of the traditional jazz acoustic piano
trio, for example recording instrumental jazz versions of songs by rock musicians.
The Bad Plus have also incorporated elements of free jazz into their music. A

firm avant-garde or free jazz stance has been maintained by some players, such as
saxophonists Greg Osby and Charles Gayle, while others, such as James Carter,
have incorporated free jazz elements into a more traditional framework.
Harry Connick, Jr. is a jazz musician and singer who has seven top-20 US
albums, including ten number-1 US jazz albums, earning more number-one
albums than any other artist in the US jazz chart history.

[173]

New vocalists, such as Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling
and Jamie Cullum, have achieved popularity with a mix of traditional jazz and
pop/rock forms. Players emerging since the 1990s and usually performing in
largely straight-ahead settings include pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer,

guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove

and Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Chris Potter and Joshua Redman, clarinetist
Ken Peplowski, and bassist Christian McBride.
Although jazz-rock fusion reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s, the
use of electronic instruments and rock-derived musical elements in jazz continued
in the 1990s and 2000s. Musicians using this approach have included Pat
Metheny, John Abercrombie, John Scofield, and Swedish group e.s.t.

See also
African
American portal
Jazz portal
Music portal

1920s in jazz

Cape jazz

Glossary of jazz and popular music

Jazz age

Jazz band

Jazz fusion

Jazz poetry

Juvenile jazz band

Smooth jazz

Timeline of jazz education

Victorian Jazz Archive

Lists

* * List of big bands

List of jazz bassists

List of jazz clubs

List of jazz drummers

List of jazz festivals

List of jazz genres

List of jazz guitarists

List of jazz institutions and organizations

List of jazz musicians

List of jazz pianists

List of jazz standards

List of jazz violinists

List of jazz vocalists

Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz, 2nd ed., Continuum, 2007,

pp. 45

Bill Kirchner, The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Oxford University

Press, 2005, Chapter Two.

Argyle, Ray (2009). Scott Joplin and the age of ragtime. McFarland.

p. 172. ISBN 0-7864-4376-6.

Father of the Blues by William Christopher Handy. 1941 MacMillan

page 292

J J Johnson continued, "[Jazz] is forever seeking and reaching out

and exploring": DownBeat: The Great Jazz Interviews A 75th

Anniversary Anthology: p. 250

6.

Joachim E. Berendt. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and

Beyond. Translated by H. and B. Bredigkeit with Dan Morgenstern. 1981.

Lawrence Hill Books. Page 371

7.
8.

Berendt, Joachim Ernst (1964) The New Jazz Book: a History and

Guide, p. 278. P. Owen At Google Books. Retrieved 4 August 2013.

In Review of The Cambridge Companion to Jazz by Peter Elsdon,

FZMw (Frankfurt Journal of Musicology) No. 6, 2003

9.

Cooke, Mervyn; Horn, David G. (2002). The Cambridge companion

to jazz. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1, 6. ISBN 0-52166388-1.

10.

Luebbers, Johannes (September 8, 2008). "It's All Music". Resonate

11.

Giddins 1998 70.

12.

Jazz Drum Lessons Drumbook.org

13.

In "Jazz Inc."

14.

"African American Musicians Reflect On 'What Is This Thing Called

(Australian Music Centre).

1998

[dead link]

by Andrew Gilbert, Metro Times, December 23,

Jazz?' In New Book By UC Professor". Oakland Post 38 (79): 77. 20

March 2001. Retrieved December 6, 2011.

15.

Seagrove, Gordon (July 11, 1915). "Blues is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues"

(PDF). Chicago Daily Tribune. Retrieved November 4, 2011. Archived at

Observatoire Musical Franais, Paris-Sorbonne University.

16.

Benjamin Zimmer (June 8, 2009). ""Jazz": A Tale of Three Cities".

17.

Imamu Amiri Baraka (2000). The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader

18.

Andrew R. L. Cayton, Richard Sisson, Chris Zacher, ed. (2006). The

Word Routes. The Visual Thesaurus. Retrieved June 8, 2009.

(2 ed.). Basic Books. p. 42. ISBN 1-56025-238-3.

American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia. Indiana University Press.

p. 569. ISBN 0-253-00349-0.

19.

Philip Larkin (2004). Jazz Writings. Continuum International

Publishing Group. p. 94. ISBN 0-8264-7699-6.

20.

"15 Most Influential Jazz Artists". Listverse. 2010-02-27. Retrieved

27 July 2014.
21.

Criswell, Chad. "What Is a Jazz Band?". Retrieved 25 July 2014.

22.

Cooke 1999, pp. 79

23.

African musician/scholar Kofi Agawu disputes this conventional view:

"The idea that African music is functional in contrast to a contemplative

European music is a myth ... this particular construct arose in connection

with earlier ethnography's written for a Western audience and aiming to

convey what might be different about African music. The point that African
music can be legitimately listened to, that it never relinquishes a

contemplative dimensionnot even in theoryapparently still needs to

be made in view of long-standing views linking music to dance." Agawu,
Kofi (2003: 104105). Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes,

Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge.

24.

"The primary instrument for a cultural music expression was a long

narrow African drum. It came in various sized from three to eight feet long
and had previously been banned in the South by whites. Other instruments
used were the triangle, a jawbone, and early ancestors to the banjo. Many

types of dances were performed in Congo Square, including the 'flat-footedshuffle' and the 'Bamboula.'" African American Registry.

http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/congo-square-soul-new-orleans
25.

Palmer, Robert (1981: 37). Deep Blues. New York: Penguin.

26.

Cooke 1999, pp. 1417, 2728

27.

Kubik, Gerhard (1999: 112).

28.

Borneman, Ernest (1969: 104). Jazz and the Creole Tradition." Jazz

29.

Sublette, Ned (2008: 124, 287). The World that made New Orleans:

Research I: 99112.

from Spanish silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN
1-55652-958-9

30.

Pealosa, David (2010: 3846). The Clave Matrix; Afro-Cuban

Rhythm: Its Principles and African Origins. Redway, CA: Bembe Inc.
ISBN 1-886502-80-3.

31.

Garrett, Charles Hiroshi (2008). Struggling to Define a Nation:

American Music and the Twentieth Century, p.54. ISBN 978-0-520-254862. Shown in common time and then in cut time with tied sixteenth &
eighth note rather than rest.

32.

Sublette, Ned (2007), Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to

the Mambo, p.134. ISBN 978-1-55652-632-9. Shown with tied sixteenth

& eighth note rather than rest.

33.

Palmer, Robert (1981: 39). Deep Blues.

34.

Kubik, Gerhard (1999: 52). Africa and the Blues. Jackson, MI:

University Press of Mississippi.

35.

Palmer (1981: 39).

36.

Wynton Marsalis states that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave."

37.

Schuller, Gunther (1968: 19) Early Jazz; Its Roots and Musical

"Wynton Marsalis part 2." 60 Minutes. CBS News (Jun 26, 2011).

Development. New York: Oxford Press.

38.

"[Afro]-Latin rhythms have been absorbed into black American styles

far more consistently than into white popular music, despite Latin music's
popularity among whites" (Roberts 1979: 41).
39.

Manuel, Peter (2009: 67). Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean.

40.

Manuel, Peter (2009: 69). Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean.

41.

Acosta, Leonardo (2003: 5). Cubano Be Cubano Bop; One Hundred

42.

Maulen (1999: 4) Salsa Guidebook for Piano and Ensemble.

43.

Pealosa, David (2010: 42). The Clave Matrix; Afro-Cuban Rhythm:

Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Years of Jazz in Cuba. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books.

Petaluma, California: Sher Music. ISBN 0-9614701-9-4.

Its Principles and African Origins. Redway, CA: Bembe Inc. ISBN 1886502-80-3.

44.

Roberts, John Storm (1999: 12) Latin Jazz. New York: Schirmer

Books.
45.

Sublette, Ned (2008: 125). The World that made New Orleans: from

Spanish silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN 155652-958-9

46.

Sublette, Ned (2008:125). Cuba and its Music; From the First

47.

Roberts, John Storm (1999: 16) Latin Jazz. New York: Schirmer

48.

"Wynton Marsalis part 2." 60 Minutes. CBS News (Jun 26, 2011).

Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Books.

49.

Morton, Jelly Roll (1938: Library of Congress Recording) The

50.

Cooke 1999, pp. 28, 47

51.

Catherine Schmidt-Jones (2006). "Ragtime". Connexions. Retrieved

52.

Cooke 1999, pp. 2829

53.

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Complete Recordings By Alan Lomax.

October 18, 2007.

2007.
54.

Tanner, Paul, David W Megill, and Maurice Gerow. Jazz. 11th ed.

Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. pgs. 328-331

55.

Benward & Saker 2003, p. 203.

56.

Matthiesen, Bill (2008: 8). Habaneras, Maxixies & Tangos The

57.

Sublette, Ned (2008:155). Cuba and its Music; From the First

58.

Roberts, John Storm (1999: 40). The Latin Tinge. Oxford University

59.

Kunzler's dictionary of Jazz provides two separate entries: blues, an

Syncopated Piano Music of Latin America. Mel Bay. ISBN 0-7866-7635-3

Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Press.

originally African-American genre (p. 128), and the blues form, a

widespread musical form (p. 131).

60.

"The Evolution of Differing Blues Styles". How To Play Blues

Guitar. Archived from the original on 2010-01-18. Retrieved 2008-08-11.

61.

Cooke 1999, pp. 1114

62.

Kubik, Gerhard (1999: 96).

63.

Palmer (1981: 46).

64.

Handy, Father (1941), p. 99

65.

Schuller (1968: 66, 145n.).

66.

Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. by W.C. Handy, edited by

Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York;

(1941) pages 99, 100. no ISBN in this first printing
67.

Cooke 1999, pp. 47, 50

68.

"Original Creole Orchestra". The Red Hot Archive. Retrieved October

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Retrieved 2013-10-02.
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example shown in half time compared to the source.

71.

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72.

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73.

In 1938 Morton made a series of recordings for the Library of

74.

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75.

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76.

The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986: 818).

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ed.

77.

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clave matrix : Afro-Cuban rhythm : its principles and African origins.

Redway, CA: Bembe Books. p. 229. ISBN 1-886502-80-3.

78.

Illustrated well in HBO's program, Treme, which has succeeded in

79.

Gridley, Mark C. (2000). Jazz styles : history & analysis (7th ed

researching the jazz culture of New Orleans.

ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. pp. 7273. ISBN 9780130212276.

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165.

"... circular and highly complex polymetric patterns which preserve

their danceable character of popular Funk-rhythms despite their internal

complexity and asymmetries ..." (Musicologist and musician Ekkehard Jost,

Sozialgeschichte des Jazz, 2003, p. 377)
166.

[4] Steve Coleman#Biography

167.

"Steve Coleman Digging deep". Innerviews. September 10, 2001.

168.

Pianist Vijay Iyer (who was chosen as "Jazz musician of the year

Retrieved June 5, 2011.

2010" by the Jazz Journalists Association) said: "It's hard to overstate Steve
(Colemans) influence. He's affected more than one generation, as much as
anyone since John Coltrane." ([5])

169.

"His recombinant ideas about rhythm and form and his eagerness to

mentor musicians and build a new vernacular have had a profound effect on
American jazz." (Ben Ratliff, [6])

170.

Vijay Iyer: "It's not just that you can connect the dots by playing

seven or 11 beats. What sits behind his influence is this global perspective
on music and life. He has a point of view of what he does and why he
does it." ([7])

171.

Michael J. West (June 2, 2010). "Jazz Articles: Steve Coleman: Vital

172.

"What Is M-Base?". M-base.com. Retrieved June 5, 2011.

173.

Chart Beat, Billboard, April 9, 2009

Information". Jazztimes.com. Retrieved June 5, 2011.

References

Adorno, Theodor. Prisms The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1967.

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McLim Garrison,

eds. 1867. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A Simpson & Co.
Electronic edition, Chapel Hill, N. C.: Academic Affairs Library, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.

Joachim Ernst Berendt, Gnther Huesmann (Bearb.): Das Jazzbuch. 7.

Auflage. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-10-003802-9

Burns, Ken, and Geoffrey C. Ward. 2000. JazzA History of America's

Music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Also: The Jazz Film Project, Inc.

Cooke, Mervyn (1999). Jazz. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-50020318-0..

Carr, Ian. Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. 2nd edition.

London: Northway. ISBN 978-0-9550908-6-8

Collier, James Lincoln. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History

(Dell Publishing Co., 1978)

Dance, Stanley (1983). The World of Earl Hines. [Includes a 120-page

interview with Hines plus many photos]. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-30680182-5

Davis, Miles. Miles Davis (2005). Boplicity. Delta Music plc. UPC 4006408-264637.

Downbeat (2009). The Great Jazz Interviews: ed Frank Alkyer & Ed

Enright. Hal Leonard Books. ISBN 978-1-4234-6384-9

Elsdon, Peter. 2003. "The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Edited by

Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2002. Review." Frankfrter Zeitschrift fr Musikwissenschaft 6:15975.

Gang Starr. 2006. Mass Appeal: The Best of Gang Starr. CD recording
72435-96708-2-9. New York: Virgin Records.

Giddins, Gary. 1998. Visions of Jazz: The First Century New York: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0-19-507675-3

Godbolt, Jim. 2005. A History of Jazz in Britain 191950 London:

Northway. ISBN 0-9537040-5-X

Gridley, Mark C. 2004. Concise Guide to Jazz, fourth edition. Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-182657-3

Hersch, Charles (2009). Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in

New Orleans. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-32868-3.

Kenney, William Howland. 1993. Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History,

19041930. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506453-4

(cloth); paperback reprint 1994 ISBN 0-19-509260-0

Oliver, Paul (1970). Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the

Blues. London: Studio Vista. ISBN 0-289-79827-2..

Mandel, Howard. 2007. Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz.

Routledge. ISBN 0-415-96714-7.

Nairn, Charlie. 1975. Earl 'Fatha' HInes: 1 hour 'solo' documentary made in
"Blues Alley" Jazz Club, Washington DC, for ATV, England, 1975:

produced/directed by Charlie Nairn: original 16mm film plus out-takes of

additional tunes from that film archived in British Film Institute Library at
bfi.org.uk and http://www.itvstudios.com: DVD copies with Jean Gray

Hargrove Music Library [who hold The Earl Hines Collection/Archive],

University of California, Berkeley: also University of Chicago, Hogan Jazz

Archive Tulane University New Orleans and Louis Armstrong House
Museum Libraries

Pealosa, David. 2010. The Clave Matrix; Afro-Cuban Rhythm: Its

Principles and African Origins. Redway, CA: Bembe Inc. ISBN 1-88650280-3.

Porter, Eric. 2002. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American

Musicians as Artists, Critics and Activists. University of California Press,

Ltd. London, England.

Ratliffe, Ben. 2002. Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important

Recordings. The New York Times Essential Library. New York: Times
Books. ISBN 0-8050-7068-0

Schuller, Gunther. 1968. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development.
Oxford University Press. New printing 1986.

Schuller, Gunther. 1991. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz,

19301945. Oxford University Press.

Searle, Chris. 2008. Forward Groove: Jazz and the Real World from Louis

Armstrong to Gilad Atzmon. London: Northway. ISBN 978-0-9550908-7-5

Szwed, John Francis. 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and

Loving Jazz. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 0-7868-8496-7

Vacher, Peter. 2004. Soloists and Sidemen: American Jazz Stories. London:
Northway. ISBN 978-0-9537040-4-0

Yanow, Scott. 2004. Jazz on Film: The Complete Story of the Musicians

and Music Onscreen. (Backbeat Books) ISBN 0-87930-783-8

Further reading

Lyons, Len. 1980. The 101 Best Jazz Albums: a History of Jazz on

Records. New York: W. Morrow & Co. 476 p., ill. with b&w photos.
ISBN 0-688-08720-3 pbk

Williams, Martin, ed. 1959. The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and

Development of Jazz. London: Cassell, 1960, cop. 1959. 248 p., ill. with
examples in musical notation

External links
Wikiquote has a collection of
quotations related to: Jazz
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Jazz.

Jazz Foundation of America

Jazz at the Smithsonian Museum

Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame website

Jazz Artist and Discography Resource

Red Hot Jazz.com

Jazz at Lincoln Center website

o

Jazz At Lincoln Center Hall of Fame

American Jazz Museum website

The International Archives for the Jazz Organ

Classic and Contemporary Jazz Music

The Jazz Archive at Duke University

Jazz Festivals in Europe

Free 1920s Jazz Collection available for downloading at Archive.org

DownBeats Jazz 101 A Guide to the Music This section of the Downbeat
magazine website has several short pages to allow the beginning student of
jazz to acquire an education.

Nairn, Charlie, (1975): Earl "Fatha" Hines: [8]. 1hr documentary filmed at
Blues Alley jazz club, Washington DC. Produced and directed by Charlie

Nairn for UK ATV Television, 1975. Original 16mm film, plus out-takes

of additional tunes, archived in British Film Institute Library at bfi.org.uk;

also at http://www.itvstudios.com; DVD copies with the "Jean Gray

Hargrove Music Library" (which holds The Earl Hines Collection/Archive),

University of California, Berkeley, California; also at University of Chicago
"Hogan Jazz Archive", Tulane University New Orleans and at the Louis
Armstrong House Museum Libraries: see also
www.jazzonfilm.com/documentaries.

Jazz collected news and commentary at The New York Times

Jazz collected news and commentary at The Guardian

Jazz at DMOZ
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A Chronology of Jazz Music

TM, , Copyright 1996 Piero Scaruffi. All rights reserved.

Main music page | History of jazz music | Best albums of all times | Chronology
of rock music

Legend: Jazz | Music industry | Instruments | Media | Necrology | Exotic

The arrow

signifies "birth of a new genre"

Several events relating to blues, boogie-woogie, soul, etc etc are listed in my
chronology of rock music. Eventually i will merge them all into just one
chronology of the 20th century.

18
28
18
43
18
65
18
73
18
85
18
97

Thomas "Daddy" Rice's Jim Crow becomes the first international hit
ever

The Virginia Minstrels define the standard of the minstrel show

The first black minstrel group, the Georgia Minstrels, is formed

James Bland becomes the first major black songwriter

Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee partner to create
a nation-wide chain of vaudeville theaters

Tom Turpin publishes the first piano rag, Harlem Rag

18

Bob Cole's A Trip to Coontown is the first musical comedy entirely

19

Ernest Hogan's black orchestra, the Memphis Students, debuts on

98

05
19
07
19
09

produced and performed by blacks

Broadway

Florenz Ziegfeld's revue "Ziegfeld Follies" debuts

James Europe founds the "Clef Club"

19

Bert Williams becomes the first black to be the protagonist of the

19

Vernon and Irene Castle open New York's first cabaret, "Sans-Souci"

10

15

"Ziegfeld Follies"

Jelly Roll Morton's Jerry Roll Blues is the first published piece of jazz

music
19
16
19
17

Charles "Luckey" Roberts is the first Harlem pianist to be recorded

James Johnson pioneers stride piano
A white band, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, makes the first
recording of "dixieland jazz" recording

Joe "King" Oliver moves to Chicago

19
18

King Oliver leaves New Orleans for Chicago

White singer Al Jolson debuts the blackface character "Gus"
James Europe's orchestra Hellfighters tours Europe

Okeh releases its first record, by the New Orleans Jazz Band
Will-Marion Cook's orchestra introduces Chicago to the syncopated
19
19

music of New York

Will-Marion Cook's orchestra tours Europe

Kid Ory's Creole Orchestra cuts the first instrumental record by a black
orchestra

The Original Dixieland Jass Band exports jazz to Britain

19
20

Mamie Smith makes the first blues recording

19

Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along is the first musical entirely produced and

21

performed by blacks

19

Louis Armstrong moves to Chicago

22

Kid Ory makes the first recording by a black jazz ensemble

19

Coleman Hawkins moves to New York as a member of Mamie Smith's

23

band and joins Fletcher Henderson's orchestra

 A blues interpreted by black singer Bessie Smith becomes a national

best-seller

The "Cotton Club" opens in Harlem

Fletcher Henderson forms a big band in New York

19
24
19
25
19
26

Classical composer George Gershwin premieres the jazz composition

Rhapsody in Blue performed by the Paul Whiteman orchestra

Louis Armstrong forms the Hot Five

Lew Leslie stages the "Blackbirds Revue" with an all-black cast

Louis Armstrong popularizes scat singing
The "Savoy" opens in Harlem
Bix Beiderbecke joins the Paul Whiteman orchestra

19
27

Duke Ellington's shows at the "Cotton Club" are broadcast live

The "Onyx Club" opens in New York

The first talking movie is titled "The Jazz Singer"

19
29

19
31

Kansas City guitarist Eddie Durham experiments with proto-amplifiers

Duke Ellington's Creole Rhapsody (1931) takes both sides of a 7"
record

Bix Beiderbecke dies

Buddy Bolden dies

19

Louis Armstrong tours Europe

32

A Duke Ellington hit features the word "swing" in the title

19

The magazine "Down Beat" is founded

34

A Cab Calloway hit gives a name to swing dancing, "jitterbug'

 The "Apollo" night-club opens in Harlem

Duke Ellington releases the 13-minute Reminiscing in Tempo, the
19
35

longest jazz pieces yet committed to a record

A concert by the Benny Goodman orchestra at the "Palomar Ballroom"

in Los Angeles is broadcast live

Benny Goodman makes recordings with a racially integrated trio

19
36

19
37

19
38

19
39

William "Count" Basie organizes the Barons of Rhythm in Kansas City

with Lester Young

Dizzy Gillespie tours Europe

Bessie Smith dies

Duke Ellington's Caravan debuts Afro-Cuban rhythms in a swing

context

King Oliver dies

Commodore, one of the first independent jazz labels, is founded by

Milt Gabler
Coleman Hawkins' Body And Soul redefines the jazz ballad
Blue Note is founded by German emigre Alfred Lion
Ma Rainey dies

Jelly Roll Morton dies

19
41

Sidney Bechet pioneers overdubbing when he plays six instruments on

Sheik of Araby

Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke

jam at Milt Minton's "Playhouse" in a new style, bebop

19

Charlie Christian dies

42

Savoy is founded by Herman Lubinsky

19
43

19
44

19
45

Fats Waller dies

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan constitute the
nucleus of Billy Eckstine's band

The word "bebop" is first used to promote Dizzy Gillespie's quintet

Verve is founded by Norman Granz

Miles Davis records with Charlie Parker

Dizzy Gillespie records George Russell's Cubana Be Cubana Bop, the

19
47

first modal improvisation

Gil Evans becomes Miles Davis' arranger

Dizzy Gillespie pioneers Afro-Cuban jazz

GNP Crescendo is founded by Gene Norman

19
48

Discovery is founded by Albert Marx

Lennie Tristano records two completely improvised free-form jams,

19
49

Intuition and Digression

Miles Davis' nonet inaugurates "cool jazz"

New Jazz (later Prestige) is founded by Bob Weinstock
Metronome is founded in Sweden

19
50
19
52

Vanguard is founded by Maynard and Seymour Solomon

The Modern Jazz Quartet is formed to play chamber jazz
Fletcher Henderson dies

Pacific Jazz is founded by Richard Bock and Roy Harte

 Lennie Tristano records the dissonant Descent into the Maelstrom

Sun Ra founds his Arkestra
19
53

Horace Silver's Opus De Funk introduces the word "funk" in music

Delmark is founded by Bob Koester in Chicago
Django Reinhardt dies

Riverside is founded by Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews

19
54

Art Blakey and Horace Silver form the Jazz Messengers and coin
"hard bop"

Charlie Parker dies at 35

19
55

John Coltrane joins Miles Davis' quintet

"Voice of America" begin broadcasting Willis Conover's jazz program
for Soviet Union

Leonard Feather's "Encyclopedia of Jazz" is published

Clifford Brown dies
19
56

Marshall Stearns' "The Story of Jazz" is published by Oxford

University Press

Art Tatum dies

Youstol Dispage dies

19
58

The Monterey Jazz Festival is started by Jimmy Lyons

Jim Hall coins the term "instant composition" to describe jazz

improvisation

19

Dave Brubeck's Time Out (1959) becomes the first million-selling jazz

59

record

Ornette Coleman launches free jazz with The Shape of Jazz to Come
Sidney Bechet dies

 Lester Young dies

Billie Holiday dies

19
60

19
61

19
62

Eric Dolphy joines Ornette Coleman

Betty Carter uses the voice as an instrument on The Modern Sound

Impulse is founded by by producer Creed Taylor
Horace Tapscott founds the Union of God's Musicians and Artists
Ascension or Underground Musicians' Association (UGMA) in Los Angeles
Ravi Shankar and Bud Shank mix jazz and Indian music
Stan Getz sparks interest in bossanova
Free-jazz musicians travel to Europe
Sunny Murray abandons rhythm
Archie Shepp and Don Cherry form the New York Contermporary

19
63

Five

Tony Oxley, Derek Bailey and Gavin Bryars form the trio Joseph
Holbrooke

ESP is founded by Bernard Stollman

19
64

Don Cherry moves to Europe

John Coltrane adopts Coleman's free jazz for Ascension

Michael Mantler founds the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association
(JCOA)

Guenter Hampel, Manfred Schoof and Alexander von Schlippenbach

formed a quintet in Germany

Tony Scott records Music For Zen Meditation, a collaboration with a

koto player and a shakuhachi flute player

John Coltrane cuts the four-movement multi-ethnic mass A Love

Supreme

 Eric Dolphy dies

19
65

The Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is

formed in Chicago

John Stevens founds the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in Britain

Bud Powell dies

19
66

Roscoe Mitchell releases the first album of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)

Alexander Von Schlippenbach forms the Globe Unity Orchestra

Milestone is founded by Orin Keepnews
Anthony Braxton forms a trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins and
trumpeter Leo Smith, the Creative Construction Company

Roscoe Mitchell's group is renamed Art Ensemble Of Chicago

19
67

Willem Breuker, Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg found the

Instant Composer's Pool in Holland

The first Montreux Jazz Festival is held in Switzerland

Nessa is founded by Chuck Nessa in Chicago
John Coltrane dies

Paul Whiteman dies

19
68

The multimedia collective Black Artists' Group (BAG) is formed in St

Louis

Evan Parker and Derek Bailey form the Music Improvisation Company
Anthony Braxton, a member of the Chicago Association for the

Advancement of Creative Musicians, launches "creative jazz" with For Alto

Saxophone

Miles Davis employs electric piano and electric guitar for Miles In
The Sky

 Wes Montgomery dies

Sackville is founded by John Norris and Bill Smith

Gunther Schuller's "History of Jazz" is published
Miles Davis launches jazz-rock fusion with In a Silent Way
19
69

Manfred Eicher founds the ECM label in Germany

FMP (the Free Music Production) is founded
Coleman Hawkins dies
Anthony Braxton forms Circle with pianist Chick Corea, double-bassist

19
70

Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul

Albert Ayler dies at 34

Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley found Incus

John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra introduces a strong Indian
19
71

element into jazz

Enja (European New Jazz Association) is founded by Horst Weber and

Matthias Winckelmann in Germany
Louis Armstrong dies

19

Barry Guy founds the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra

19

Herbie Hancock's Headhunters becomes the all-time best-seller of jazz

19

Duke Ellington dies

19

Derek Bailey founds the Company

19

Errol Garner dies

72

73

74

76

Steeple Chase is founded by Nils Winther

music

Hat Hut/Hat Art is founded by Werner Uehlinger in Switzerland

Black Saint is founded by Giovanni Bonandrini in Italy

77

19
79

19
80
19
81
19
82
19
83
19
84
19
85
19
86

Roland Kirk dies

Creative Music Productions is founded in Germany

Charles Mingus dies
Stan Kenton dies

Gramavision is founded by Jonathan Rose

Soul Note is founded by Giovanni Bonandrini in Italy

Bill Evans dies

Mary Lou Williams dies

Thelonious Monk dies

Fred Anderson opens the "Velvet Lounge" in Chicago

Earl Hines dies

Herbie Hancock's Rockit is the first single by a jazz musician to reach

number one in Billboard's pop charts
Count Basie dies

Kenny Clarke dies

Benny Goodman dies

19

Jaco Pastorius dies

87

The "Knitting Factory" club is opened by Michael Dorf

19

Gilles Peterson coins the term "acid jazz"

88
19
89

19

Gil Evans dies

Chet Baker dies

Roy Eldridge dies

Woody Shaw dies

Mel Lewis dies

Sarah Vaughan dies

90

Dexter Gordon dies

19

Stan Getz dies

19

Sun Ra dies

91

93
19
94
19
95

Art Blakey dies

Miles Davis dies

Dizzy Gillespie dies

Joe Pass dies
Don Cherry dies at 59
Don Pullen dies

Tzadik is founded by John Zorn

19

Gerry Mulligan dies

96

The first Vision Festival is held for avantgarde jazz

19
97
19
99

Stephane Grapelli dies

Tony Williams dies

Ted Gioia's "The History of Jazz" is published.

Art Farmer dies

Milt Jackson dies

 Lester Bowie dies

20
01
20
04

Alyn Shipton's "New History of Jazz" is published

Steve Lacy dies at 69

20

Derek Bailey dies at 75

05

The "Katrina" hurricane devastate New Orleans

20
06

Piero Scaruffi's "A History of Jazz Music" is published

20
07

Leroy Jenkins dies at 75

Max Roach dies at 83

Joe Zawinul dies at 75

Oscar Peterson dies at 82

20
11
20
14

Paul Motian dies at 80

Sam Rivers dies at 88
Charlie Haden dies

Timeline

Ye Developments in Jazz

Historical Events

ar
16

19

18

The first Africans are sold into

slavery in America.

17

New Orleans city council establishes

"Congo Square" as an official site
for slave music and dance.

18

Harvard Law School is founded.

Mississippi becomes a state.

James Monroe is elected president.

Slavery is abolished in the U.S. by

65

the 13th Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution.

18

Pianist Tommy Turpin writes

Harlem Rag, the first known ragtime

92

most serious labor disputes in U.S.

composition.

18

95

Pianist Scott Joplin publishes his

first two rags.

Cornetist Buddy Bolden forms his

band.

The Homestead Strike, one of the

history occurred in Pittsburgh.

General Electric Company is founded

Cinema is born.

18

96

18
97

Racial segregation is upheld by the

U.S. Supreme Court.

The first piano rags appear in print.

Ragtime grows in popularity.

Radio technology is introduced.

First subway in the U.S. created in

Boston.

William McKinney is elected

President.

18

The U.S. goes to war with Spain.

Felix Hoffman patents Aspirin.

Spanish rule ends in Cub

98
18

Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag is

99

published and sells over 100,000

copies.
Duke Ellington is born.

Timeline
Yea Developments in Jazz
r

190
0

A cutting contest (a colloquial

term for music competition) for

ragtime pianists is held at New

Historical Events

Hawaii becomes
official U.S.
territory.

York's Tammany Hall.

First electric bus

runs in New York
City.

190

Charles Booth's performance of

J. Bodewalt Lange's Creole

William McKinley

Blues is recorded for the new

Victor label. This is the first

acoustic recording of ragtime to

is assassinated.

votes to suppress ragtime.

190

Louis Armstrong is born.

The John Philip Sousa Band

exhibit is held in

The American Federation of

Musicians (the musicians union)

Paris.

movie theater in the

Arthur Pryor.

United States, opens

in Los Angeles,

Lincoln Park is opened in New

California.

Orleans as a center for ragtime

Scott Joplin publishes The

Entertainer: a Ragtime Two-

Step, which would become a

The Electric

Theatre, the first

Trombone Sneeze, written by

and early jazz performances.

Theodore Roosevelt
becomes president.

records the ragtime piece,

Painter Pablo
Picasso's first

be made commercially available.

U.S. President

Cuba gains

independence from
the United States.

popular hit nearly 70 years later.

Pianist Jelly Roll Morton claims

to have invented jazz in this
year.

190

Pianist and composer Eubie

Blake publishes his first piano

make their first

rags.

190

Cornetist Buddy Bolden begins

successful flight.

to develop a reputation in New

The third Modern

Olympic Games

Orleans for playing music that

opens in St. Louis,

ragtime.

the World's Fair.

fuses elements of blues and

The Wright brothers

Tenor saxophonist Coleman

Missouri as part of

Hawkins is born.

The ice cream cone

is created.

The first
underground line of
the New York City
Subway opens.

The first New

Year's Eve

celebration is held
in New York City's
Times Square.

190

A black newspaper in

Indianapolis releases a statement

Einstein presents his

in reaction to racist songs

special theory of

popular during this period:

"Composers should not set music
to a set of words that are a

relativity.

190

Pizza is introduced
at Lombardi's in

direct insult to the colored race."

190

Scientist Albert

New York.

Jelly Roll Morton composes

King Porter Stomp.

Cornetist Buddy Bolden is

committed to a mental institution

broadcast of

any music.

produced in New

without having ever recorded

The first wireless

classical music is
York.

Scott Joplin moves to New

York.

190

Alcohol is banned
in North Carolina
and Georgia.

190

The U.S. Marine band records

Alcohol is banned

Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag.

in Tennessee.

The popularity of ragtime

continues to grow among Blacks

reaches the North

and white resulting in increased

public interaction between the
races.

Robert Peary
Pole.

William Howard
Taft becomes
president.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz
ar

19

10

Composer and conductor

James Reese Europe

founds the Clef Club, an

association for Black

Historical Events

The NAACP is founded.

Mark Twain dies.

Marie Curie isolates radium.

Raold Amundsen reaches the

musicians based in New

York.

19

11

Pianist Scott Joplin

publishes his opera

Treemonisha.

Irving Berlin records

South Pole.

Civil War occurs in Mexico.

Alexander's Ragtime

Band, which becomes a

hit but is scorned by
ragtime purists.

19

The Titanic sinks.

60-floor Woolworth Building

12
19

13

The word "jazz" first

appears in print.

is completed, making it the

largest building in the world.

James Reese Europe

records ragtime

arrangements in New

Woodrow Wilson becomes

President.

York with the first black

ensemble to be recorded.

Vernon and Irene Castle,

a married dance team,

begins performing floor

shows at James Europe's
shows.

19
14

Pianist W.C. Handy

writes St. Louis Blues.

World War I begins in

Europe.

The Panama Canal opens to

commercial traffic.

19

15

Trumpeter King Oliver

forms a band in New

Orleans with clarinetist

Sidney Bechet.

general theory of relativity.

Scott Joplin stages

million Blacks will leave the

the show fails.

mid-west and California,

South for northern cities, the

carrying their musical

Vocalist Billie Holiday

influences with them.

is born.

19

Revolution occurs in Russia.

The U.S. enters World War

16
19
17

Scott Joplin dies.

The classic era of

ragtime ends.

The Great Migration begins;

over the next 65 years 6

Treemonisha himself and

Albert Einstein presents his

I.

men served the armed forces

The Original Dixieland

in segregated units.

Jass Band (an all white

group) makes the first
jazz recording, Livery

Stable Blues, and also

becomes the first jazz

group to appear on film

in the movie, The Good

for Nothing.

More than 200,000 Black

James Europe leads the

369th Hell Fighters Band.

The U.S. Navy closes

New Orleans's Storyville
red-light district.

Jazz musicians begin to

leave the city for the
North.

Dizzy Gillespie and

Thelonious Monk are
born.

19

18

Trumpeter King Oliver

leaves New Orleans for
Chicago.

World War I ends.

A flu epidemic kills an

estimated 20 million people

Tenor saxophonist

Coleman Hawkins tours

with blues singer Mamie

worldwide.

activist Paul Robeson

Smith and begins to

graduates first in his class

develop a unique style

from Rutgers University.

of playing.

19

19

The Original Dixieland

Jass Band performs in
London.

Will Marion Cook tours

Europe with his

Singer, actor, and civil rights

Labor and housing tensions

lead to race riots in Chicago,
East St. Louis, Washington,

D.C. and other cities, killing

hundreds and burning

thousands out of their

Southern Syncopated
Orchestra which includes
clarinetist Sidney

homes.

Atlantic Ocean, piloted by

Bechet. After the tour

John Alcock and Arthur

Bechet stays in Europe.

New Orleans trombonist

Kid Ory moves to Los

Whitten Brown.

murdered by government

band, bringing jazz to

forces.

new ears.
James Europe is
murdered by a fellow
bandmate after an
argument.

Mexican rebel leader Emilio

Zapata is ambushed and

Angeles and forms a

The first airplane crosses the

Physicist Ernest Rutherford,

known as the father of

nuclear physics, discovers a

way to induce the splitting

of an atom. This is the first

instance of an experiment
performing nuclear

transmutation, the changing

of one chemical element into
another.

Timeline
Yea Developments in Jazz
r

192

The town of Zion, Illinois

Historical Events

A crisis occurs

bans jazz performances,

surrounding German war

labeling them "sinful."

reparations.

Pianist James P. Johnson

records The Harlem Strut

and Carolina Shout, the
earliest stride piano

Adolf Hitler is elected

leader of the Nazi Party.

Russia is refused entry to

the League of Nations.

recordings, in New York.

The first Miss America

contest is held.

Warren G. Hardin
becomes president.

192

Trombonist Kid Ory's

band, based in Los

Angeles, makes the first

recordings by a black

imprisoned.

is founded.

New Orleans style.

Pianist Fats Waller makes

Pianist William "Count"

Basie makes his first

banned.

Blues singer Mamie Smith

continues to grow in
popularity, recording

Mussolini seizes power in

Rome.

recordings.

Isadora Duncan's
suggestive dancing is

his first recordings.

The BBC (British

Broadcasting Corporation)

ensemble playing in the

Mahatma Ghandi is

Egyptian pharaoh

Tutankhamen's tomb is
discovered.

twenty songs with her

band The Jazz Hounds,

Writer James Joyce

publishes Ulysses.

which features saxophonist

Coleman Hawkins.

Ragtime publisher John

Stark goes out of business
signifying the end of
ragtime.

Race records are created,

marketing and categorizing
music by the race of the
performers.

Louis Armstrong moves to

Chicago to join King
Oliver's Band.

192

Blues singer Bessie Smith

makes her first recording,

broadcast occurs in the

Down-hearted Blues,

which sells a million

copies in six months and

U.S.

Columbia Records.

Cornetist King Oliver's

band, which includes Louis

Earthquake in Tokyo kills

100,000.

leads to her signing a

nine-year contract with

The first network radio

Congress approves a law

making all Native

Americans citizens of the

U.S.

Armstrong on trumpet and

Armstrong's wife Lil

Hardin on piano, makes its

first recordings, including

Dippermouth Blues.

Pianist and arranger

Fletcher Henderson forms

the Fletcher Henderson
Orchestra and begins
performing at Club

Alabama in New York.

Pianist Jelly Roll Morton,

now based in Chicago,

makes several recordings

including solo pieces such

as King Porter Stomp and
performances with the
New Orleans Rhythm
Kings.

Clarinetist Sidney Bechet

makes his first recordings.

Bandleader Elmer

Snowden's Washingtonians
performs in New York

with Duke Ellington on

piano.

Calvin Coolidge becomes

President.

192

Duke Ellington makes his

first recordings as leader of

leader of the Communist

the Washingtonians.

George Gershwin debuts

Revolution, dies.

Rhapsody in Blue along

with Paul Whiteman's
band.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,

Stalin becomes dictator of

Russia.

The Fascist Party wins

the Italian elections.

Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke

and his band, The

Wolverines, make their

first recordings.

Louis Armstrong moves to

New York City to work

with Fletcher Henderson.

Coleman Hawkins plays

alongside Louis Armstrong

in the Fletcher Henderson's
Orchestra, and his sax
playing significantly
evolves.

192
5

Blues singer Bessie Smith

and trumpeter Louis

Armstrong record the

classic version of W.C.

Italian leader Benito

Mussolini commences his
dictatorship.

Handy's St. Louis Blues

for Columbia Records.

recording of classical

music is made in the U.S.

Louis Armstrong makes

his first recordings with his

Fitzgerald christens the

James P. Johnson records

decade "The Jazz Age."

Charleston, which becomes

a huge hit and gives rise

to a dance of the same

Electrical recordings are

D.C.

introduced.

convicted for teaching

The Original Dixieland

Darwin's theories of

evolution to high school

Pianist Fats Waller gives

lessons to pianist Count
Basie.

Tennessee teacher John

Thomas Scopes is

Jass Band disbands.

The Ku Klux Klan

marches in Washington,

name.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The

Great Gatsby is published;

group, the Hot Five.

The first electrical

students.

American labor leader A.

Philip Randolph organizes
the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters to

help bring American
Blacks into the

mainstream of the
American labor
movement.

Frisbee is played for the

first time by a group of

students using empty

Frisbie Baking Company

pie plates.

192

Trumpeter Louis

Armstrong has a huge hit

and pioneers scat singing
with his first recorded

introduced.

transmitting nationally.

Heebie Jeebies, featuring

The Harlem Globetrotters

basketball team is

records in Chicago.

Painter Claude Monet

dies.

Pianist Jelly Roll Morton's

group the Red Hot Peppers

The National Broadcasting

Company (NBC) begins

original composition,
his Hot Five.

The first television is

organized by Abe

Bandleader Fletcher

Saperstein in Chicago.

Henderson's group records

with saxophonist Coleman
Hawkins.

John Coltrane and Miles

Davis are born.

192
7

Louis Armstrong makes

his first recordings with his

Hot Seven, which was the
Hot Five plus drums and

The U.S. and Britain use

military force in China.

Charles Lindbergh makes

tuba.

the Atlantic Ocean.

Jean Goldkette's Orchestra

is dissolved.

the first solo flight across

System (CBS) is

Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke

inaugurated.

joins Paul Whiteman's

band.

Columbia Broadcast

The first "talkie" film is

released, The Jazz Singer,

Pianist and bandleader

starring Al Jolson.

Duke Ellington begins his

residency at the Cotton

Club in Harlem, increasing

the band from six to
eleven members.

192

Clarinetist Benny

Goodman makes his first

Japanese troops enter

China.

recordings.

192

Pianist Fats Waller

participates in a mixedrace recording session in

which he is forced to play

under King Alexander.

musicians.

The film St. Louis Blues

The U.S. stock market

crashes.

behind a screen to separate

him from the white

Yugoslavia is formed

The St. Valentine's Day

Massacre occurs in
Chicago.

about the life of pianist

The first Academy

W.C. Handy is released,

Awards are held in

featuring blues singer

Bessie Smith, Handy as

musical director, and

Hollywood.

Herbert Hoover becomes

president.

pianist James P. Johnson's

band.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz
ar

19

Historical Events

Trumpeter Louis Armstrong

In a recording session with

records Body and Soul.

30

Armstrong, percussionist

Lionel Hampton plays his

first vibraphone solo and

decides to make that his main

instrument.

Bandleader Paul Whiteman

and his orchestra star in the

movie The King of Jazz.

Bandleader Cab Calloway

The planet Pluto is

discovered.

The jet engine is

invented.

becomes a regular at the

Cotton Club.

Free jazz saxophonist Ornette

Coleman is born.

19

31

Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke

dies of pneumonia at age 38.

Cornetist Buddy Bolden dies.

Pianist Lil Hardin separates

Building opens in New

York City.

female band.

RCA demonstrates the first

Duke Ellington records It

Don't Mean a Thing (If it

32

Ain't' Got That Swing), the

first jazz composition to use

swing in the title.

Clarinetist Benny Goodman

begins his career with the

Fletcher Henderson Orchestra.

There is massive
worldwide

disc.

Japan invades
Manchuria.

33 1/3 rmp long-playing

19

Spain becomes a
Republic.

from her husband Louis

Armstrong and forms an all-

The Empire State

unemployment.

John Cockcroft works in

nuclear physics, and is

the first to split an atom

in a completely

controlled manner. This

work, for which he won
a Nobel award in 1951,

was also one of the first

experiments to verify

Einstein's E=mc^2.

Pianist Joe Zawinul,

trumpeter Donald Byrd, and
jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby

Japan forms a

Manchurian Republic

are all born.

and later attacks

Shanghai.

Radio City Music Hall

opens in New York.

Aviator Charles

Lindbergh's son is
kidnapped.

19

33

With the rise of the Nazi

party in Germany, Berlin

Chancellor of Germany,

radio station Funkstunde bans

followed by the creation

jazz broadcasts.

of the Dachau

concentration camp,

Pianist Art Tatum records his

political arrests, and the

first piano solo, Tiger Rag,

appropriation of Jewish

which is thought by many to

finances by the

be a duet.

Duke Ellington and his

orchestra begin their first tour

government.

intiates economic

Singer Bessie Smith makes

her last recordings.
Singer Billie Holiday makes

Franklin D. Roosevelt
becomes president,

of Europe.

Adolph Hitler becomes

recovery in the U.S.

Mahatma Ghandi is

her first recording.

imprisoned.

Prohibition ends in the

U.S.

The first photographs of

the Loch Ness monster
are published in

Britain's Daily Mail.

19

34

Fletcher Henderson's band

folds due to financial

and Clyde Barrow are

difficulties and Henderson

sells his arrangements to
Benny Goodman, who

shot dead.

The journal Down Beat: the

Chicago.

Adolf Hitler begins his

dictatorship in Germany.

Contemporary Music

Magazine is launched in

The Nazi coup fails in

Austria.

New York.

Italian troops invade

Albania.

performs with his band at

Billy Rose's Music Hall in

Outlaws Bonnie Parker

Blues singer Leadbelly

is released from prison

in Louisiana after

The Quintette du Hot Club

de France, featuring guitarist

writing a song to the

violinist Stephane Grappelli,

pardon.

governor asking for a

Django Reinhardt and

gives its first public

performance at the Ecole

The first cheeseburger is

served in Louisville,

Normale de Musique in Paris.

Kentucky.

Jimmie Lunceford's band

replaces Cab Calloways at

the Cotton Club in Harlem.

Clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey and

trombonist Tommy Dorsey
form the Dorsey Brothers
Orchestra.

Duke Ellington and Billie

Holiday appear in the film

Symphony in Black.

19

35

Pianist and bandleader Bennie

Moten dies.

members of Moten's band.

Vocalist Ella Fitzgerald

makes her first recordings.

Clarinetist Benny Goodman

records Fletcher Henderson's

arrangement of Jelly Roll

Morton's King Porter Stomp.

Italy invades Ethiopia.

The first paperback

Pianist Count Basie forms the

Barons of Rhythm with

Benny Goodman begins

recording with a racially

books are published.

The electric guitar is

invented.

integrated trio that includes

pianist Teddy Wilson and
drummer Gene Krupa.

Billie Holiday makes several

recordings with pianist Teddy

Wilson, including What a

Little Moonlight Can Do.

George Gershwin's three-act

opera Porgy and Bess opens

at the Alvin Theater in New

York.

19

Billie Holiday and Teddy

Wilson record I Cried for

36

You, which goes on to sell

15,000 copies.

Pianist Nat King Cole makes

his first recordings with the
Solid Swingers, a band led

by his brother, Eddie Cole, a

bassist.

Benny Goodman, adding

vibraphonist Lionel Hampton

to his trio, records

Moonglow, which starts a

series of popular quartet

Black American athlete

Jesse Owens wins four
gold medals at the

Olympic Games in

Berlin; Hitler leaves the

stadium and refuses to
be photographed with
Owens.

recordings.

Duke Ellington provides

music for the Marx Brothers

movie A Day at the Races.

19

37

Billie Holiday makes her

debut with Count Basie's

band.

Coleman Hawkins records

with Django Reinhardt and

saxophonist Benny Carter in

Paris.

Duke Ellington records

Caravan, by Juan Tizol.

Count Basie's band broadcasts

from the Savoy Ballroom in
Harlem.

Count Basie's band records

One O'clock Jump, which

becomes their signature tune.

Benny Goodman records

Sing, Sing, Sing.

George Gershwin dies of a

brain tumor.

The Hindenburg

explodes in New Jersey.

The Japanese capture

Peking and control
Shanghai.

Nat King Cole creates a new

ensemble with piano, bass,
and guitar.

Bessie Smith dies in a car

accident.

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie

makes his first recordings.

19

38

Benny Goodman's band hosts

a sold out concert at

Austria and

Carnegie Hall which features

a jazz history element and a

jam session with members of

Sudetenland.

time in Oklahoma.

Basie's bands. After the

Basie's band and Chick

Actor Orson Welles

broadcasts War of the

Worlds, a radio science-

Savoy Ballroom.

Martian invasion, and

Cornetist King Oliver dies

after years in poverty

working as a pool-room
janitor.

Webb's band have an

informal competition at the

Shopping carts are

introduced for the first

Duke Ellingtons and Count

Goodman concert, Count

Germany annexes

Benny Goodman's band

records Bach Goes to Town:

fiction drama about a

causes a nationwide
panic.

Prelude and Fugue in Swing,

which combines elements of
classical music and swing.

19

39

A new band led by

trombonist Glenn Miller gains

notoriety through regular
radio broadcasts.

out in Europe.

Slovakia, and Lithuania

Strange Fruit, with

lynchings which causes it to

and invades Poland.

Steel."

Fitzgerald takes over his

Glenn Miller records the

hugely successful In The

Mood.

Benny Goodman hires

guitarist Charlie Christian.

Lester Young records Lester

Leaps In with Count Basie.

Coleman Hawkins records

Hitler and Mussolini

agree to a "Pact of

Chick Webb dies and Ella

band.

Military conscription is
introduced in Britain.

be banned from several radio

stations.

Germany occupies
Bohemia, Moravia,

Billie Holiday records

controversial lyrics regarding

World War II breaks

The Spanish Civil War

ends.

Body and Soul, setting a new

standard for improvisational
sophistication on the
saxophone.

Artie Shaw retires.

Singer Ma Rainey dies.

Charlie Parker moves to New

York to pursue music.

Blue Note Records is

founded.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz

Historical Events

ar
19

40

Composer and bandleader Duke

Ellington hires saxophonist Ben

Webster and records Ko-Ko,

Concerto for Cootie, and

attacks Finland.

Trumpeter Cootie Williams

Winston Churchill
becomes Prime

leaves Ellington's band and is

Minister of Britain.

replaced by trumpeter and

violinist Ray Nance.

Germany invades
Norway and Denmark.

Cottontail.

The Soviet Union

Holland and Belgium

Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton's

big band records Flying Home.

Nat King Cole's trio records the

timely piece, Gone with the

Draft.

fall to Germany.
Italy declares war on
Britain and France.

Germany occupies
Paris.

Minton's Playhouse in New

York becomes a hot spot for

jazz, where musicians such as
pianist Thelonious Monk,

trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and

drummer Kenny Clarke are
featured.

The American Society of

Composer, Authors, and

Publishers (ASCAP) issues a

broadcast ban of ASCAP

works, resulting in the growth

of rival organization Broadcast
Music Incorporated (BMI).

19

41

Duke Ellington's band records

composer Billy Strayhorn's

Yugoslavia, Russia,

becomes the band's signature

North Africa.

Take the 'A' Train, which

tune.

Germany invades

Trumpeter Roy Eldridge joins

and sends troops to

The British army goes

to Libya and Ethiopia.

drummer Gene Krupa's

orchestra as featured soloist.

Clarinetist Sidney Bechet plays

Harbor, Hawaii.

five different instruments on

The Sheik of Araby and Blues

of Bechet, using some of the

earliest overdubbing techniques.

Saxophonist Charlie Parker

makes his first recordings with

Jay McShanns band and

begins participating in the

famous Minton's Playhouse jam
sessions where bebop is
created.

ASCAP's broadcasting boycott

ends.

Jelly Roll Morton dies.

Cootie Williams forms his own

orchestra, which eventually
employs musicians such as

Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, Charlie

Parker and Bud Powell.

Dizzy Gillespie is fired by Cab

Calloway after an altercation
involving a knife.

Japan bombs Pearl

The U.S. and Britain
declare war on Japan.

The U.S. declares war

on Germany and Italy.

19

42

Pianist Fats Waller appears at

Composer Leonard Bernstein

Carnegie Hall.

Germany.

performs in Boston as a jazz

pianist.

The American Federation of

Musicians bans its members
from participating in studio

recordings for record companies

that fail to pay royalties to
performers.

Trombonist Glenn Miller

dissolves his band and enlists
in the Air Force where he
forms a new band.

Eighteen-year-old singer Sarah

Vaughan wins a talent

competition at Harlem's Apollo

Theater.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy

Gillespie join pianist Earl Hines
band.

Eddie Condon's integrated band

appears on CBS television.

The U.S. bombs

Germany attacks

Stalingrad, U.S.S.R.

Japan wages

campaigns in East
Indies, Malaya, and
Burma.

Billboard magazine publishes

the first black record chart

under the title "Harlem Hit

Parade."

19

Duke Ellington's Orchestra

performs Black, Brown, and

43

Beige and New World

AComin' at Carnegie Hall.

and bassist Slam Stewart.

Tripoli.

Germany surrenders at
Stalingrad and

Pianist Art Tatum establishes a

trio with guitarist Tiny Grimes

Britain captures

Tunisia.

Italian leader Benito

Mussolini resigns

Glenn Miller publishes a text-

after the Allied

book for arranging music.

invasion of Sicily.

The Allies land on

mainland Italy.

Italy turns against

Germany.

The jitterbug dance

becomes popular in
the U.S.

19
44

Producer Norman Granz

initiates the series, "Jazz at the
Philharmonic" in Los Angeles.

The siege of
Leningrad ends.

Bud Powell urges bandleader

Cootie Williams to record

Normandy beaches on

Midnight. This is the first

Day."

Thelonious Monk's 'Round

known recording of this song,

which has since become the

what becomes "D-

is made on Adolph

composed by any jazz

Hitler.

musician.

Thelonious Monk makes his

border.

Gillespie leave Billy Eckstine's

Trumpeter Miles Davis arrives

in New York to study at

Juilliard School of Music but

promptly withdraws. He

complains of the classical /

European focus of the school

and decides he can learn more
from Parker, Gillespie and the
NY jazz scene.

Lester Young is drafted into

the army, is voted most popular
saxophonist by Down Beat

The U.S. Army

crosses the German

Charlie Parker and Dizzy

band.

Paris and Brussels are

liberated.

first recordings with the

Coleman Hawkins Quartet.

An unsuccessful
assassination attempt

most-recorded jazz standard

The Allies land on

The United Negro

College Fund is
established.

magazine, and appears in the

film Jammin' the Blues.

The American Federation of

Musicians lifts the recording
ban.

Glenn Miller disappears in an

Air Force flight from London
to Paris.

19

Dizzy Gillespie records Be-

Charlie Parker hires Miles

Bop.

45

fall to the U.S.S.R.

Davis to replace Dizzy

Gillespie at the Three Deuces

on 52nd Street, leading Davis

Charlie Parker records Now's

his corpse later hung

upside down for

trumpet and Max Roach on

public viewing.

drums.

in bebop.

Adolph Hitler
commits suicide.

Gillespie play in Los Angeles,

helping to establish an interest

Italian leader Benito

Mussolini is executed;

leader, with Miles Davis on

Charlie Parker and Dizzy

President Franklin
Roosevelt dies.

The Time, his first session as a

Cologne falls to the

Allies.

to quit school.

Warsaw and Budapest

Berlin is captured by
Russian troops.

Pianist Mary Lou Williams

gives the first performance of

her Zodiac Suite at New York's

Town Hall.

German forces
surrender.

The U.S. drops

atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

Japan surrenders.

Composer Anton
Webern is

accidentally shot to

death by U.S. military

policeman in Austria.

Composer Bela Bartok

dies.

The United Nations is

founded.

Ebony Magazine is
founded.

Harry S. Truman
becomes president.

19
46

Charlie Parker and Dizzy

Gillespie perform at "Jazz at

the Philharmonic" in Los
Angeles.

Hungary becomes a
republic.

President Juan Peron

Charlie Parker performs with

assumes power in

Miles Davis in Little Tokyo,

Argentina.

Los Angeles.

Miles Davis records

Ornithology and Night in

Tunisia with Charlie Parker,

republic.

War.

Eckstine's band.
Guitarist Django Reinhardt and

Mao Tse-Tung revives

the Chinese Civil

and then rejoins Billy

Italy becomes a

The bikini is
introduced.

violinist Stephane Grappelli are

reunited after their wartime
separation.

Dizzy Gillespie forms a big

band that includes pianist John
Lewis and drummer Kenny
Clarke.

Billie Holiday performs at

Town Hall in New York.

19

47

Louis Armstrong appears at

Carnegie Hall with Billie

Holiday.

Palestine.

Miles Davis continues to

series of recordings with

India and Pakistan

gain independence

perform with Charlie Parker at

the Three Deuces and makes a

Crisis occurs in

from Britain.

Communists assume

Parker.

Miles Davis makes his first

power in Hungary.

recordings as a leader, featuring

becomes the first

Charlie Parker, pianist John

African American in

Lewis, and drummer Max

Roach.

and Savoy labels.

major league baseball.

Charlie Parker records

numerous tracks for the Dial

created by President
Harry Truman.

Gillespie appear at a sold out

concert at Carnegie Hall, where

Committee begins

Be/Cubana Bop.

communism in

investigating

Hollywood, leading to

Dizzy Gillespie records

the blacklisting of ten

Manteca, bringing attention to

filmmakers.

Afro-Cuban jazz.

The House Un-

American Activities

Gillespie performs Cubana

The Central

Intelligence Agency is

Billie Holiday is convicted for

Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy

The sound barrier is

broken in the U.S.

possession of heroin.

Jackie Robinson

Thelonious Monk makes his

first recordings as a bandleader

for Blue Note. Several of his
original compositions are

featured, including In Walked

Bud, Monk's Mood and Well

You Needn't.

The first microwave

oven is introduced.

Drummer Art Blakey forms a

group that is later to become
the Jazz Messengers.

The Atlantic label is founded.

Louis Armstrong and Billie

Holiday appear in the film

New Orleans.

Chano Pozo introduces AfroCuban jazz in New York.

19

48

Dizzy Gillespie brings bebop to

Europe, performing at the Nice

assassinated in New

Jazz Festival in France along

with Louis Armstrong and
others.

Harlem.

Billie Holiday performs twice

at Carnegie Hall, both times
breaking box-office records.

discs.
Miles Davis forms a nonet

Communists gain
control of

Czechoslovakia.

Britain abandons
Palestine.

Israel is founded.

The U.S.S.R. isolates

Berlin.

Columbia Records introduces

the first long-playing vinyl

Delhi.

Gillespie's Cuban drummer,

Chano Pozo, is shot dead in

Mahatma Ghandi is

Writer George

Orwell's 1984 is
published.

which appears for two weeks at

the Royal Roost as a

establishes the

replacement for pianist Count

Basie's band.

South Africa
apartheid system.

Saxophonist Ben Webster

In the U.S., a judge

rules that it is illegal

rejoins Duke Ellington's band.

for homeowners to

refuse to sell to black

buyers.

19

49

Miles Davis and

composer/arranger Gil Evans

record Birth of the Cool.

is established.

The first Festival International

Gillespie, Sidney Bechet, Miles

established.

Pianist Lennie Tristano records

by Chairman Mao
Tse-Tung.

improvisation.

Norman Granz pairs Canadian

is established.

bassist Ray Brown at a "Jazz at

Carnegie Hall.

The East German

Democratic Republic

pianist Oscar Peterson with

the Philharmonic" concert at

The People's Republic

of China is founded

early examples of free jazz

The first passenger jet

aircraft makes a flight.

Davis, Kenny Clark, and

others.

The West German

Federal Republic is

de Jazz is held in Paris,

featuring Charlie Parker, Dizzy

The Republic of Erie

Civil War ends in

Greece.

Pianist Dave Brubeck records

in San Francisco with his piano
trio.

Vietnam achieves
independence from
France.

The club Birdland, named after

Charlie "Bird" Parker, opens on

Broadway.

Charlie Parker appears at

Carnegie Hall; the same year

he also records Charlie Parker

with Strings.

Stan Kenton performs

progressive jazz at Carnegie

Hall with a 25-piece orchestra.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz
ar

19

50

Pianist Oscar Peterson makes his

Historical Events

Orwell (1984)

first recordings.

dies.

Vocalist Sarah Vaughan records in

NY with trumpeter Miles Davis.
Saxophonist Charlie Parker and

pianist Thelonious Monk record

Writer George

The Soviet Union

declares its

nuclear weaponry.

together.

begins.

Thelonious Monk is arrested for

possession of drugs and banned

from performing in NY nightclubs

China invades
Tibet.

for six years.

The Korean War

Pianist Errol Garner composes

Misty.

Pianist Ahmad Jamal forms his

first piano trio.

Pianist Count Basie and trumpeter

Dizzy Gillespie both disband their

big bands due to financial
constraints.

19

51

The Miles Davis All Stars record

their first long-playing album for

Prestige.

troops take Seoul.

Salinger publishes

Desmond.

the Rye.

Pianist John Lewis forms the Milt

Jackson Quartet with vibraphonist
Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown,
and drummer Kenny Clarke.

Writer J.D.

Pianist Dave Brubeck forms his

The Catcher in

first quartet with saxophonist Paul

United Nations

New York police strip Thelonious

NATO is formed.

Monk of his cabaret card after he

refuses to testify against Bud

Powell for a narcotics arrest. The

loss of his card severely restricts

Thelonious' ability to find gainful

employment in New York (a

cabaret card was required to play

in any establishment that served
liquor).

19

52

Charlie Parker records sessions

with strings and Latin repertoire

Beckett's publishes

Waiting for

for Mercury.

Debut label.

Carnegie Hall presents a concert

devoted to California jazz featuring
trumpeter Chet Baker and

saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and

Paul Desmond.

Milt Jackson and John Lewis

rename their group the Modern

Jazz Quartet.

Godot.

Bassist Charles Mingus and

drummer Max Roach form the

Bandleader Fletcher Henderson

dies.

Writer Samuel

The Immigration
and Naturalization
Act is passed,

removing the last

racial and ethnic
barriers to

naturalization.

Duke Ellington's 25th Anniversary

is celebrated with two concerts at
Carnegie Hall featuring Billie

Holiday, saxophonist Stan Getz,

Charlie Parker, and Dizzy
Gillespie.

Gerry Mulligan's piano-less quartet

records My Funny Valentine.

19

Dave Brubeck's quartet records

Jazz at Oberlin during a highly

53

acclaimed college tour.

Stalin dies.

Benny Goodman's band goes on

tour with Louis Armstrong's All

Stars eventually leading to a fight

London.

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,

Max Roach, Bud Powell and

Charles Mingus travel to Toronto,

Canada to record Jazz at Massey

Hall.

The Korean War

ends.

replaces Chet Baker in Gerry

Mulligan's quartet.

Queen Elizabeth II
is coronated in

nervous breakdown.

Trombonist Bob Brookmeyer

Composer Serge
Prokofiev dies.

that ends with Goodman having a

Soviet leader Josef

Dwight
D.Eisenhower

becomes president.

19

Miles Davis records Walkin' and

Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz

54

hydrogen bomb on

Giants, the latter featuring

Thelonious Monk and Milt

Jackson.

Valentine and But Not For Me.

Bikini Atoll.

Ives dies.

Dave Brubeck appears on the cover

the hit song

records Jazz Goes To College.

Roll.

Shake, Rattle and

Drummer Shelly Manne records

West Coast Sound.

The first American jazz festival is

racial segregation
in public schools

Charlie Parker attempts suicide and

in unconstitutional.

is later admitted to Bellevue

Bassist Charles Mingus makes his

first recordings with the Jazz
Composers Workshop.

The film The Glenn Miller Story is

released, starring Jimmy Stewart

The U.S. Supreme

Court rules that

Island by George Wein.

Hospital.

The Vietnam War

begins.

organized in Newport, Rhode

Bill Haley and the

Comets introduce

of Time magazine, his quartet

American
composer Charles

The highly popular Chet Baker

Quartet records My Funny

The U.S. tests the

The first nuclear

power is produced
in the Soviet
Union.

and featuring Louis Armstrong and

others.

Drummer Max Roach forms a hard

bop quintet with trumpeter Clifford
Brown.

Drummer Art Blakey records his

first album under the name the

Jazz Messengers.

Thelonious Monk tours Europe,

where Mary Lou Williams first
introduces him to Baroness

Pannonica 'Nica' de Koenigswarter,

for whom Thelonious will later
dedicate the song Pannonica.

19

55

Charlie Parker dies. The coroner

who performs his autopsy

mistakenly estimates Parker's 34year-old body to be between 50

Einstein dies.

Miles Davis makes his first

Jonas Salk

perfects the polio

Coltrane, pianist Red Garland,

vaccine.

bassist Paul Chambers, and

drummer Philly Joe Jones.

Disneyland opens
in Los Angeles.

recordings with a new quintet

featuring saxophonist John

The Warsaw Pact

is agreed upon.

and 60 years of age.

Scientist Albert

Chuck Berry's

Maybelline

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers

record live in Greenwich Village,

New York, with a quintet featuring

pianist Horace Silver, trumpeter

becomes a hit.

Chicken goes on

Kenny Dorham, saxophonist Hank

sale in the U.S.

Mobley, and bassist Doug Watkins.

Kentucky Fried

Saxophonist Julian "Cannonball"

Adderley performs in New York
for the first time.

Pianist Lennie Tristano experiments

with overdubbing.

19

Bassist Charlie Mingus records

Pithecanthropus Erectus, breaking

56

Monroe marries

new ground in collective

playwright Arthur

improvisation.

Saxophonist Sonny Rollins records

Miller.

Saxophone Colossus.

Hungarian

Trumpeter Clifford Brown dies in a

Art Blakey records the album Hard

Bop.

Pianist Horace Silver leaves the

Jazz Messengers.

Duke Ellington's popularity is

The U.S.S.R
crushes the
rebellion.

car accident.

Actress Marilyn

Singer Elvis
Presley releases

Heartbreak Hotel.

resparked by an appearance at the

Newport Jazz Festival and by a
cover story in Time Magazine.

Miles Davis records Relaxin',

Cookin', and Steamin' and then

tours Europe.

Art Tatum dies.

NBC launches the Nat King Cole

Show.

Trumpeter Lee Morgan makes his

first recordings.

Thelonious Monk records Brilliant

Corners, with Sonny Rollins.

19

The Modern Jazz Quartet provides

the score for the film Sait-on

57

jamais, and tours Europe

performing the music.

Miles Davis and arranger Gil

Evans record Miles Ahead.

Toscanini dies.

pour l'echafaud and performs the

music in Paris with bassist Pierre

Michelot and drummer Kenny

Composer Jean
Sibelius dies.

The U.S.S.R.
launches the first

Miles Davis records the soundtrack

for the French film L'Ascenseur

Conductor Arturo

Sputnik satellite.

Governor Faubus

of Arkansas calls
out the National

Clarke.

Clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey dies.

Bassist Charles Mingus records

Tijuana Moods, using elements of

Latin music.

Leonard Bernstein's West Side

Story opens in Washington, D.C.

Saxophonist John Coltrane records

the album Blue Trane.

Louis Armstrong causes

controversy by speaking out against

President Dwight Eisenhower.

Billie Holiday performs Fine and

Mellow in a live TV broadcast.

The State Department sends Benny

Goodman on a tour to the Far
East.

Pianist and arranger Toshiko

Akiyoshi wins a poll in Down

Beat and receives an award from

the Berklee College of Music.

desegregation.

Thelonious Monk records with the

Jazz Messengers.

Guard to prevent

Brandies University commissions

Dr. Seuss'
children's book

The Cat in the

Hat becomes a
bestseller.

Third Stream works by Charles

Mingus and others.

19

58

Critic Barry Ulanov speaks out

against sexism in jazz in an article

Economic

in Down Beat.

Community is
established.

Sonny Rollins records Freedom

Suite with Oscar Pettiford and Max

Roach, using the liner notes to

The Fall of Icarus

is unveiled.

Dave Brubeck performs in

Denmark.

air travel.

Amsterdam.
Bandleader W.C. Handy dies.

The film St. Louis Blues depicts

Handy's life and features Nat King

Miles Davis records Milestones,

featuring early modal jazz.

Miles Davis records On Green

Dolphin Street with pianist Bill

Evans.

The hovercraft is
invented.

The first stereo

record is issued.

Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and blues

singer Mahalia Jackson.

The Boeing 707

jet revolutionizes

Oscar Peterson performs in

Painter Pablo

Picasso's mural

attack racism in America.

The European

The skateboard is
invented in
California.

Miles Davis and Gil Evans record

large-ensemble arrangements of

composer George Gershwin's opera

Porgy and Bess.

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers

record Moanin', a defining album

for hard bop.

Composer Antonio Carlos Jobim

launches the bossa nova craze,

recording Joao Gilberto's Chega de

Saudade.

Bill Evans records Everybody Digs

Bill Evans with the influential

modal track Peace Piece.

Art Blakey records Holiday for

Skin with three jazz drummers and

seven Latin percussionists and
tours Europe with the Jazz
Messengers.

19

59

Thelonious Monk appears at Town

Hall.

assumes power in
Cuba.

Miles Davis records Kind of Blue,

which pioneers modal jazz, and

will eventually become one of the

best selling jazz albums of all

Fidel Castro

Singer Buddy
Holly dies.

time.

Saxophonist Lester Young dies.

John Coltrane records Giant Steps.

Clarinetist Sidney Bechet dies.

Los Angeles-based saxophonist

Ornette Coleman records The

Shape of Jazz to Come, a free jazz

join the U.S.

Coleman's group performs free jazz

at the Five Spot in New York.

Duke Ellington composes the score

United Nations.

introduced in the
U.S.

Paul Desmond's hit Take Five.

the dark side of

the moon.

drummer Ed Thigpen.

The first Xerox

machines are
introduced.

Pianist Oscar Peterson forms a trio

with bassist Ray Brown and

Earth receives its

first pictures of

Dave Brubeck and his quartet

record Time Out, which includes

The first cassette

tapes are

for the film Anatomy of a Murder.

China is barred
from joining the

possession of drugs and dies soon

Panama is invaded
by Cuban forces.

Billie Holiday is arrested for

after.

Architect Frank
Lloyd Wright dies.

album.

Hawaii and Alaska

Two monkeys are

sent into space by
NASA and return
safely.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz
ar

19

Trumpeter Miles Davis records

Historical Events

Sketches of Spain, which uses

60

is killed in a car

Flamenco music, and then tours

Europe.

crash.

The Modern Jazz Quartet

Saxophonist John Coltrane and

trumpeter Don Cherry

collaborate on the album Avant-

Garde, influenced by saxophonist

Ornette Coleman.

John Coltrane records My

Favorite Things, as well as

Giant Steps.

the U.S.

Crowd disturbances disrupt the

7th Newport Jazz Festival.

Drummer Max Roach records

We Insist!: Freedom Now Suite.

The album has an explicit civil
rights message.

John F. Kennedy is
elected president of

records an album with orchestral

accompaniment.

Writer Albert Camus

The first laser beam

is demonstrated.

African-American

students stage sit-ins

in North Carolina.

Pianist Cecil Taylor and

saxophonist Archie Shepp record

The World of Cecil Taylor.

Bassist Charles Mingus and

saxophonist/clarinetist Eric

Dolphy record What Love and

Fables of Faubus, the latter

written about the Arkansas
governor who opposed
desegregation.

Drummer Shelly Manne opens

the club "Shelly's Manne-Hole"
in Los Angeles.

Ornette Coleman records Free

Jazz.

19

61

Drummer Art Blakey's Jazz

Messengers tour Japan.

Pianist Thelonious Monk tours

Writer Ernest

Hemingway dies.

The Berlin Wall is

completed.

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie

appears at Carnegie Hall.

first man in space.

Miles Davis and arranger Gil

Evans appear at Carnegie Hall.

Yuri Gagarin is the

Miles Davis records live at San

Francisco's Black Hawk.

Russian cosmonaut

The birth-control pill

is introduced.

Europe.

Heller's novel Catch-

Ornette Coleman's avant-garde

22 is published.

quartet disbands.

Down Beat magazine prints

leader Fidel Castro

Coleman's music and the current

in the Bay of Pigs

(free jazz) music of John

invasion.

Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.

The Newport Jazz Festival

John F. Kennedy is
inaugerated,

relocates to New York after

becoming the first

rioting in its original location.

Cuban exiles attempt

to overthrow Cuban

several articles attacking Ornette

Writer Joseph

Catholic President.

Saxophonist Oliver Nelson

records Blues and the Abstract

Truth.

19

62

Saxophonist Stan Getz and

guitarist Charlie Byrd record

Desafinado, which sparks

renewed interest in bossa nova.

Pianist Herbie Hancock records

his first album as a leader,

Monroe dies.

Trumpeter Cootie Williams

rejoins Duke Ellington's

band. Ellington records an album

Writer William
Faulkner dies.

The Cuban Missile

Crisis occurs.

Takin' Off.

Actress Marilyn

Lincoln Center for

the Performing Arts

opens in New York

with Charles Mingus and

drummer Max Roach, and an
album with John Coltrane.

City.

a sensation with their

first single Love Me

Carnegie Hall hosts a bossa

Do.

nova concert.

The Beatles become

Guitarist Joe Pass makes his first

album.

Cecil Taylor records live in

Copenhagen.

19

Charles Mingus records The

Black Saint and The Sinner

63

Martin Luther King

Lady, a landmark in extended

Jr. addresses a rally

structure and free improvisation.

Bill Evans records

in Washington, D.C.

Conversations with Myself,

Wonder releases his

first album.

Miles Davis performs and

records with his new group with

Herbie Hancock, saxophonist

Tony Williams.

Count Basie tours Japan.

Trumpeter Lee Morgan records

U.S. President John

F. Kennedy is

George Coleman, bassist Ron

Carter, and 17-year-old drummer

Twelve-year-old
singer Stevie

which uses overdubbing.

Civil rights leader

assassinated.

Lyndon B. Johnson

becomes president of
U.S.

Four black girls are

the best-selling The Sidewinder.

killed in an Alabama
church bombing.

Astrud Gilberto's Girl from

Ipanema becomes a huge hit

featuring Stan Getz.

19

The Miles Davis Quintet records

the classic live album My

64

political activist

Funny Valentine, and soon after

Nelson Mandela

saxophonist Wayne Shorter

begins his life

replaces George Coleman.

Clarinetist and flutist Eric

sentence.

Dolphy records Out To Lunch

with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard

and Tony Williams.

Strangelove.

John Coltrane records A Love

Night and tour the

U.S. for the first
time.

Blind multi-instrumentalist

Newport in Europe festival.

Avant-garde tenor saxophonist

Albert Ayler records the album

Ghosts.

The Beatles appear

in A Hard Day's

of thousands of copies.

Roland Kirk performs at the

Filmmaker Stanley

Kubrick releases Dr.

Supreme, which sells hundreds

Composer Cole
Porter dies.

Pianist Horace Silver records

Song for My Father.

South African

The U.S. Civil

Rights Bill is passed.

France and Britain

agree to construct a
Channel Tunnel

connecting the two

countries.

The soldier doll G.I.

Joe is introduced.

19

65

Miles Davis records ESP with

Pianist Nat King Cole dies of

his new quintet.

dies.

cancer.

Vietnam.

with the other members of Miles

Davis' group plus trumpeter
Freddie Hubbard.

rehearsal orchestra that is to last

Angeles race riots.

by Ornette Coleman.

The film The Sound

of Music receives an
Oscar for Best

John Coltrane records Ascension,

a free jazz experiment influenced

Thirty-four people
are killed in Los

for years.

The first spacewalk

occurs.

Trumpeter Thad Jones and

drummer Mel Lewis form a

The U.S. intensifies

its involvement in

Herbie Hancock records Maiden

Voyage, a classic modal tune,

Writer T.S. Eliot

Picture.

Political activist
Malcolm X is
assassinated.

19

Duke Ellington receives the

Race riots break out

66

President's Gold Medal of

in New York,

Honor.

Cleveland, and
Chicago.

Thad Jones and Mel Lewis

debut with their big band at the

Cecil Taylor records Unit

Village Vanguard in New York.

occurs in China.

Structures, which is an

experimental album that

resembles contemporary classical

Barbara Jordan

becomes the first

African American

The Miles Davis Quintet records

woman to win a seat

Miles Smiles, a historic work

that explores structural freedom.

Star Trek appears on

TV.

music.

Cultural Revolution

in the Texas Senate.

Rise of the "Black

Power" movement;
Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale form

the Black Panthers

Party.

19

67

John Coltrane makes his last

recordings and dies soon after of

transplant operation

liver disease.

The Miles Davis Quintet records

Sorcerer and Nefertiti, featuring

mostly compositions by Wayne
Shorter.

The first heartis performed.

The Six-Day War

occurs in the Middle
East.

The Dave Brubeck Quarter

disbands.

Bandleader Paul Whiteman dies.

The first Montreux Jazz Festival

crew is killed in a
launchpad fire.

Down Beat announces it will

cover rock music as well as

top-10 hits.

President Lyndon
Johnson orders a

jazz.

Singer Aretha

Franklin has four

is held in Switzerland.

The Apollo space

commission to report

Trumpeter Lester Bowie forms

on rising racial

the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an

violence.

important avant-garde jazz

group.

Herbie Hancock introduces

electric piano to popular jazz in
Miles Davis' group.

19

68

Vibraphonist Gary Burton

appears at Carnegie Hall.

Herbie Hancock records the

Jr. is assassinated.

album Speak Like a Child with

trumpeter Thad Jones and bassist

Ron Carter.

Herbie Hancock quits the Miles

Davis Quartet.

Martin Luther King

Students protest in
Paris.

The U.S.S.R. invades

Czechoslovakia.

Presidential
candidate Robert

Guitarist Wes Montgomery,

Kennedy is

whose album A Day in the Life

is the best selling jazz album of
the year, dies.

band.

the U.S.

charts with two

Anthony Braxton, a member of

Advancement of Creative

albums.

Filmmaker Stanley

Kubrick's 2001: A

Musicians, records For Alto

Space Odyssey is

Saxophone and Three

released.

Compositions of New Jazz.

Rock guitarist Jimi

Hendrix soars up the

Avant-garde saxophonist

the Chicago Association for the

Massive antiwar
protests are staged in

Pianist Chick Corea and bassist

Dave Holland join Miles Davis'

assassinated.

Composer Carla Bley's Jazz

Composers Orchestra

Association forms the New

Music Distribution Service to
disseminate its recordings.

19

Composer Gunther Schuller

completes his book Early Jazz,

69

becomes the first

the first critical study of the

man to land on the

origins of the music.

Bassist Paul Chambers dies from

tuberculosis.

Neil Armstrong

moon.

Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi seizes power

Miles Davis records In a Silent

in Libya.

Way. Later in the year, Davis

records Bitches Brew, the first

Premier of Israel.

important fusion album.

Tony Williams forms the group

in New York.

McLaughlin and organist Larry

Young.

Writer Mario Puzo's

The Godfather is

The Art Ensemble of Chicago

published.

records in Paris.

The Woodstock pop

music festival is held

Lifetime with guitarist John

Golda Meir becomes

Coleman Hawkins dies of

The lottery system is

established for the

pneumonia.

U.S. draft.

Richard M. Nixon
becomes president.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz

Historical Events

ar
19

Pianist Chick Corea records

The Song of Singing, a

70

successful experiment with

atonal jazz.

Chick Corea and bassist

Artist Mark Rothko

dies.

The U.S. army enters

Cambodia.

Dave Holland quit Miles

Davis' band and form the

dies from a drug

group Circle.

Pianist Keith Jarrett joins

overdose.

Miles Davis' group on

electric organ.

Berlin.

Student demonstrators

are killed at Kent State

Saxophonist Jan Garbarek

Pianist Joshua Rifkin records

The voting age is

lowered to 18.

University and Jackson

visits the U.S.

Singer Janis Joplin dies

from a drug overdose.

Bassist Charles Mingus and

bandleader Sun Ra record in

Guitarist Jimi Hendrix

State College.

U.S. Supreme Court

case Roe vs. Wade

ragtime composer Scott

Joplin's rags.

defends women's right

to abortion.

The World Trade Center

in New York

City becomes the tallest

building in the world.

19
71

Keyboardist Joe Zawinul's

and saxophonist Wayne

Shorter's new fusion group,

Weather Report, records in

Composer Igor
Stravinsky dies.

The U.S. bombs North

Vietnam.

New York.

Filmmaker Stanley

Kubrick's A Clockwork

Guitarist John McLaughlin's

Orange is banned in the

newly formed Mahavishnu

Orchestra records in New
York.

UK.

Pianist Thelonious Monk

is reported on the front

records in London.

Louis Armstrong's death

pages of newspapers all
over the world.

Sun Ra's Arkestra tours

Egypt.

Bassist Charles Mingus

publishes his autobiography,

Beneath The Underdog.

Trumpeter Louis Armstrong

dies.

19

Weather Report records I

Sing the Body Electric.

72

people in Northern
Ireland.

Keyboardist Chick Corea

records with his newly

formed fusion group Return

Bassist Charles Mingus

Community.

performs at the Philharmonic

Hard bop trumpeter Lee

Morgan is shot dead by his

The SALT agreement

limits U.S. and U.S.S.R.

Hall in New York.

The UK joins the

European Economic

to Forever.

British troops kill 13

nuclear weapons.

Eleven Israelis are

murdered by Arab

former mistress in New

terrorists in Munich at

York.

the Olympics.

Pianist Thelonious Monk

goes into retirement.

bombing of North
Vietnam.

Free jazz saxophonist Ornette

Coleman's Skies of America

is performed by the London

The Mahavishnu Orchestra

President Richard Nixon

visits Communist China

Symphony Orchestra.

The U.S. makes its final

and the U.S.S.R.

records Birds of Fire and

Reggae star Bob Marley

is signed to Island

Love Devotion Surrender.

Records and brings

Jamaican music and
culture into the
mainstream.

The first Polaroid

cameras go on sale.

19

73

Keyboardist Herbie Hancock

records the jazz-rock (fusion)
album Headhunters in San

The Vietnam War ends.

Painter Pablo Picasso

dies.

Francisco, the album's sales

breaking all records in jazz.

occurs.

The movie The Sting

features Scott Joplin's music,

The Watergate Scandal

The mountain bike is

creating a renewed interest in

invented in California.

ragtime.

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie

arranges a comeback

appearance for trumpeter

Chet Baker.

Guitarist John McLaughlin

disbands the first Mahavishnu
Orchestra.

19

74

Trumpeter Thad Jones and

drummer Mel Lewis take

their big band to Tokyo.

Cyprus.

The Akiyoshi-Tabackin big

William Randolph

Hearst, is kidnapped.

The Modern Jazz Quartet

gives a farewell performance

at New York's Lincoln

shock and laughs) hits

college campuses and

Pianist Oscar Peterson visits

other public places.

the Soviet Union.

Saxophonist Grover

Duke Ellington dies from

President Richard Nixon

resigns.

Washington Jr. records his

crossover hit Mr. Magic.

The "streaking" craze

(running in the nude for

Center.

Patty Hearst, daughter

of newspaper mogul

band records in Los Angeles.

Turkish forces invade

Gerald Ford becomes

president.

lung cancer and pneumonia.

19

75

Saxophonist Michael Brecker

and his brother, trumpeter

Randy, record together.

control of Cambodia.

Return to Forever records

No Mystery.

The Khmer Rouge takes

North Vietnam invades
South Vietnam.

Filmmaker Steven

Spielberg's Jaws is

Miles Davis performs in

Japan, New York, and at the

released.

Newport Festival before

going into retirement.

Guitarist Pat Metheny

records his first album,

Bright Sized Life, with

electric bassist Jaco
Pastorius.

Pianist Bill Evans records the

album Alone.

Fourteen-year-old trumpet
virtuoso Wynton Marsalis
performs with the New

Orleans Symphony Orchestra.

19
76

Pianist Dave Brubeck's

quartet reunites for an

The Viking space probe

transmits pictures from

anniversary concert.

Pianist Thelonious Monk

Mars.

Roots is published.

performs for the last time at

the Newport Jazz Festival.

Pianist Herbie Hancock

independence with 4th

his group, VSOP.

Guitarist John McLaughlin

of July festivities.

disbands the second

Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Weather Report, now with

electric bass virtuoso Jaco

Prize for his

selling albums Black Market

American music.

Pianist Errol Garner dies.

Alto saxophonist Paul

Desmond dies.

contributions to

Filmmaker George

Lucas' Star Wars is

Drummer Kenny Clarke

Multi-instrumentalist Roland

Singer Elvis Presley

dies.

released.

returns to the U.S.

The U.S. space shuttle

makes a test flight.

The World Saxophone

Quartet is founded.

Scott Joplin is awarded

a posthumous Pulitzer

and Heavy Weather.

77

Punk rock becomes

popular in Britain.

Pastorius, records its best

19

The U.S. celebrates the

bicentennial of its

records live at Newport with

Writer Alex Haley's

Jimmy Carter becomes

Kirk dies.

president.

Pop jazz group Spyro Gyra

records its first album.

19

78

President Jimmy Carter hosts

a jazz concert at the White

House in honor of bassist
and composer Charles

Afghanistan.

The Cuban band, Irakere,

a hug hit worldwide.

in Europe and the U.S.

Pianist Chick Corea records

Television reporter Max

Robinson is the first

with vibraphonist Gary

African American to

Burton.

The first video arcade

game Space Invaders is

promotes Afro-Cuban music

The hit film musical

Grease is released.

Mingus.

Revolution occurs in

anchor network news.

Keyboardist Bob James

composes a popular fusion

theme for the TV series

Taxi.

The Pat Metheny Group is

formed.

19
79

Bassist Charles Mingus dies

in Mexico.

Margaret Thatcher
becomes Britain's first

Sue Mingus forms the

Mingus Dynasty in honor of
her late husband.

female prime minister.

Coppola's movie

Apocalypse Now is

Drummer Jack DeJohnette

collaborates with saxophonist

David Murray on Special

Edition.

Pianist Keith Jarrett and

saxophonist Jan Garbarek

released.

Nuclear disaster occurs

at Three Mile Island.

The first Sony

Walkman is introduced.

record live.

Filmmaker Francis Ford

Bandleader Stan Kenton dies

in Los Angeles.

Dizzy Gillespie publishes his

book, To Be or Not To Bop.

Pianist Bill Evans makes his

final recordings.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz

Historical Events

ar
19
80

Saxophonist Grover
Washington, Jr., records his
Grammy Award winning

Former Beatle John

Lennon is murdered in
New York City.

album, Winelight, that

includes the hit song Just the

Two of Us.

come to the U.S.

Trumpeter Miles Davis

comes out of retirement and

records the funk and rock-

10,000 Cuban refugees

Mt. St. Helen's volcano
erupts.

The Iranian hostage

crisis begins.

influenced The Man with the

Horn.

Eighteen-year-old trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis records at

Montreux with Art Blakey's

Jazz Messengers.

Pianist Bill Evans dies in

New York.

19

81

Pianist Mary Lou Williams

dies.

first successful space

shuttle mission.

Miles Davis makes his first

live performance since

retirement at Avery Fisher

Hall in New York.

featuring the Grammy-

Prince Charles marries

Lady Diana Spencer.

President Anwar Sadat

of Egypt is assassinated.

winning song All I Need is

You, composed by bassist

Race riots occur in

Brixton, London.

Saxophonist David Sanborn

records the album Voyeur,

The U.S. completes its

Poland declares martial

Marcus Miller.

law to quash trade

union "solidarity."

Saxophonist Branford and

trumpeter Wynton Marsalis

joins Art Blakey's Jazz

Former actor Ronald

Reagan becomes

Messengers.

president.

Assassination attempts
are made on President

Reagan and Pope John

Paul II.

Sandra Day O'Connor

becomes the first female

U.S. Supreme Court
Justice.

The Iranian hostage

crises ends.

The AIDS epidemic

begins.

19

82

Pianist Thelonious Monk

dies.

Saxophonist Sonny Stitt dies.

Bassist Jaco Pastorius leaves

Falkland Islands. British

forces reclaim the

Falklands forcing the

surrender of Argentine

Weather Report.

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis

Argentina invades the

troops.

Filmmaker Richard

and vocalist Bobby McFerrin

Attenborough receives

are featured at the Kool Jazz

eight Academy Awards

for the film Ghandi.

Festival.

Filmmaker Steven

Spielberg receives three

Academy Awards for

E.T.

The Message is one of

the earliest rap hits.

19

83

Pianist Keith Jarrett make his

first recordings of standards

with drummer Jack

DeJohnette and bassist Gary

Williams dies.

Pianist Eubie Blake dies.

Pianist Earl Hines dies.

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis

Award in the same year.

commercial success.

The School Prayer

Amendment is rejected
by the U.S. Supreme

synthesized dance hit, Rockit,

pop charts.

The Cabbage Patch

dolls become a

Keyboardist Herbie Hancock's

reaches number one in the

The first compact discs

are marketed.

makes history by winning a

jazz and classical Grammy

The U.S. invades

Granada.

Peacock.

Writer Tennessee

Court.

Harold Washington

becomes the first Black

Pianist Scott Joplin appears

on a U.S. postage stamp.

mayor of Chicago.

Vanessa Williams

becomes the first Black

Miss America.

19

84

Bandleader and keyboardist

Sun Ra performs in Athens

is granted in South

and is voted into the Down

Beat Hall of Fame.

Africa.

Pianist Count Basie dies in

Drummer Shelly Manne dies.

Miles Davis records You're

assassinated.

term as President.

signing a seven figure deal

85

Drummer Kenny Clarke dies.

Miles Davis records Aura in

Macintosh.

concert "Live Aid"

reaches a global

Trumpeter Thad Jones takes

over the Count Basie band.

Blue Note is relaunched with

Singer and promoter

Bob Geldof's charity

Denmark.

Apple Computers
launches the first

with Warner Bros.

19

Ronald Reagan is

elected to his second

Under Arrest before leaving

Columbia Records and

Indian Prime Minister

Indira Ghandi is

Hollywood.

The first black franchise

audience.

The sunken cruise ship

The Titanic is located.

a concert at Town Hall with

drummer Art Blakey, bassist
Ron Carter, pianist Herbie

Cola is introduced but

Hancock, trumpeter Freddie

Coca-Cola goes back to

Hubbard, and others.

the original recipe due

Drummer Philly Joe Jones

to poor sales.

dies.

A new, sweeter Coca-

Trumpeter Cootie Williams

dies.

Pianist Chick Corea captures

a new audience with his

Elektrik Band with electric

bassist John Patitucci and
drummer Dave Weckl.

Branford Marsalis tours with

pop artist Sting.

19

Wynton Marsalis records

Standard Time, establishing

86

Challenger explodes on

his reputation as a
traditionalist.

launch.

Jazz-pop musician Kenny G

has a hit with Songbird.

Jazz education and outreach

organization Thelonious

The U.S. space shuttle

The U.S. bombs Libya

from a British air base.

Filmmaker Oliver

Stone's Platoon receives

an Academy Award.

Monk Institute of Jazz

established in memory of the

jazz legend.

The Iran-Contra Scandal

becomes public.

The film Round Midnight is

The U.S. Supreme

Court upholds

released, starring saxophonist

affirmative-action hiring

Dexter Gordon as a character

quotas.

loosely based on pianist Bud

Powell; Herbie Hancock wins

Academy Award for original
score.

Jazz legend Benny Goodman

dies.

19

87

Electric bassist Jaco Pastorius

dies, beat up by a bouncer in

a South Florida bar.

quartet.

The stock market

crashes.

Ex-Nazi deputy Rudolf

Hess commits suicide in

Saxophonist Michael Brecker

releases his first solo album.

dies.

Free jazz saxophonist Ornette

Coleman reunites his original

Artist Andy Warhol

a Berlin prison.

President Ronald

A big band is formed to

Reagan and Soviet

Gillespie's seventieth

Gorbachev sign the first

celebrate trumpeter Dizzy

birthday.

leader Mikhail

treaty to reduce nuclear

Major record labels begin

massive reissues of classic
jazz recordings on CD,

arms.

Houston becomes the

reflecting the renewed interest

first female artist to

in bebop and hard bop.

Pop vocalist Whitney

have an album go

Classical Jazz, Lincoln

straight to number one

Center's first concert series

on the Billboard charts.

devoted exclusively to jazz,

begins in Alice Tully Hall.

19

88

Arranger Gil Evans dies in

Mexico.

over Lockerbie,
Scotland.

Trumpeter Chet Baker dies in

mysterious circumstances in

Amsterdam.

resign after admitting to

an affair.

nominated for a Grammy for

composer J.S. Bach.

American TV evangelist
Jim Bakker is forced to

Pianist Keith Jarrett is

his recording of music by

A jumbo jet explodes

The antidepressant drug

Prozac is launched.

Actor Clint Eastwood directs

Bird, a biographical

dramatization of the life of

Charlie Parker.

19

Trumpeter Roy Eldridge dies.

Artist Salvador Dali

89

Trumpeter Woody Shaw dies.

Nineteen-year-old trumpeter

dies.

Roy Hargrove records

Diamond in the Rough.

opened.

John Zorn records the postTrumpeter and producer

Beijing, China.

Quincy Jones records Back

Iran for writing his

novel The Satanic

variety of genres from bop to

Verses.

rap.

Miles Davis records

Writer Salman Rushdie

is sentenced to death in

on the Block with a wide

Protesters are massacred

at Tiananmen Square in

modern album Naked City.

The Berlin Wall is

Amandla.

The U.S. invades

Panama.

The Exxon Valdez oil

spill occurs.

George H. Bush

becomes president.

Timeline
Ye Developments in Jazz
ar

19
90

Drummer Mel Lewis dies.

Historical Events

The Gulf War

Vocalist Sarah Vaughan dies.

Saxophonist Dexter Gordon dies.

Drummer Art Blakey dies.

Trumpeter Miles Davis publishes

begins.

collapses.

Miles: The Autobiography (co-

Saxophonist Stan Getz dies.

Miles Davis appears at the

authored by Quincy Troupe).

91

dies.

Miles Davis dies in California.

Upon winning Thelonious Monk

work with arranger Gil Evans.

Redman signs with Warner Bros.

Records.

New York's Lincoln Center

establishes jazz division Jazz at

Lincoln Center; Wynton Marsails

named Artistic Director.

Children's book
writer Dr. Seuss

Quincy Jones, performing early

Saxophone Competition, Joshua

Composer Leonard
Bernstein dies.

Montreux Jazz Festival with

Institute International Jazz

The Soviet Union

falls.

his controversial autobiography

19

The Warsaw Pact

The Tailhook

scandal occurs.
The Gulf War ends.

19

Miles Davis' final album, Doo-

Bop, which features rap, is

92

released.

out in Los Angeles.

McMillan publishes

Tonight Show with Jay Leno,

Waiting to Exhale.

with a group that includes pianist

Kenny Kirkland, bassist Bob

the hit novel

African American

Hip hop group US3 has a hit

with a song that samples Herbie

Hancock's Cantaloupe Island.

Mae Jemison
becomes the first

Hurst, and drummer Jeff Watts.

Author Terry

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis

becomes the bandleader on The

Race riots break

woman astronaut.

Carol MoseleyBraun becomes the

Pianist Herbie Hancock,

first African

saxophonist Wayne Shorter,

American woman

Williams and trumpeter Wallace

Senate.

bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony

elected to the U.S.

Roney tour in a tribute to Miles

Davis.

19
93

Bandleader Sun Ra dies.

Saxophonist Joe Henderson

receives critical acclaim for his
Miles Davis tribute album So

Near, So Far (Musings for

Miles).

Pianist Chick Corea's Elektrik

South African

Prime Minister
F.W. de Klerk and
political activist

Nelson Mandela

win Nobel Peace

Prize.

Band is refused permission to

perform in Germany because of

delivers a poem for

controversial Church of

President Clinton.

Corea' s membership in the

Scientology.

the inauguration of

Writer Toni

Saxophonist Jan Garbarek has

Morrison wins the

album Officium.

literature.

commercial success with his

Poet Maya Angelou

Saxophonist Joshua Redman

Nobel Prize for

records two albums and

Bill Clinton
becomes president.

establishes himself as the top star

in the young lion jazz scene.

Dizzie Gillespie dies of pancreatic

cancer.

19
94

Guitarist Joe Pass dies.

Trumpeter Red Rodney dies.

A Tribute to Miles, featuring the

Miles Davis tribute band, wins a

South Africa has its

first multi-racial
election.

Paula Jones files a

suit for sexual

Grammy Award.

harassment against
President Bill
Clinton.

19

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove ousts

Former football star

95

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in

O.J. Simpson is on

the Down Beat critic polls.

Film director Robert Altman's

trial for murder.

film, Kansas City, is released,

in former

featuring a reenactment of a

1930's jam session with pianist

Geri Allen, saxophonist Joshua

Chechnya.

bombed.

McBride, saxophonist James

Nation of Islam
leader Louis

The Impulse record label is

Farrakhan organizes

revived after 21 years.

Oklahoma City

Federal building is

Redman, bassist Christian

Carter, and others.

Civil unrest occurs

the Million Man

Drummer Tony Williams dies.

March in

Washington, D.C.

19

Kenny Garrett releases Pursuance:

The Music of John Coltrane, with

96

Pat Metheny.

Thelonious Monk Institute

produces "A Celebration of

America's Music" on ABC TV,

the first network television special
devoted to jazz in over 25 years.

Jazz at Lincoln Center becomes

full constituent of Lincoln Center,

equal in stature with the ten other

A bomb is set off

at the Olympic

games in Atlanta.

organizations on campus including

the NY Philharmonic,

Metropolitan Opera, and NYC

Ballet.

19

97

Wayne Shorter wins a Grammy

Award for his electric jazz album

occurs among

High Life.

religious cult

Heaven's Gate

Saxophonist Joshua Redman,

members in

bassist Christian McBride, and

California.

drummer Brian Blade tour as a

trio.

Group suicide

Former Princess of
Wales Lady Diana

A $27 million jazz museum

dies in a car

opens in Kansas City.

accident.

The first successful

clone (Dolly, a
sheep) occurs.

19

98

Guitarist Pat Metheny and bassist

Charlie Haden win Grammy

Awards for their duet album

Beyond the Missouri Sky.

Guitarist Kevin Eubanks replaces

Branford Marsalis as the

bandleader on The Tonight Show

President Clinton is
impeached.

Google Internet
search engine
established.

with Jay Leno.

19
99

Trumpeter Art Farmer dies.

Vibraphonist Milt Jackson dies.

Singer Joe Williams dies.

Trumpeter Lester Bowie dies.

President Clinton is
acquitted on

impeachment
charges after a
Senate trial.

Fifteen high school

students are shot
dead by two
students at

Columbine High

School in Colorado.

Timeline
Yea Developments in Jazz
r

20

00

Trumpeter Dave Douglas

and vocalist Diana Krall
rise in popularity.

Bassist Dave Holland tours

with a group featuring

saxophonist Chris Potter.

Historical Events

Violence erupts in Israel.

The U.S. Presidential

election results are

delayed due to confusion

about votes in Florida.

New jazz-related genre,

"jam bands," rises in
popularity.

20

19-hour, 10-part

documentary Jazz directed

01

by Ken Burns is presented

on PBS and released on

president.

Pentagon in Washington,

Famed Juilliard School

D.C. are rammed by

in jazz studies.

worst terror attack on

establishes degree program

hijacked jetliners in the

U.S. soil; over 3,000

Dave Brubeck's alma

killed.

mater, the University of

the Pacific, launches the

Brubeck Institute.

Taliban government

Thelonious Monk Jr.

refuses to hand over

terrorist mastermind

record label Thelonious

Osama bin Laden; Taliban

Records.

regime topples but bin

Jazz greats Joe Henderson,

John Lewis, J.J. Johnson,

Billy Higgins, and Tommy

U.S. and Britain attack

targets in Afghanistan as

establishes independent

The World Trade Center

in New York and the

DVD.

George W. Bush becomes

Laden remains at large.

Apple Computer

introduces the iPod.

Flanagan die.

XM satellite radio begins

service.

20

02

Wayne Shorter tours and

records with his new

Iran, Iraq, and North

acoustic quartet.

Dave Holland forms

Korea as "axis of evil."

critically acclaimed big

Los Angeles Philharmonic

established.

establishes Creative Chair

for Jazz; vocalist Dianne
Reeves accepts first
appointment.

begins service.

The word "google"

becomes a verb (to google
means to perform a Web
search); the American

Bechet, Louis Armstong,

the verb as the "most

and Ella Fitzgerald are

placed on French postage

stamps.

Tom Lord publishes

comprehensive jazz

discography containing
136,263 recordings

(15,000 pages in 26
volumes).

Sirius satellite radio

The faces of jazz icons

Duke Ellington, Sidney

U.S. Homeland Security

cabinet department

band.

President Bush lables

Several major record lables

Dialect Society chooses

useful word of 2002."

shut down or minimize

their jazz divisions,

effecting a rise in the

number of independent
jazz labels.

Jazz legends Lionel

Hampton, Peggy Lee, Ray

Brown, and Rosemary
Clooney die.

20

03

Blue Note recording artist

Norah Jones wins 8

explodes upon reentry

Grammy Awards including

into Earth's atmosphere,

Album of the Year.

killing all seven

astronauts on board.

Louis Armstrong's Queens,

NY home opens as a jazz

museum, educational

resource, and historical

landmark.

New development in jazz,

"jazztronica" (combining

Former President of Iraq

Saddam Hussein captured

in Tikrit by U.S. 4th
Infantry Division.

studio electronics) arrives

Resurgence of interest in

President Bush signs

$350 billion tax-cut bill.

fusion era groove, and

U.S. and Britain wage

war against Iraq.

improvisation, 1980's

on the scene.

Space shuttle Columbia

Apple Computer launches

digital media player

application and online

music service iTunes.

jazz vocals and pre-rock

standards.

Jazz legend Benny Carter

the common standard at

dies.

20

04

Jazz at Lincoln Center

video stores.

opens Frederick P. Rose

Hall, the first-ever

Iraq; U.S. maintains

and broadcast facility

troops there to fight

approximately 135,000

devoted exclusively to
jazz.

growing insurgency.

As major record lables

continue to minify or

reach the surface of the

divisions, more and more

detailed data and images

release their own CDs on

Earth.

red planet and send

jazz artists record and

the Internet via such
organizations as
ArtistShare.

Jam band Bad Plus rises in

popularity.

Two Mars exploration

robotic rovers successfully

eliminate their jazz

Sovereignty returned to an
interim government in

performance, education,

DVDs replace VCRs as

NEA increases number of

Jazz Masters honored each

year from 3 to 6 and

of its landscape back to

Tsunami causes
devastation in Sri Lanka,

India, Indonesia, Thailand,

Malaysia, and the
Maldives, killing

approximately 300,000

and prompting the largest

humanitarian response for

honorarium from $20,000

a natural disaster in

to $25,000.

history.

Jazz legends Elvin Jones

and Illinois Jacquet die.

Internet usage surpasses

TV viewing.

Videogame industry
profits surpass movie
industry's.

20

05

1957 recording of the

Thelonious Monk Quartet

transport system in

discoved and released on

New Delhi.

with John Coltrane

Blue Note.

Jazz DVDs enter market.

New Orleans native sons

London and markets in

Mississippi and Louisiana;

80% of New Orleans
flooded; over 1,400

Wynton Marsalis (and

killed; all levels of U.S.

others) organize telethons,

government criticized for

concerts, etc. to help

delayed and inadequate

Hurricane Katrina vicitims;

response.

despite dark days, jazz

contiunes to flourish in

Herbie Hancock, Wayne

New Orleans.

Shorter, Nnenna Freeelon,

and 8 Monk Institute

Hurricane Katrina causes

catastrophic damage in

Harry Connick Jr. and

Terrorists bomb public

Earthquake in Kashmir
kills 80,000.

Israeli government enacts

unilateral disengagement
plan, removing Israeli

Fellows tour Vietnam on

behalf of the U.S. State
Department,

settlements from Gaza.

age 84 and is succeeded

commemorating 10th

by Pope Benedict XVI.

anniversary of

normalization of U.S.-

Cell phone carriers add

video viewing, internet,

Vietnam diplomatic

and music downloading

relations.

Pope John Paul II dies at

services.

Jazz legend Percy Heath

dies.

20

06

Tony Bennett, Chick Corea

and the late Ray Barretto

Rights activist and wife

are named NEA Jazz

of Dr. Martin Luther King

Masters.

Jazz legends Walter

Coretta Scott King, Civil

Jr., dies at 78.

Booker and Anita ODay

Former Iraqui President

Saddam Hussein and two

die.

of his senior allies are

sentenced to death by

hanging after an Iraqi

court finds them guilty of

crimes against humanity.

Google buys YouTube for

$1.65 billion.

The Blu-Ray disc,

Nintendo Wii, and

Playstation 3 are released

in the U.S.

20

07

Ornette Coleman wins a

Pulitzer Prize for album

Sound Grammar.

to the public.

Monterey Jazz Festival

massacre on the campus

of Virginia Polytechnic

Jazz legends Alice

Institute and State

Coltrane, Michael Brecker,

University in Blacksburg,

Joe Zawinul, Oscar

Virginia.

Peterson, and Max Roach

die.

32 people are killed in

the Virginia Tech

celebrates their 50th year.

The iPhone is introduced

Nancy Pelosi becomes the

first female Speaker of the
U.S. House of

Representatives.

Russia is once again

recognized as a full-

fledged superpower by the

U.S.

20
08

One of the largest and

most powerful jazz

advocacy groups, the

International Association of
Jazz Education (IAJE),

Barack Obama is elected

the 44th President of the

U.S., becoming the first
U.S. African-American

files for Chapter 7

bankruptcy.

President.

The U.S. Postal Service

the first time the

issues jazz related stamps

Republican Party

featuring Frank Sinatra.

nominated a woman for

Vice-President (then

Herbie Hancocks album

Governor of Alaska,

The River: The Joni

Sarah Palin).

Letters wins a Grammy for

Album of the Year,

This election also marks

becoming the first jazz

Voter turnout is the

highest in at last 40

album in 43 years to do

years.

so.

Miguel Zenon and Alex

Ross win John D. and

Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation Genius
Fellowships.

Geri Allen was awarded a

Guggenheim fellowship for

music composition.

Dave Brubeck and Quincy

Jones are inducted into the
California Museums

California Hall of Fame.

20

Jazz musician Duke

Barack Obama is

09

Ellington has become the

inaugurated as the 44th,

first Black American to be

and first African-

U.S. coin in circulation

U.S.

prominently featured on a
with the release of a
quarter honoring the

American president of the

the closing of the

District of Columbia.

President Obama orders

Guantnamo Bay

Koko Taylor, blues singer,

detention camp in Cuba,

dies.

where the U.S. had held

non-citizens accused of
terrorism.

President Obama signs the

Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay

Act, an equal-pay act that

expands workers rights.

The outbreak of the

H1N1 influenza strain,

commonly referred to as
"swine flu", is deemed a
global pandemic,

becoming the first

condition since the Hong
Kong flu of 19671968
to receive this
designation.

Sonia Sotomayor is

confirmed to the U.S.

Supreme Cout, the first

Latino and third woman
on the bench.

U.S. Airways Flight 1549

makes a forced landing in
Hudson River. All 150
passengers and 5 crew
members survived.

The death of American

entertainer Michael
Jackson triggers an

outpouring of worldwide
grief.

History of Jazz Timeline

1895
Hot cornet player Buddy Bolden is born in uptown New Orleans, La. in 1868.
Buddy is considered by many to be the first person to play the Blues form of
New Orleans Jazz.
1897

Buddy Bolden organizes the first band to play the

instrumental Blues (the fore-runner of Jazz). The band's

repertoire consists of Polkas, Quadrilles, Ragtime and Blues.

1899
Piano player, band leader and Jazz composer Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
is born on April 29 in Washington, D.C. to a moderately well-to-do butler/navy
blueprint man.
1900
July 4, 1900 is the day that Louis Armstrong always claims as his birthday.
Armstrong's nickname will be Satchmo. He will receive this nickname in England
in the early 1930's when the British hear his original nickname, Satchelmouth,

incorrectly. Armstrong will be recognized as the first genius of Jazz because the
entire concept of swinging will be attributed to him.
1900
New Orleans players are playing a mix of Blues, Ragtime, brass band music,
marches, Pop songs and dances. The Jazz stew is brewing. Some musicians are
beginning to improvise the Pop songs.
1900
Trumpeter Tommy Ladnier is born in Mandeville, LA on May 28. Ladnier will
become one of the important early Jazz trumpeters.

1902
Jelly Roll Morton is now seventeen years old. He is beginning to attract attention
in the New Orleans area as a brothel piano player. At this point he is playing

primarily Ragtime and a little Blues. He is one of the first to play this mix that is
a forerunner of Jazz. Jelly Roll will later claim to have invented Jazz in this year
by combining Ragtime, Quadrilles and Blues.
1904
Eddie Lang is born in Philadelphia, PA as Salvatore Massaro. Lang will become
the first jazz guitarist and will thus influence all to come.
1905
Earl "Fatha" Hines, one of the most important Jazz piano players of all times, is
born in Duquesne, PA on December 28.
1906
Clarinetist and Ellington band member Barney Bigard is born in New Orleans,
Lousiania on March 3. Bigard and Sidney Bechet will eventually introduce the
Duke to true Jazz.
1908
Vibraphone pioneer Lionel Hampton born in Birmingham, Al. Raised in Kenosha,
Wisconsin. During a stint with Les Hite's band on Central Avenue in Los

Angeles, he joined the Benny Goodman Quartet, which, along with pianist Teddy

Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa, became the first integrated, commercially
accepted jazz group. He has fronted his own Big Bands since Sept. 1940. Biggest
hits: "Flying Home" and "Midnight Sun". Many early Bop stars began in his
band.
1908
Trumpeter Freddie Keppard and his Creoles were playing more powerful Jazz in
New Orleans than the Original Dixieland Jazz Band will play in 1917. Keppard

was not recorded until many years later because he was afraid of having his style
stolen.
1910
Leadbelly hears New Orleans Jazz and is not intrigued or impressed.
1910
Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt is born in Liberchies, Belgium on January 23
to a gypsy family. Django will become the first European to have a major
influence on American Jazz players.
1910
Jazz and Blues proponent John Henry Hammond is born in New York City.
1911
Trumpeter Roy Eldridge is born in Pittsburgh, Pa. on January 30. Eldridge was

an excellent player and is viewed, maybe unfairly, as the link between Armstrong
and the Boppers. Roy will eventually get the nickname Little Jazz because of his
diminutive size.
1913
The stride pianists are still playing Ragtime as the New Orleans players did a
generation before. So we will see an interesting evolution in their playing over
the next few years that parallels the beginning of Jazz in New Orleans.
1914
Ralph Ellison is born in Oklahoma City on March 1. He will achieve critical
acclaim with his novel, Invisible Man, in 1952. Ellison, who attended Tusegee
Institute with the intention of pursuing a career in music, will write influential
essays on jazz music and on African American folk culture.
1915
Jazz singer Billie "Lady Day" Holiday is born in Baltimore, MD on July 7.
1915
Pop/Jazz singing idol Frank Sinatra is born in Hoboken, N.J. on December 12.
1915
RCA offers to record Freddie Keppard. He turns them down and misses the

chance to be the first Jazz performer to record because he is afraid that his style

will be copied.
1915
At this point, Jean Goldkette dislikes pre-Jazz music so much that he quits
Lamb's Cafe in Chicago rather than share the stage with Tom Brown's Band from
Dixieland.
1917
The history of recorded Jazz begins on February 26 when the white band the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band (originally, Original Dixieland Jass Band ) records

Livery Stable Blues at Victor Studios in New York City. The ODJB was from

New Orleans and consisted of Nick LaRocca on cornet, Larry Shields on clarinet,
Eddie "Daddy" Edwards on trombone, Henry Ragas on piano and Tony Sbarbaro
on drums. Many black bands of the time were probably producing far more
authentic and better music. Never the less, the Jazz Age begins. Trumpeter

Freddie Keppard had refused the chance to make the first Jazz record because he
feared that his style would be copied.
1917
New Orleans Jazz is a melting pot for the Blues, Ragtime, Marching Band music,
etc. It can be thought of as an impressionistic view of these forms, just as
Impressionistic painting gives a novel view of what we normally see.
1917
After Freddie Keppard declines to be recorded, Jazz gains

first national exposure with Victor's release of the Original Dixieland Band's
"Livery Stable Blues. This release outsells by many times over any 78s by the
days recording stars like Enrico Caruso, John Phillip Sousa or the US Marine
Military Band. Sales estimates are around 500K in the first year. The group

consisted of cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie

Edwards, pianist Harry Ragas, and drummer Tony Sbarbaro.
1918
Coleman Hawkins attends school in Chicago and gets to hear early Jazz players
such as Jimmy Noone there.
1919
After years of lynching and other mistreatment of blacks by whites, the NAACP
promotes the slogan "The new Negro has no fear". This type of thinking will
further the cause of Jazz.
1919
Accolades (mentioned above) given to Sidney Bechet by Swiss conductor Ernest
Ansermet appear in Revue Romande. This article is the first serious article on
Jazz to appear anywhere.
1919
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band visits England and triggers an interest in the
new music.

1919
Free Jazz pianist Herbie Nichols is born New York City on January 3.
1919
The Scrap Iron Jazz Band (from the Hellfighters) makes a series of records in
Paris.
1920
Prohibition of alcohol begins. In many respects, prohibition has the opposite of its

intended effect. For example, before prohibition, few, if any women drank in bars.
However, women were very likely to drink in speakeasys. Prohibition indirectly
furthers the cause of Jazz.
1920
Armstrong drops in on a St. Louis dance and the band he is with blows away the
most popular band in town with New Orleans Jazz.
1920
Somebody discovers that the New York brownstone basement (being narrow and
running from mainstreet to back alley) is well suited to use as an speakeasy. In
time, the cellars of New York City will become riddled with speakeasys
providing numerous opportunities for Jazz musicians.
1920

The cabaret business begins in New York. This will eventually be the cause of
the shift of Jazz from Chicago to New York.
1920
This year marks the beginning of an age of great interest in black arts and music
(Jazz). The young future Bop players are being born. They will be raised in an

era which will allow them to want to rebel. Thus, Bop will begin in about twenty
years.
1920
Adrian Rollini begins playing bass saxophone with the California Ramblers (a
popular New York City dance band). Rollini was one of the top Jazz
saxophonist's in the 1920's. He will later play with Bix Beiderbecke.
1920
Paul Whiteman and his Band record the classic Whispering in New York City.
Whiteman's band does not play true Jazz but the so-called symphonic Jazz.
1921
Future Ellington trumpeter Bubber Miley sees King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band at
the Dreamland Cafe in Chicago and becomes interested in Jazz. Bubber will learn
to play blue notes and growls in imitation of Oliver. These growls and slurs will

later become a trademark of Ellington which are passed down to Cootie Williams
and other future trumpeters.

1921
Bix Beiderbecke begins attending the Lake Forest Academy near Chicago. He

will get the opportunity to gain firsthand knowledge of New Orleans and Chicago
Jazz.
1921
James P. Johnson's "Worried and Lonesome Blues" and "Carolina Shout" begin to
approach Jazz. At any rate, Johnson becomes the pioneer of stride piano with
these recordings.
1921
Saxophone player Coleman Hawkins joins Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds.
1921
Pop Jazz pianist Errol Garner is born in Pittsburgh, Pa on June 15.
1922
Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band is in Chicago at the Lincoln Gardens.
Oliver sends for Armstrong who is still in New Orleans.
1922
At this point, Coleman Hawkins is a well schooled musician, perhaps the best in

Jazz. He is asked to join Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds. This group will take him
to New York where Fletcher Henderson will eventually hire him.
1922
Alto saxophonist Benny Carter hears Frank Trumbauer on a recording by

Chicago's Benson Orchestra. Carter will later claim Trumbauer as a major

influence. Since Lester Young also does this, that makes two major Jazz sax
players who claim to owe a lot to Trumbauer.
1922
Innovative bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus is born in Nogales,
Arizona on April 22. Charles will grow up in Watts and will be the most wellrounded musician in Jazz by the Modal and Free Jazz phases.
1922
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band is now playing commercial music such as Fox
Trots. They've sold out.
1922
Paul Whiteman controls twenty-eight bands on the east coast. In this year, he will
gross over $1,000,000 (a tidy sum for producing pseudo-Jazz in the early 20's).
1923
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong on second cornet makes

their first recordings. Armstrong is first recorded on March 31 on the Gennet

recording of Chimes Blues. Other members of the band were Warren "Baby"
Dodds on drums, Honore Dutrey on trombone, Bill Johnson on bass, Johnny

Dodds on clarinet, and Lil Hardin on piano. The most notable recording was the
legendary Dippermouth Blues which was written by Oliver.
1923
Jelly Roll Morton moves to Chicago. By now, Jelly is more interested in his
music than he is in pimping and conning. Morton will record his first piano solos

during this year. The list of songs includes Grandpa's Spells, Kansas City Stomps,

Milenburg Joys, Wolverine Blues and The Pearls. Morton is at the frontline of
Jazz with Bechet and Oliver at this point.
1923

In late January, Duke Ellington pays his way into the segregated section of the
Howard Theatre in Washington D.C. to hear soprano saxophone master Sidney
Bechet. This is Ellington's first encounter with authentic New Orleans Jazz.
1923
The Lois Deppe band with Earl Hines on piano cuts a few records. Hines winds
up in Chicago as a result of the popularity gained. He plays as a single using a
portable piano in a cafe. At this time, the combination Stride/Blues piano style
which Hines pioneered was already well formed. Hines will become the most
influential early pianist in Jazz.
1923

March 12, 1923: Gennett begins to record the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. They
would release the soon to be jazz standards, "Tin Roof Blues," "Bugle Call

Blues," and "Farewell Blues." Members of NORK include Paul Mares, coronet,
George Brunies, trombone, Leon Rappolo, clarinet, Mel Stitzel, piano, & Ben
Pollock, banjo
1923
April 6, 1923 - Gennett records and releases King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.

This would be the first recordings to feature Louis Armstrong and the incredible
two coronet leads. Recordings from this session include "Canal Street Blues,'

"Chimes Blues," "Weather Bird Rag," "Dippermouth Blues," "Froggie More,"

"Just Gone" and a few others. Member of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band

include: King Oliver & Louis Armstrong on coronet, Honore Dutrey on trombone,
Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Bill Johnson on piano
and Baby Dodds on drums.
1923
June 1923 - Jelly Roll Morton begins to record with Gennett, including a session
with New Orleans Rhythm Kings ("Mr. Jelly Lord"), often considered the first
inter-racial jazz recording.
1924
Ellington writes first revue score for Chocolate Kiddies and records the novelty
song "Choo Choo" for Blue Disc label. Ellington is still not doing Jazz at this
time.

1924
At twenty-one, Bix Beiderbecke has already become a recognizable figure among
Jazz musicians. His playing represents one of the few styles which oppose rather
than imitate Armstrong. He will be influential to Lester Young on tenor sax as
well as the future Boppers via Young and directly.
1924
Kansas City bands are beginning to play a style with a four even beat ground
beat (New Orleans Jazz had a distinct two beat ground beat behind a 4/4

melody). This paved the way for more modern forms of Jazz. Charlie Parker as a
child growing up in K.C. heard this music. Count Basie is later quoted as saying
"I can't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play; cause my boys and I
got to have four heavy beats to a bar and no cheating."
1924
Paul Whiteman makes Jazz "respectable" with his February 21 concert at Aeolian
Hall in New York City. The first song is an authentic version of ODJB's "Livery
Stable Blues" which is merely meant to show how crude the real thing is, but
most fans like it better than the "Symphonic Jazz" which follows.
1925
New Orleans giants Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet are now playing together
in the Red Onion Jazz Babies with Blues singer Alberta Hunter. At this point,

Bechet is the superior Jazz player. Recordings can be found on Classic CD - The

Chronological Sidney Bechet 1923-1926 and EPM Musique CD - The Complete

1923-1926 Clarence Williams Sessions.
1925
In February, Bix Beiderbecke attempts to "straighten up and fly right" when he
continues his formal studies at Iowa State University. The effort lasts only
eighteen days, however, and Bix is off on the road again playing Jazz.
1925
The Ellington band is still not a Jazz band, but a commercial orchestra playing
Pop tunes and dance numbers. However, the addition of New Orleans players

Sidney Bechet on clarinet and Bubber Miley on trumpet begin to turn the band
around. Miley's signature mutes and growls (borrowed from Oliver) become
Ellington's signature passed on to a number of horn players in the band
throughout the decades.
1925
Lyrical trumpeter Joe Smith begins to play with the Fletcher Henderson band. Joe
is one of the most underrated trumpeters in early Jazz. Joe is often compared to
Bix.

1925
Red Norvo who is the first important mallet instrument player in Jazz begins on
the xylophone.

1926
In September, Jelly Roll Morton cuts his first band recordings with his Red Hot
Peppers group. Jelly Roll had acquired Lester and Walter Montrose as publishers.
Notable songs are "Deep Creek", "The Pearls", "Wolverine Blues", "Dead Man
Blues" and King Oliver's "Doctor Jazz".
1926
The Ellington band has finally taken shape. They are now playing bonafide New
York Jazz. Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton on trombone and Harry Carney on clarinet

join Ellington. Ellington forms a significant partnership with music publisher and
band booker Irving Mills.
1926
Kansas City, Missouri becomes the wildest city in America (a perfect match for
Jazz) when Tom "Boss" Pendergast (the Democratic boss of Jackson county)
begins his reign over the city.
1926
Until now, Bechet was the only black saxophonist of importance. Coleman
Hawkins is beginning to change that. Currently, most Jazz saxophonist's are white
(not many used saxophones, only whites could afford them). Hawkins admires
Adrian Rollini.
1926

Jimmy Harrison is playing saxophone for Fletcher Henderson. Jimmy is beginning

to create an influential Jazz trombone style that will rule for awhile.
1926
Tommy Ladnier is playing trumpet for Fletcher Henderson. Tommy is one of the
most underrated trumpeters of early Jazz.
1926
Swedish Jazz group called the Paramount Orchestra is formed.
1927
Armstrong makes the greatest of the hot fives and sevens. He is now setting
whole phrases ahead or behind the beat, not just pulling single notes. This will
set the stage for Swing. Armstrong is now a star and because of him, New

Orleans style ensemble playing is disappearing and is being replaced by Chicago

and New York style solos. In short Jazz is becoming a soloist art primarily

because of Armstrong. A few songs of significance include "Struttin' with Some

Barbecue", "Big Butter and Egg Man" and "Hotter than That". In May, Warren

"Baby" Dodds on drums and Pete Briggs on tuba are added to hot fives to make
hot sevens.
1927
Coleman Hawkins drops his "slap tongue" style of playing tenor saxophone and
begins improvising by playing the notes of the chords of a song. He'd heard a
teenaged Art Tatum do this and was quite impressed. Up to this time all

improvisation had been based on a song's melody. At first, this new style seemed
somewhat incoherent but it will eventually lead to modern forms of Jazz.
1927
James P. Johnson is now playing Jazz with his release of "Snowy Morning
Blues". The stride style at this point is analogous to the former rag players
swinging the rags like Jelly Roll did about a decade earlier.
1927
The first talking movie is released. It is The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson in
black face. It opens on October 6.
1927
October 1927 - Hoagy Carmichael records two versions of his composition "Star
Dust," one with lyrics (which get edited a year later), one instrumental - Gennett
releases the instrumental version which is a poor seller, when Gennett is

approached to release the vocal version, Fred Wiggins head of Gennett writes on
the master: "Reject. Already on Gennett. Poor Seller." "Star Dust" would soon
become one of the most recorded songs in pop and jazz.
1928
On February 7, federal agents raid a dozen of Chicago's North Side nightclubs.
They take names of everybody that is caught with alcohol. They had already

closed a number of the South Side black-and-tans. This is all part of a "get tough
on booze" policy of the new Republican mayor William Dever (Big Bill

Thompson's successor). Chicago will soon fall as the Jazz capital.

1928
Armstrong drops the New Orleans style completely and with it, he drops the New
Orleans players except for Zutty Singleton. Landmark recordings are made by

Armstrong with Earl Hines on piano. Hines is almost the equal of Armstrong in
terms of Jazz talent and the result is such memorable recordings as "West End

Blues" (many believe this to be the top Jazz recording of all times) and "Weather
Bird Rag", both Joe Oliver tunes. These and others can be found on Columbia

CD Louis Armstrong Vol 4. - Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines or the Classics
CD Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra 1928-1929.
1928
Django meets violinist Staphane Grapelli and makes his first records which have
no Jazz value.
1928
Spanish/Fillipino, Fred Elizade persuades the Savoy Hotel management in
England to let him bring in a Jazz band with American trumpeter Chelsea

Qualey, sax players Bobby Davis and Adrian Rollini, and an English rhythm
section.
1928
Bing Crosby, an early Jazz fan, visits Harlem to hear Ellington and other
authentic Jazz players.

1929
Armstrong shifts base from Chicago to New York. This coincides with a general
shift of the Jazz mainstream from Chicago to New York. Bigger Swing type
orchestras will begin to dominate.
1929
Armstrong begins fronting big Swing bands such as Les Hite and Luis Russell.

He is becoming more commercial. This will cause later Jazz artists to say that he
sold out.
1929
Drummer Dave Tough and clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow get together a Jazz band in

Place Pigalle in Paris. The music is spreading. Dave Tough will later become one
of the few players to successfully switch from Swing to Bop - most could not.
1930
Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers recorded four numbers at this
session:

Each Day

If Someone Would Only Love Me

That'll Never Do

I'm Looking For A Little Bluebird

"If Someone Would Only Love Me" features a bass clarinet solo by an unknown
player--an early example of this instrument in a jazz setting.
1930
With Coleman Hawkins and his followers Ben Webster and the young Chu Berry
and his only competitor at the time Lester Young, the saxophone, in general, and
the tenor saxophone, in particular, becomes a major competitor of the

trumpet/cornet in Jazz. Recall that the cornet was king in New Orleans Jazz. The
faster changes which a sax allows begins to push the trombone out of Jazz.
1930
Scotsman Tommy McQuater is the leading British Jazz trumpeter.
1930
Future alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman (Free Jazz) is born in Fort Worth,
Texas. He will be reared in poverty.
1931
Ellington records the first extended Jazz piece called Creole Rhapsody this piece
covers two full 78 sides. He will also record Mood Indigo and Rockin' in

Rhythm (there's that word rock). Duke is by now very famous.

1931

On November 4, cornet player Buddy Bolden (who many people think was the

first person to play Jazz) dies in a Louisiana state hospital. He was never
recorded.
1931
Bix Beiderbecke dies in Sunnyside Queens, New York City from pneumonia
which was brought on by acute alcoholism. Jazz has lost a disproportionate
number of artists to drug and alcohol addiction.
1932
English trumpet player Nat Gonella establishes himself with the English by

playing Jazz. He cuts I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me and I Heard a
Don Redman song.
1933
Eddie Lang dies at the height of his powers at twenty-nine from complications
following a tonsillectomy. This was a great loss to Jazz.
1933
Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin begin to play
together in Louis Vola's Hotel Claridge orchestra. This was the start of what

might have been the greatest duo in Jazz. Django makes a recording of Si J'aime

Suzy with L'Orchestra du Theatre Daunon. Lang's influences are showing.

1933

Art Tatum makes his first solo records including Tiger Rag and Tea for Two. The
stride is very evident on Tea for Two. Art is currently the biggest draw on 52nd
Street. Tatum who has a better grasp of harmony than anyone currently in Jazz
claims Fats Waller as his inspiration.
1933
Future Free Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor is born in Corona, Long Island, New York
where he grew up.
1933
The Hot Club of France gives its first Jazz Concert with a group of lesser known
black American musicians living in France at the time.
1933
Prohibition is repealed. Jazz moves out of the speakeasys. Speakeasys become
legal bars. Joe Helbock's Onyx on 52nd Street in N.Y. becomes a very good

draw. However, much competition moves in. 52nd Street will become legendary
in Jazz annals.
1933
The depression has taken its toll on most early Jazz musicians. A new breed is
emerging. This new breed is the Swing musician.
1934

Benny Goodman has his own orchestra which supplies the Jazz portion of a
popular radio show Let's Dance sponsored by Nabisco to advertise the Ritz
Cracker.
1934
Coleman Hawkins (now one of the premier Jazz players) leaves Fletcher
Henderson and goes to Europe to work with Jack Hylton. He is replaced by

Lester Young. The band members do not like Lester's light style. They prefer the
bigger sound of Coleman Hawkins or even Ben Webster. Lester soon leaves
Henderson for Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy.
1934
Soul Jazz saxophonist Stanley Turrentine is born in Pittsburgh, Pa.
1935
The Swing band era opens with the sudden rise of Benny Goodman. Benny's
band toured the U.S. from the east to the west with little success until August 21
when the band played the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles where much to his

and his dejected band's surprise, they were a huge success and their fortune was
sealed. The band had played the late night Jazz portion of Nabisco's radio show

from New York and had developed a wide following among young adults on the
west coast. But when they played elsewhere they flopped in front an older

audience. They became confused and tried to play popular dance music. When

they played this Pop music at the Palomar, they were flopping and Benny said,
"If we're going to flop, at least we'll do it playing Jazz". They switched to Jazz
and the rest is history.

1935
There is a lot of Jazz action going on in England, more than in the rest of
Europe.
1935
Django and the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris record Hoagy Carmichael's

Stardust with Coleman Hawkins. It is clear the Django understands Jazz rhythm.
1935
By now, a number of blacks have not only succeeded in Jazz, but some have
become "legitimate" actors and singers too. For instance, Paul Robeson has

become a well-respected actor and Marion Anderson a well-respected opera

singer. This will set the stage for the "Bop Rebellion".
1935
Acclaimed Jazz writer, arranger, composer, performer and critic Leonard Feather
comes to the U.S. from England for the first time. Leonard will eventually settle
here.

1935
Jazz Hot is created in France by Charles Delaunay. This is the first Jazz journal
in the world.

1935
Swing has developed a language of its own. Some examples of Jazz related slang
at this time follow:
1936
Billie Holiday (Lester's good friend) begins to record with various small bands
(usually lead by Teddy Wilson and usually containing Lester Young). These

recordings which will be done over the next six years until the recording ban of

1942 will be the work on which her reputation rests. She has already discovered
the two secrets which will make her the greatest Jazz singer of all with Did I

Remember?, No Regrets and Billies Blues. They are 1) lift the melody away
from the beat like Armstrong and 2) employ great balance.
1936
Important Free Jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler is born.
1936
Important Free Jazz trumpeter Don Cherry is born.
1937
By Joel Simpson
Origins

Meade Anderson Lewis was born September 4, 1905, in Chicago and died June
7, 1964 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in a car accident. He came from a musical

family. He acquired the nickname "Lux" because as a child he would imitate the
excessively polite comic strip characters Alphonse and Gaston, calling himself the
Duke of Luxembourg. His father, a Pullman car porter, insisted he play the violin
as a child. At age 16, when his father died, Lewis switched to the piano after

hearing local boogie-woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey. Lewis was entirely self-taught
on piano. He was a boyhood friend of Albert Ammons. Together they studied the
music of Jimmy Yancey and other Chicago blues pianists. They also drove taxis
together around 1924.
In 1927, Lewis recorded his boogie "Honky-Tonk Train Blues," a driving boogie
based on the sounds of the trains that rumbled past his boyhood home on South
La Salle Street in Chicago as many as a hundred times a day. The record was
released 18 months later in 1929, but attracted little attention. The recording
company, Paramount, went out of business, and the record became almost
impossible to obtain. Lewis did various things to survive at the time, the
beginning of the Depression: he dug ditches for the Works Progress
Administration and he returned to taxicab driving.
Discovery
In 1933, jazz promoter/producer and record collector John Hammond (heir to the
Hammond organ fortune) obtained a beat-up copy of Lewis's recording. He was
so impressed with it that he embarked on a two-year search for the pianist.

Hammond found Lewis in 1935, through Albert Ammons. Ammons was playing
in Chicago's Club De Lisa, and he was the first person Hammond met who had

ever heard of Lewis. Hammond found Lewis washing cars in a Chicago garage.
After a few days practice Lewis got "Honkey Tonk Train Blues" back up to

speed, and Hammond arranged a recording session to rerecorded it. The following

year Hammond recorded Lewis's other classic, "Yancey Special" and booked him
in a concert in New York. Following the concert Lewis performed at Nick's in

Greenwich Village for six weeks, then returned to Chicago and applied for relief
as an unemployed car washer.
Then in 1938 Hammond invited Lewis back to New York to perform in his

legendary Carnegie Hall concert From Spirituals to Swing along with boogiewoogie pianists Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. The performance was an

enormous hit, setting off a minor riot among the fans and spawning a flood of

boogie-woogie imitators. The boogie-woogie craze was on. The three pianists got
together with blues singer Joe Turner and held down a long-term engagement at
the Cafe Society Downtown.
Style
Lewis had the most pianistically complex style of the three major boogie pianists.
He had a vast repertoire of bass patterns and right hand riffs and figures. He was
more intense and quicker than his mentor Jimmy Yancey, and he frequently

varied his left hand by going into stride. He had a fertile musical imagination and
technique to match. He could keep a single boogie going for 20 or 30 minutes

by careful use of his material: each chorus would be based on a single technical
idea, which he would conclude with an unexpected twist. He used the whole
range of the piano. Sometimes choruses would be linked developmental and

sometimes by dramatic contrast. He utilized dynamic variety and cross-rhythms

much more than the other boogie pianists.
Lewis was an excellent whistler and could whistle the blues with the ease of a
trumpet-like style. He recorded "Whistlin' Blues" in 1937. He also recorded blues
played on the celesta and the harpsichord.
After the Peak

In 1941 Lewis moved to Los Angeles, where most of his appearances were
relatively low-paying solo gigs. He made a number of short films in 1944 (an
excerpt from one is included with this program) and appeared with Louis

Armstrong in the 1947 film New Orleans. He made frequent appearances on

television during its early years. In 1952, along with Pete Johnson, Erroll Garner
and Art Tatum he did a series of concerts on a U. S. tour entitled "Piano

Parade." In his later years he became frustrated at being identified purely as a

boogie-woogie pianist, and his playing was frequently rushed and perfunctory.
Lewis's weight hovered around 290 pounds until he underwent medical
treatments, gave up alcohol and restricted his diet. He died in a car accident June
6, 1964, in Minneapolis after a performance. Rear-ended at 80 miles per hour,
his car was thrown into a tree, and he was crushed to death. The driver of the
other car was seriously injured but survived.
1937
Pittsburgh drum innovator Kenny Clarke moves the ground beat from the
Bass/Hi-hat combination (previously innovated by Walter Johnson and Jo Jones)

to the large ride cymbal. This moves the ground beat completely away from the
bass drum and makes faster Bop-type rhythms possible. Clarke found that he

could get pitch and timbre variations and produce an airy sound. He also was
then free to use the bass drum in a new manner, to "drop bombs". He said that

he simply got tired of playing like Jo Jones, but this was an important innovation
in the development of modern Jazz (maybe as important as later innovations by
Parker and Gillespie).
1937

Bessie Smith dies in a car accident in Clarksdale, Mississippi on September 26.

The old is dying in Jazz and the new is coming on strong.
1937
Archie Shepp (future Free Jazz giant) is born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He will
grow up in Philadelphia, Pa.
1938
Future piano player Cecil Taylor is taking piano lessons from the wife of a
timpani player who played with Toscanini. She lived across the street. Taylor will
become big in the Free Jazz movement.
1938
1938 - John Hammond produces the 'From Spirituals to
Swing' concert at Carnegie Hall (then again in 1939). This
would be the first time race music and an integrated band

would be presented on a major US Stage. Vanguard would

eventually release a multi-LP collection and then a CD

boxset with these recordings. Hammond intends to answer "Where did jazz come
from" with his choice of styles and artists. Artists on the bill included: Count

Basie (with Lips Page, Lester Young, Jo Jones and Walter Page) Helen Humes
Kansas City Five, Six Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons Meade Lux

Lewis/Albert Ammons/Pete Johnson/Walter Page/Jo Jones Joe Turner Sister

Rosetta Tharpe New Orleans Feetwarmers Jimmy Rushing Benny Goodman

Sextet (with Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton) Ida Cox
Sonny Terry Big Bill Broonzy

1939
At this point in time, we have the Swing players who are king and the Dixieland
players who are trying to revive what they think of as "real" Jazz but ... what's

this up on the horizon? It's Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
who are sowing the seeds of what will take Jazz over in the next few years!
1939
By now, there are hundreds of Swing bands, but the Bop rebellion is beginning
because many excellent young black players are getting irritated that the whites
are making most of the money in Jazz.
1939
52nd Street is by now called "Swing Street". It all started with The Onyx. Now,
in the block between 5th and 6th Avenues, six Jazz clubs offer a high level of
Jazz. Four of these are The Famous Door, Jimmy Ryan's, The Onyx and The

Three Dueces. Because of space limitations, the small house band with one major
soloist like Coleman Hawkins is the thing at these clubs.
1939
Clubs also flourish in Greenwich Village, Harlem and in Chicago's south side, but
52nd Street is the symbolic headquarters of Jazz.
1939

The first formal books on Jazz appear. They are Wilder Hobson's American Jazz

Music and Frederick Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith's Jazzmen. These books
tend to paint a storybook picture of New Orleans Jazz and help to promote the

Dixieland Revival. It must be remembered that New Orleans Jazz and Dixieland
Jazz have some fundamental differences.
1939
Alan Lomax does the famous Jelly Roll Morton recordings for the Library of
Congress. This presents as close as we can get to a realistic view of the early
days of Jazz.
1939
Teddy Wilson leaves the Benny Goodman small groups and Jess Stacy leaves the
Benny Goodman big band. At this point the Earl Hines influenced Wilson is the
most influential pianist in Jazz. Jess Stacy is also of the Hines school.
1939
Coleman Hawkins does a version of Body and Soul which many feel is among
the finest masterpieces of Jazz. It is virtually an exercise in chromatic chord

movement. This is a precursor to Bop harmonics. Coleman understands harmonics

very well and he will have no problem with Bop harmonics. The Bop rhythm
will however elude him.
1940
Big band Swing is about to be done in by the war and economics. Small band

Jazz is evolving along two distinct and opposing movements. The first is the New
Orleans Revival or Dixieland. This produced little that was new musically. It was
a white movement to revive and exploit the black New Orleans music of the
1920's. Some notable legends resurface including Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney

Bechet, Kid Ory and Bunk Johnson. Some memorable records result. The other
movement is distinctly new musically and sociologically. This movement is called
Bebop, Rebop or simply Bop.
1940
In addition, the small band Swing is still there and a new big band trend is afoot.
This trend is called Progressive. Its proponents are Stan Kenton, Boyd Raeburn
and Earle Spencer. This will eventually influence what will become Cool Jazz.
1940
Claude Thornhill organizes a Swing band that, while not successful, presages
Cool Jazz.
1940
Meanwhile, the most successful of the early Cuban bands is formed by a man

named Machito. They are called Machito and his Afro-Cubans. They start as a
completely Cuban band and slowly assimilate Jazz into their repertoire. They
introduce more complex rhythms to the world of Jazz, however, they are

primarily successful due to their trumpet player/arranger Mario Banza (Machito's

brother-in-law and former Cab Calloway trumpet player).
1940

There is a Trad Jazz revival in Europe. The Europeans discover Joe Oliver and
Jelly Roll Morton.
1940
All of Europe except England is under Hitler's control and thus Europe will
remain in the Dixieland revival and Trad Jazz phase.
1940
The Yerba-Beuna Jazz Band featuring Lu Watters begins to play at the Dawn
Club in San Francisco. It played the music of Oliver and Armstrong.
1940
Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the leading gospel singer and is popular in Jazz as well.
1941
Future piano innovator Bill Evans is asked to sit in for a missing pianist in his
brother's Jazz group.
1942
It is becoming very clear to musicians that Bop is indeed a new music. A number
of Jazz musicians are now playing Bop.
1942

Future Free Jazz pianist, Cecil Taylor (only 9) is already interested in Jazz,
especially Swing.
1942
Belgian Robert Goffin and Englishman Leonard Feather act on Goffin's idea to
have a formal class on Jazz history and analysis. The class consists of fifteen

lectures by Feather and Goffin which are augmented by recordings and musical
demonstrations by such artists as Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. The

class which attracted almost one hundred serious Jazz students was given at the
New School for Social Research in New York. It was repeated later in the year.
1943
Bop is becoming well known among young Jazz players.
1943
Robert Goffin convinces Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich that a "real" Jazz poll,

one in which Coleman Hawkins could win for tenor sax instead of Tex Beneke,
is needed. Thus is born the Esquire Jazz Band Poll. At Esquire publisher David
Smart's suggestion, a concert performed by the winners will be given at the
Metropolitan Opera House on January 18, 1944.
1943
Louis Armstrong wins the first Esquire Jazz Band Poll for trumpet. Other winners
include Coleman Hawkins for tenor sax and Billie Holiday for vocals.

1944
The winners of Esquire magazine's first Jazz poll perform in the first Jazz concert
ever to be given at the Metropolitan Opera House. The concert date is January
18. The concert is recorded but never released in America. A Japanese release
becomes available years later.
1944
Carlo Loffredo forms the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band in Italy.
1945
The clarinet has nearly disappeared from Jazz at this point courtesy of the
saxophone. By now, the sax is king even forcing trumpeters to take notice.
1945
Jazz is becoming the preferred music of white renegades (will be until the mid
60's).
1945
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie become known as partners and the cofounders of Bebop. Diz and Bird and Bird and Miles Davis record a number of
tunes in Feb, May and Nov which establish Bebop. These tunes which are the

most influential sides since the Hot Fives and Sevens include Groovin' High, Salt

Peanuts, Hot House, Koko, Billie's Bounce and Now's the Time. These and other

tunes which mark the beginning of recorded Bebop can be found on several

Savoy Jazz CD's including The Charlie Parker Story and The Genius of Charlie

Parker as well the Stash CD The Legendary Dial Sessions: Vol 1.

1945

Lenny Tristano is currently one of the most thoroughly schooled musicians in

Jazz.
1945
The term "Moldy Fig" (sometimes "Mouldy Figge") appears for the first time in
reference to the old school Jazz players in the Esquire letters column in a letter
from a Navy man named Sam Platt.
1945
Eddie Condon opens his Dixieland oriented Jazz club called Eddie Condon's in
the Greenwich Village section of New York City.
1946
Parker does his first Dial recordings. These are some of the landmark recordings

of Jazz. They are available on the Stash CD series The Legendary Dial Masters -

Vol 1 and Vol 2.

1946

During 1946 Parker will also start with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic.

His sidemen include Miles Davis on trumpet, Red Rodney on trumpet, Kenny
Dorham on trumpet, Duke Jordan on piano, Al Haig on piano, Tommy Potter on
bass, Max Roach on drums, Roy Haynes on drums, Lester Young on tenor sax
and Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax.
1946
In December, eight of the biggest Swing bands break up. The list includes Benny
Goodman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Benny Carter and 3
more. The Swing era is truly over. Big band Jazz will not die out entirely
though.
1946
Lenny Tristano (Mr. Cool on the piano) arrives in NYC and takes Jazz into more
coolness and complexity. His primary source of income is teaching. He quickly
develops a reputation as a crazy genius among musicians. He has a lot of new
musical ideas. He is consciously trying to weld Jazz and Classical.
1947
Bop is beginning to dominate American Jazz.
1947
With Bebop well established at this point, it is clear that the mainstream of Jazz
is from New Orleans through Swing to Bebop. Bop currently rules.
1947

Dizzy and George Russell's Cubana Be, Cubana Bop contains Modal Jazz
elements way before its time.
1947
The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas offers a Jazz degree. This is the
first Jazz degree to be offered in the United States.
1948
Ornette Coleman graduates high school and goes on the road with a traveling

variety show. Ornette gets fired in Natchez for trying to interest other players in
Jazz.
1948
Armstrong forms the first version of the Jazz All Stars with Jack Teagarden on

trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Dick Carey on piano, Sid Catlett on drums
and Arvell Shaw on bass. Their music fits in with New Orleans revival.
1948
Louis Armstrong performs at the Jazz festival in Nice, France.
1948
Fans of Classical and Jazz music Dr Peter Goldmark and
William Bachman invent microgroove or 'high fidelity'

playback, thus the 33 1/3 RPM disc is introduced.

1949
Cool Jazz begins in a series of recordings made by Miles Davis, et al. Many
people attach more importance to the "et al" than to Davis. Nevertheless, a

nucleus of people from the Claude Thornhill band including Lee Konitz, Bill
Barber, Gerry Mulligan, Joe Shulman and Gil Evans apparently arrived at the

ideas which led to Cool and then called Davis in as a trumpeter and maybe more
importantly, a known name. Songs include Denzil Best's Move, Mulligan's Jeru

and Rocker as well as Israel and Boplicity. See the Capitol Jazz CD Miles Davis

- Birth of the Cool.

1949

Latin influences become more important in Jazz.

1949
Charlie Parker takes his first trip overseas. He takes part in the Paris Jazz festival.
The new Parker quintet features Parker on alto sax, Al Haig on piano and Red

Rodney on trumpet. Listen to the CD's Bird at the Roost - Vol 2 and Vol 4 on
Savoy/Vogue.
1949
John Coltrane first appears on record as a member of Dizzy Gillespie's big band,
playing alto saxophone. He will stay with Gillespie until 1951, later doubling on
tenor sax. During his tenure with Gillespie, Coltrane plays on George Russell's

"Cubana-Be, Cubana-Bop," one of the first modal recordings and also a landmark
Latin jazz composition.
1949
Ben Webster leaves Ellington again. He moves back to Kansas City to work in
the Jay McShann band. In addition, he begins work at this time in pioneering

Rhythm and Blues bands playing a new music which might easily be called Rock
and Roll. He will eventually work with Johnny Otis and others. An interesting

thing appears to be happening, it seems as if many Swing musicians displaced by

Bop are working in small bands pioneering Rock and Roll which will eventually
totally eclipse Jazz. Talk about irony. See the EmArcy CD The Complete Ben

Webster on EmArcy for some examples.

1949

J. J. Johnson is now the premiere trombone player in Jazz.

1949
Art Blakey returns from Africa. His name is now Abdullah Ibn Buhaina and his
work becomes some of the most imaginative in Jazz.
1949
Lenny Tristano group records some unique sides that are closely listened to by

Jazz musicians...even musicians that don't like the music. The tunes are Intuition
and Digression. The players are Lee Konitz on alto sax, Warne Marsh on tenor

sax, Billy Bauer on guitar, a drummer and a bassist. The drummer and bassist are

not given much latitude. Tristano is interested in complicated systems of chord

changes and he wants to create pure melodic lines with shifting meters or without
meter. This music is close to Free Jazz and is 5 to 10 years early.
1949
At the end of the Tristano session above, in May 1949, Tristano tells engineers
to leave the mike open. Each instrumentalist plays in a melodic system of his

own choice. The Tristano group is playing Free Jazz about ten years before its
time and musicians and record company execs are puzzled. The record is not
issued for quite some time.
1949
Coleman Hawkins is now out of the vanguard of Jazz. Hawkins was another
displaced Swing idol. He was as capable as anyone of understanding Bop

harmonics. Since he had been improvising on the chord structure longer than
anyone at this point. However, like many Swing musicians, the Bop rhythms
completely escaped him.
1949
Cuban bandleader Luis del Campo becomes enamored with Jazz and begins to
hire Jazzmen. This is a switch. Usually, it was the Jazz bands which hired cuban
musicians. The del Campo band had five rhythm men including three drummers,
a piano and a bass.
1949

Norman Granz persuades Oscar Peterson to join the Jazz at the

Philharmonic(JATP). The popular style pianist is an instant success.
1950
By this time, it is possible for a Jazz star to get rich without compromising. A

competent Jazz musician can make a good living without compromise. Audiences
are finally somewhat indifferent to a mixed black and white band.
1950
Charlie Parker becomes the first modern Jazz soloist to perform with strings and
woodwinds in a symphony style group.
1950
Art Tatum is back as a major Jazz figure.
1950
The Del Campo band is playing Jazz numbers with a rolling rhumba rhythm that
attracts large dance audiences. Del Campo is inclined to turn the band loose and
then dance with the ladies. He very dramatically dies on the dance floor while
doing this very thing. The cause is a bad heart.
1951
Jazz is starting to be considered legitimate by colleges and universities.

1951
The first American Jazz festival occurs in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. in the autumn. This
festival precedes the first Newport Jazz Festival by almost three years.
1951
Lars Jansson was born in Rebro, Sweden. In his early teens,
a relative lent him some jazz records that got him interested
in jazz. During the 1960s, he followed the trend and

developed an interest in the organ and started playing a B-3

Hammond. In 1970, after graduation from upper secondary school, Lars moved to
Gteborg and started studying at a dental college, but after a year and a half he

decided to switch to music. He was accepted at the Gteborg College of Music,

which gave him the opportunity to play with all the good musicians in Gteborg.
Lars became a member of such groups as: the Arild Andersen Quartet, Radka
Toneff, Bjrn Alke's quartet, Egba, Hawk On Flight, Equinox, Red Mitchell,

Tolvan Bigband, Jukkis Uotila with Bob Berg and Mike Stern, Ulf Wakenius,

Lew Sollof, and Bohusln Big Band, among others. He also played with Danish
musicians like Cecile Norby, Hans Ulrik, and Klyvers Bigband. Lars was also a
member of The Jan Garbarek Group in 1987.
1952
Johnny Smith's best-known album, 1952's MOONLIGHT IN
VERMONT (also the title of his signature song), assured the
guitarist a place in jazz history. While saxophone legend

Stan Getz is a prominent guest on the record, and certainly

threatens to steal the show on numerous occasions, the spotlight never strays too
far from Smith, who easily entrances with his supremely laid-back style.

Consisting almost entirely of standards, MOONLIGHT is ideal for lulling listeners

to sleep (in the most pleasing sense), as Smith's spare, chiming six-string lines

gently mesh with the subtle rhythmic backing and Getz's resonant sax playing, as
revealed on lilting renditions of "Where or When" and "Stars Fell on Alabama."

Of course, the title track is the main attraction of the disc, garnering its reputation
with gorgeously delicate work by the entire ensemble. The epitome of Smith's
mesmerizing, soporific style of jazz, MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT is all that
most listeners will need by this amiable artist.
Personnel includes: Johnny Smith (guitar); Stan Getz (saxophone); Stanford Gold
(piano); Bob Carter (bass); Don Lamond (drums)
1952
Not as much is happening in Jazz. Bop is getting old.
1952
Classically trained pianist John Lewis forms the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) with

vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Kenny Clarke. Lewis
insists that group members wear tuxedos to dignify Jazz.
1953
Dave Brubeck: piano

Paul Desmond: alto sax

Ron Crotty: bass

Lloyd Davis: drums
I find it hard to believe that when I arrived on a college campus in the early
sixties I was quickly indoctrinated by the "insiders" among the jazz players into

disavowing any interest in the music of Brubeck or Desmond. Both were deemed
not only too commercial but too West Coast, too white, too fay, too unaffected by
the Bird revolution.

Not only is the foregoing among the most myopic viewpoints ever shared by

musicians, but it is equally mistaken to assume Brubeck's music is not a force to

be reckoned with until the Time Out recordings. Let the Oberlin record speak for
itself: it represents improvisation of the highest order by two musicians at the
very peak of their creative powers.
Take Paul's solo on "Just the Way You Look Tonight": He quotes from Prokofief,
Stravinsky, and at least three American composers while building an emotional,
pyrotechnical, beautifully structured solo spurred on by the audible vocal

encouragements of Brubeck himself. Who could follow that? Brubeck does, not
only matching but possibly topping it, with thunderous, wildly inventive yet

boldly assertive, polyrhythmic melodic statements played in octaves in the left

hand.

There's a widespread myth, proven wrong time and again, that the best music

occurs when great soloists are accompanied by equally heralded drummers and
bass players. To the contrary, the most spirited and swinging jazz always happens
when players know their roles and listen to each other.

Before your jazz collection numbers more than 10 albums, make certain that this
is one of them.

1953
George Russell has worked out his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, a

landmark treatise on modal theory. Modal jazz will become a major movement
over the course of the next decade.
1953
Parker, Gillespie, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus and Bud Powell are recorded in
concert at Massey Hall in Toronto. A good LP results. Listen to The Quintet:

Jazz at Massey Hall on Original Jazz Classics(OJC). Also check out Charlie
Parker at Storyville on Blue Note.
1953

Armstrong wins Downbeat International Critic's poll, Downbeat Hall of Fame

award, Melody Maker's Reader's poll, Melody Maker's Critic's poll, Jazz Hot poll
in France and Jazz Echo poll in Germany.
1953
The first biographical dictionary or encyclopedia of Jazz musicians is published in
Copenhagen.
1954
Johnny Hodges fires Coltrane for drug-related problems. Coltrane returns to
Philadelphia to work in R&B groups, including one led by seminal jazz organist
Jimmy Smith.

1954
Horace Silver initiates the first version of the Jazz Messengers to record for Blue
Note.
1954
Horace Silver is currently one of the most sought after pianists in Jazz.
1954
Cecil Taylor begins to abandon the standard Jazz piano approaches. He begins to
use chords, not as building blocks, but as swatches of color like the French
Impressionists.
1954
The first Newport Jazz festival occurs in Newport, Rhode Island. Pianist George
Wein is responsible for inviting the musicians.
1955
The Chet Baker Quartet records six tracks for Pacific Jazz, all of which feature
Chet's vocal style: Daybreak, Just Friends, I Remember You, Let's Get Lost,
Long Ago And Far Away, You Don't Know What Love Is.
1955

Roy Eldrige records "The Urbane Jazz of Roy EldridgeBenny Carter" for Norgran Records. On the same day he

plays a quintet session with Art Tatum for Pablo Records.

Both are labels founded by jazz impresario Norman Granz.
1955
The Hard Bop style is emerging via people like drummer Art Blakey and piano
player Horace Silver. Blue notes are disappearing from Jazz. They are being
replaced by minor notes. For instance, the blue seventh becomes the minor
seventh, etc.
1955
Cool Jazz hits its last peak as saxman Jimmy Giuffre eliminates drums and strong
bass altogether giving an implicit beat rather than an explicit beat.
1955
Art Blakey puts together the first of his Jazz Messenger groups featuring Kenny

Dorham on trumpet, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Doug Watkins on bass, Horace
Silver on piano and Blakey on drums. The sound will continue to define Hard
Bop.

1955
Jimmy Smith debuts the Hammond B-3 organ as a Jazz instrument in an organguitar-drum trio in Atlantic City. Smith's Hammond will become a Jazz force.

1955
Pianist Cecil Taylor becomes a major Free Jazz figure way before the time of
Free Jazz.
1955
Sonny Rollins joins the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet. Rollins says that

Clifford showed him that it is possible to lead a good clean life and still be a
good Jazz musician.
1955
Piano player Herbie Nichols records the first of four sessions for Blue Note. Free
Jazz is not far off.
1955
Leonard Feather finishes his first Encyclopedia of Jazz.
1955
Downbeat becomes the most widely read jazz periodical in the U.S. (until 1965).
1956
The Duke Ellington Ellington Orchestra performed at the
American Jazz Festival at Newport, RI. After Ellington's

career had been at an ebb for some years, this triumphant

concert served as his comeback. The climax of the performance was 'Diminuendo
and Crescendo in Blue' where Paul Gonsalves played a tenor sax solo for 27

straight choruses. Following the concert, Ellington appeared on the cover of Time
magazine. The concert recording became the best-selling Duke Ellington album.
1956
Art Tatum, who set the standard for jazz piano and inspired the young Oscar
Peterson, died from uremia.
1956
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners

Quirky yet rigorously logical, Brilliant Corners is a triumph

of composition and performance, a set heavy on Monk

originals with Rollins, Roach and Pettiford along for the

swing. Even its title describes Monk's angular genius.
1956
Charles Mingus records the LP Pithecanthropus Erectus. This recording

demonstrates some of the earliest use of modal themes in Jazz. Mingus uses
unusual saxophone cries and hollers to simulate the human voice. Newer forms of
Jazz are being explored.
1956

AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces

Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus

Not just one of Rollins' great moments - one of the great

"monster" jazz sessions of all time, and, in "St. Thomas,"

one the first crossroads between Jazz and the Caribbean.
1956
Clifford Brown plays an informal gig at a Music City store in Philadelphia on
June 25. Later that night Clifford Brown, Richie Powell (Bud's brother) and

Richie's wife Nancy head west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In the early hours
of June 26, their car veers off the road killing all three. It was a great loss for
Jazz.
1956
Clifford Brown takes his place beside Jazz greats such as Charlie Parker and
Louis Armstrong.
1956
Pianist Bill Evans records New Jazz Conceptions which is

available on Original Jazz Classics. This is Bill's first effort

as a leader. The personnel are Bill, Teddy Kotick on bass
and Paul Motian on drums.
1956

Blue Note's Alfred Lion and Frank Woolf go to Small's Paradise in Harlem to

hear a Jazz organist named Jimmy Smith. Woolf describes the scene, "It was at
Small's in January of 1956. He was a stunning sight. A man in convulsions, face
contorted, crouched over in apparent agony, his fingers flying, his foot dancing
over the peddles. The air was filled with waves of sound I had never heard

before. A few people sat around, puzzled but impressed. Jimmy came off the
stand smiling...'So what do you think?' he asked. 'Yeah!' I said. That's all I could
say. Alfred Lion had already made up his mind." (Woolf quote found in the
Rosenthal book, page 112 - see bibliography)
1956
Piano player Cecil Taylor records for Transition with Steve Lacy on soprano

saxophone, Buell Neidlinger on bass and Dennis Charles on drums. The record
which they make is not a commercial success, but musicians take notice. The
music exhibits most of the devices that would later become Free Jazz.
1956
Pianist Horace Silver leaves the Jazz Messengers and drummer Art Blakey
becomes the leader.
1956
Duke Ellington's band performs at the Newport Jazz Festival. Duke's band devises
a landmark performance which is capped by an amazing tenor saxophone solo by
Paul Gonsalves on Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. Duke gets a new record
contract with Columbia.

1956
In Liverpool, England, an unknown teenager named John Lennon forms a group

called the Quarry Men. This group begins as a Skiffle (or Folk/Blues) group. The
group will eventually include George Harrison and Paul McCartney and will

evolve into the Beatles in the early 1960s. The Beatles owed a lot to the Trad
Jazz which was played in England during their childhood and adolescence. They
will eventually have their influences on Jazz also -- "the child is father to the
man."
1957
Bop still rules. All future Jazz should follow from it. But...will this happen?
1957
Monk appears on the CBS Television Show The Sound of Jazz in December.
Monk is rapidly becoming a leading figure in the world of Jazz.
1957
Cecil Taylor is invited to play the Newport Jazz Festival. His detractors are most
Bop musicians who are afraid of being pushed aside as they pushed aside the
Swingers only a decade or so before.
1958

This was a very busy day regarding jazz recordings. Some memorable sessions
were played:

The Miles Davis Sextet (Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane,
Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones) recorded three tracks (Dr.
Jeckyll; Sid's Ahead; Little Melonae) for Columbia Records at Columbia

30th Street Studios, NYC. The first two tracks were released on Milestones.

Cannonball Adderley recorded with his own quintet (Cannonball & Nat

Adderley, Junior Mance, Sam Jones, Jimmy Cobb) that very same day for

EmArcy Records at the Bell Sound Studios, NYC. The tracks (Our Delight;
Jubilation; What's New?; Straight, No Chaser) were released on

Cannonball's Sharpshooters. The remaining tracks for the album were

recorded two days later.

After that, this first Adderley quintet broke up. Nat Adderley: "Miles

offered to pay Cannonball two hundred dollars more per week than both of
us took out of the band, it was time to call it quits"(cited from the liner
notes of Verve's 'The EmArcy Small Group Sessions').

Meanwhile at the Universal Studios in Chicago, the Count Basie Orchestra

recorded two songs for the Chairman Of The Board album (Blues In Hoss'
Flat; H.R.H).

At the Travis Air Force Base, Fairfield, California, the Duke Ellington

Orchestra played a dance that was recorded and released as Volumes 2 & 6
of The Private Collection.

1958
The new Miles Davis group, featuring Coltrane, records Milestones in April. This

recording represents a significant shift toward modal jazz.

1958
On December 15, pianist Bill Evans records the unaccompanied piano solo Peace

Piece on which he improvises two repeated chords. What makes this recording

significant is that Evans draws heavily on George Russell's modal theory. It's one
of the first examples of modes in modern Jazz.
1958
Pianist Bill Evans records Everybody Digs Bill Evans with Sam Jones on bass

and Philly Joe Jones on drums. This album, which contains the innovative Peace

Piece, is available on Original Jazz Classics. I hope that Bill didn't come up with
this title! ... Just kidding. Riverside came up with the title to promote Bill in the

ranks of Jazz. The cover is a unique "all quotes" design featuring complimentary
blurbs from various people including Miles Davis, the first time the trumpeter
allowed himself to be quoted in such a manner about a fellow musician.
1958
Bill Evans is chosen "New Star" pianist in the Downbeat International Jazz
Critics Poll.
1958
Trumpeter Lee Morgan is now with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
1958

Sax player Benny Golson is now with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers for a
short while.
1958
Pianist Cecil Taylor plays the Great South Bay Festival with a group that
includes Buell Neidlinger on bass, Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone and Dennis

Charles on drums. Nat Hentoff gives them a good review. The resulting publicity

gets Taylor a recording date with United Artists which results in the LP Love for

Sale. Taylor will later go completely into Free Jazz and will gradually decline.
1958

Art Kane's photo of 57 Jazz greats on the steps of a Harlem Brownstone appears
in Esquire magazine. Some of the legendary musicians who showed up for the
10:00 a.m. photo shoot were: Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, Count Basie,

Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Milt
Hinton and Art Farmer.
1958
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin'

Jazz's most explosive drummer debuted his third version of

the Jazz Messengers with this instant hard-bop classic. It's
way too funky in here, thanks to compositions and

performances by Benny Golson, Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons (who

contributed the famous title track).

1958
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Jimmy Smith - The Sermon

A foreshadowing of Smith's awesome Back at the Chicken

Shack and Midnight Special, and defining moment of organ

jazz. Smith, Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller testify on the
side-long title track.
1959
This is the one jazz record owned by people who don't listen to jazz, and with
good reason. The band itself is extraordinary (proof of Miles Davis's masterful
casting skills, if not of God's existence), listing John Coltrane and Julian

"Cannonball" Adderley on saxophones, Bill Evans (or, on "Freddie Freeloader,"

Wynton Kelly) on piano, and the crack rhythm unit of Paul Chambers on bass

and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Coltrane's astringency on tenor is counterpoised to

Adderley's funky self on alto, with Davis moderating between them as Bill Evans
conjures up a still lake of sound on which they walk. Meanwhile, the rhythm

partnership of Cobb and Chambers is prepared to click off time until eternity. It
was the key recording of what became modal jazz, a music free of the fixed

harmonies and forms of pop songs. In Davis's men's hands it was a weightless

music, but one that refused to fade into the background. In retrospect every note
seems perfect, and each piece moves inexorably towards its destiny. --John Szwed

On the March 2 session the following tracks were recorded: 'So What', 'Freddie
Freeloader', and 'Blue In Green'. The remaining two tracks ('All Blues', 'Flamenco
Sketches') were recorded on April 22.
1959
Since its creation in 1958 A Great Day in Harlem has
become an icon of jazz photography. It is also recognized, in
the broader context of American photography, as a major

work. Through appearances on posters, postcards, in books

and magazines it is celebrated worldwide. Originally commissioned by Esquire

magazine, the underlying concept was simple: to create a group portrait of living
legendary jazz musicians on a Harlem street. However the photograph's

compositional brilliance, its historic importance, no less the complex logistics

required to organize the shoot, elevated Art Kane's achievement to a true tour de
force.
This was Art Kane's first assignment as a professional photographer.
1959
George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept is written about use of the modes in
Jazz. This is probably the first important text on Jazz theory. Modal Jazz will
soon emerge in full force.
1959
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

The best-selling jazz recording of the era (and a perfect introduction for the jazz
newbie), Kind of Blue helped introduce a new sound for jazz. Working from
relatively simple structures, the musicians here lay out wonderfully lyrical

extended improvisations. Generally considered the best Jazz album ever and still
sells 5,000 copies a week.
1959
In September, Coltrane plays on George Russell's big band recording New York,

New York (Decca) along with some of the biggest names in jazz.
1959

Coltrane also records Coltrane Jazz (Atlantic), which experiments with tone

polytonality. Polytonality involves playing a melody in one key over a chord

sequence in another.
1959
Influential tenor sax player Sonny Rollins takes another sabbatical from Jazz.
People think that he's off inventing a new kind of Jazz. At this point in time most
people believe Sonny to be as important to Jazz as Coltrane.
1959
The Ornette Coleman Quartet's stint at the Five Spot splits the Jazz world.
1959

AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces

Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come

After four decades, this disc remains true to its title.

Saxophonist Ornette Coleman solidified his group in 1959 to

the working quartet recorded here. They broke convention and provided a major
stepping stone on the road to free jazz
1959
Bill Evans forms trio with brilliant young bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul
Motian. Their work can be found on the excellent Portrait In Jazz on OJC.
1959
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out

What was conceived by pianist Brubeck as an adventure into

unusual time signatures ended up one of the most successful
records in jazz history, due in large part to its beautiful

melodies and the mesmerizing alto work of Paul Desmond.

1959
Cannonball Adderley hears little-known guitarist Wes Montgomery playing with
organist Melvin Rhyne and drummer Paul Parker in a west-side Indianapolis club
called the Missile Room. Adderley is so impressed he calls Riverside producer

Orin Keepnews about Wes and convinces Keepnews to record him. The result is

Montgomery's first album The Wes Montgomery Trio, which propels him into
Jazz guitar history.
1959
Armstrong finishes fifth in the Music USA all-time great Jazz musician poll.
1959
The French Jazz group Les Double Six is formed.
1960
The Jazz Messengers lineup of Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter,
Bobby Timmons, Jymie Merritt, and Art Blakey record The

Big Beat. Tracks:

The Chess Players

Sakeena's Vision

Politely

Dat Dere

Lester Left Town

It's Only A Paper Moon

1960

Red Garland records his solo album "Red Alone" for

Moodsville.
Bud Powell performs at the Essen Jazz Festival. The concert
recording is released by Black Lion.

1960
Free Jazz and Black rights become intertwined.
1960
Free Jazz and Modal Jazz are pushing Bop forms aside.
1960
In Free Jazz, it is as if the musicians have blown apart the older forms (New
Orleans, Swing and Bop) and represented them in a form that is musically
analogous to the Abstract Art of Jackson Pollock.
1960
Bop is becoming passe. In fact, Dixieland players at this point may be producing

more interesting music because the Dixieland form is more varied than Hard Bop.
The mainstream of Jazz (New Orleans > Swing > Bop) is drying up.
1960

The heyday of Soul Jazz (a popular form of Hard Bop) is beginning.

1960
Ornette Coleman finishes The Shape Of Jazz To Come in July after starting it in
October of 1959. The album features Ornette on alto sax, Don Cherry on pocket

trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, and can be found on
Atlantic CD.
1960
Ornette releases the anthem LP Free Jazz in December. This album can be found
on Atlantic CD. The players include Ornette on alto sax, Don Cherry on pocket
trumpet, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Charlie

Haden and Scott LaFaro on bass and Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins on drums.
The original album cover featured an appropriate Jackson Pollock painting. This
was one of the most important albums in the Free Jazz movement.
1960
Over six days in October, Coltrane records material for three albums. The first
one released, My Favorite Things, features his recorded debut on the soprano
saxophone. "My Favorite Things," a highly modal piece, will become a Jazz

favorite. Coltrane's quartet on this date includes pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist
Steve Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones.
1960
Coltrane's The Avant-Garde, which delves into Free Jazz, was also released

during 1960.
1960
Pianist Barry Harris moves to New York City. Barry records Barry Harris at the

Jazz Workshop with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes.

1960

Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter joins Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

1960
At what is first scheduled to be just another "blowing date," tenor saxophonist
Hank Mobley records the classic Soul Jazz album Soul Station. The rhythm

section includes Art Blakey, Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers. How could you
go wrong with these four first-rate musicians?
1960
Poll results printed in Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz list Duke Ellington,
Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Count Basie as top Jazz

figures in that order. This points out the lag between fan and musician appeal.
1961
Possession of previous editions of this singular set simply

won't do. After the Ellington at Newport and The Complete

Lady Day reissues, the engineers at Columbia/Sony

command respect as experts when it comes to authoritative, definitive, faithfully

represented remasters of indispensable jazz recordings.
This transitional group, between Miles' first great quintet with Coltrane and his
second with Wayne Shorter, is the equal of the first ensemble and more satisfying
than the second. Miles' chops were never better, and as if to make up for the

absence of Coltrane, he was playing with uncharacteristic fire and pyrotechnical

flare. Jimmy Cobb had practically erased the memory of Philly Joe Jones as the
ideal complement to Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly. No rhythm section ever
achieved a greater sense of vitality and vibrancy within the conventional 4/4

walking-bass pattern of mainstream modern jazz. (Many drummers would do well

to listen just to Cobb's ride cymbal, noting how little else is required to keep the
music fresh and flowing.)
Continue...
1961
Free Jazz is currently becoming more popular and it is making a number of
waves in the pool of Hard Bop.
1961
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Bill Evans - Waltz for Debby & Live at the Village

Vanguard

The laid-back character of Bill Evans's piano playing here

masks a serenely beautiful touch and wonderfully innovative

ideas. His inhumanly intuitive interactions with bassist Scott LaFaro remain

legendary. This is the best piano trio music ever recorded (and it's all live).
1961
Coltrane records Impressions and Live at the Village Vanguard (Impulse!) during
1961 Vanguard performances. The personnel on Impressions, released in

November, include Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie
Workman and Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. The title tune
is modal, but other pieces, such as "India," approach Free Jazz.
1961
Ornette Coleman records a few albums which are far less important than his
landmark Free Jazz albums.
1961
Pop Jazz singer Nancy Wilson and British Jazz pianist George Shearing team up
on The Swingin's Mutual. Critic Leonard Feather characterized it as "one of the
most logical and successful collaborations of the year."
1961
A Dixieland revival or Trad Jazz movement with a modified New Orleans style is
currently popular in Britain.
1961
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces

Oliver Nelson - Blues & The Abstract Truth

Some of Nelson's best work - as a composer, arranger AND saxophonist -

features his large ensemble soulfully tight-roping arrangement and improvisation.

A genuine masterpiece that has inspired musicians and arrangers for decades.
1962
Ornette Coleman is temporarily out of Jazz because of a salary dispute. Ornette

perceives (and is probably correct) that he is not making money like the other big
names in Jazz and goes on strike.
1962
Sonny Rollins puts together a band with Don Cherry on trumpet and Billy
Higgins on drums. This group will make the album Our Man in Jazz.
1962
Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz records the album Jazz Samba. This is a major

commercial success. The music here represents variations on Latin dance music.
This type of music becomes popular in nightclubs.
1962
The Latin Dance Jazz boom has begun. The first hit to break the charts wide
open is Desafinado followed by The Girl from Ipanema.
1962

Saxophonist Curtis Amy and his band record the album Tippin' On Through at
the famous jazz club The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, CA.
1963
Astrud Gilberto says that her husband, Joao, informed Stan
Getz that she "could sing at the recording". Creed Taylor

recalls that it took Getz's wife, Monica, to get both Astrud

and Joao into the recording studio; Mrs. Getz had a sense

that Astrud could make a hit. And Getz himself is on record saying that he

insisted on Astrud's presence over the others' objections. So who's right? What
does it matter? The Gilbertos, Getz, and the legendary Antonio Carlos Jobim

followed up the bossa nova success of Jazz Samba with this, the defining LP of
the genre. With one of the greatest hit singles jazz has ever known--each one
who hears it goes "Ahhh!"
1963
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Horace Silver - Song for My Father

One of the greatest Hard Bop albums, and not just from that
title track (honored in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number") but
also his classic "Lonely Woman."
1963
Saxophonist Gigi Gryce drops out of Jazz, never to return.

1963
Grant Green records his classic album Idle Moments. The guitarist gets ample
support from saxophonist Joe Henderson and vibist Bobby Hutcherson. This
landmark release earns Green the reputation as one of Jazz's most versatile
guitarists.
1963

Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Vince Guaraldi becomes a Gold Record winner

and earns the Grammy as Best Instrumental Jazz Composition. Guaraldi was best
known for his work on the "Peanuts" television specials.
1963
Asian and Middle Eastern instruments are added to Jazz by flutist Yusef Lateef.
Lateef also adds techniques to accommodate these new Jazz instruments.
1963
Pioneer Free Jazz pianist Herbie Nichols dies of Leukemia at age 44.
1963
Trumpeter Lee Morgan records The Sidewinder (Blue Note), which will rise to

number 25 on the Billboard pop album chart, impressive for a Jazz LP. Most of
the record is Hard Bop, though the title track has crossover appeal.
1964

A Love Supreme is a jazz album recorded by John Coltrane's

quartet on December 9, 1964 at the Van Gelder studio in
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The album is a four-part

suite, broken up into tracks: "Acknowledgement" (which

contains the famous mantra that gave the suite its name),

"Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm." It is intended to be a spiritual album,

broadly representative of a personal struggle for purity. The final track

corresponds to the wording of a devotional poem Coltrane included in the liner

notes.
1964
In October, trumpeter Bill Dixon organizes a series of Free Jazz concerts called

the October Revolution at the Cellar Cafe in New York, featuring John Coltrane,
Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and others. Out of this festival grows the Jazz
Composer's Guild, which includes Dixon, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, Cecil
Taylor, Paul Bley and Carla Bley, among others.
1964
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces

Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch (Blue Note)

Eric Dolphy was always a big fan of bird calls, and much of his playing here

reflects that natural sonority. This disc transports a relatively straightahead group
into adventurous, inventive territory--with dramatically successful results.
1964
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
John Coltrane - Love Supreme

One of Coltrane's most spiritually moving recordings, this

disc has been popular among devotees and neophytes alike.

It's a heart-felt celebration of divine love, with equal measures of devotion and

exploration. Recorded in December with his classic quartet: pianist McCoy Tyner,
bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones.
1964
Japanese impresario Tokutara Honda stages the World Jazz Festival in Japan.
Miles Davis is the biggest draw.
1965
AAJ Building a Jazz Library: Masterpieces
Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage (Blue Note)

Pianist Herbie Hancock's best record adopts a nautical angle,

with gentle waves of sound surrounding strong, forward-

sailing melodies. Maiden Voyage relies upon subtlety, but it

features wonderful group interaction and showcases some of Hancock's finest

playing.
1965
The classic fuzz box assumes popularity among rock guitarists, including Jimmy
Page, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, and Keith Richards (who uses a Gibson Fuzz

Box on "Satisfaction" in 1965). As effects technology develops, jazz players (and

even horn players like Miles Davis) will pick it up for use.
1967
The Beatles record the tremendously influential Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts

Club Band album. This album is not only influential on the Rock front. It will
influence all types of music including Jazz.
1970
Free jazz saxophone player Albert Ayler dies on November 5.
1970

Pianist Chick Corea, reedist/percussionist Anthony Braxton, bassist Dave Holland

and drummer Barry Altschul form the free jazz group Circle. They record Early

Circle and Circulus (Blue Note). The rhythm section of the group also records
Song of Singing (Blue Note) under Corea's name.
1971

In September, Thelonious Monk and a band including Art Blakey on drums and

Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet begins "The Giants of Jazz" world tour in New
Zealand. They would record at several venues in Europe. Shortly after the tour's
conclusion, Thelonious Monk records three Black Lion sessions (The London

Collection, Vol. 1-3) solo and with drummer Art Blakey and bassist Al
McKibbon.
1972

Hard bop trumpeter Lee Morgan is shot dead at 33 by his common-law wife,
Helen More, at Slug's, a New York City jazz club, on February 19.
1973
Pianist Herbie Hancock records the classic jazz/funk album

Head Hunters (Columbia), which includes "Chameleon" and

"Watermelon Man."
1974
Vibraphone player Gary Burton hires Berklee colleague Pat

Metheny, whom he met the year before at the Wichita Jazz

Festival, to join his newly expanded quintet. The group,

which includes Burton, Metheny, guitarist Mick Goodrick,

bassist Steve Swallow, and drummer Bob Moses, records the
album Ring (ECM).
1974
Jazz-rock trumpeter Bill Chase, leader of the group Chase, dies on August 9.

1975
The Thelonious Monk Quartet plays the Newport in New York Jazz Festival. The
Quartet, which includes Thelonious Jr., Larry Gales and Paul Jeffrey, appears at
the Lincoln Center.
1975
Pianist Keith Jarrett's Kln Concert (ECM) is one of the most successful solo
piano efforts in the history of jazz.
1975
Sax player Art Pepper returns to jazz after 15 years with Living Legend (OJC)
and brings with him an interest in classic bop.
1975
Quirky pop jazz vocalist Michael Franks records his first major label release, The

Art of Tea (Warner), with Joe Sample, Michael Brecker, David Sanborn and
Larry Carlton.
1976

Thelonious Monk's quartet appears at Carnegie Hall with guest trumpeter Lonnie
Hillyer in March, four months before his final public appearance at the Newport
Jazz Festival in July.

1977
Free Jazz drummer Sunny Murray states (Jazz Magazine, June) that "the music
(Free Jazz) didn't stop a decade ago."
1978
President Jimmy Carter hosts the First Annual White House Jazz Festival in

honor of Charles Mingus. Many prominent jazz musicians come to the event,
including Roy Eldridge, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cecil Taylor.
1978
Toshiko Akiyoshi's jazz orchestra places first in Downbeat magazine's readers'
poll. This is a first time accomplishment for a Japanese woman.
1978
Woody Shaw is rated top jazz trumpeter in a Downbeat magazine poll. His record

Rosewood (Columbia) is the number one jazz album in the same poll.
1980

Miles Davis begins to get back into jazz by playing his horn after four years of
abstinence.
1980
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis appears with Art Blakey's Jazz

Messengers on his first commercial recording, Live at Montreux and Northsea, at

age 18. Wynton's saxophonist brother Branford, trombonist Robin Eubanks, and
guitarist Kevin Eubanks also appear with the group.
1980
Drummer and keyboard player Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition fuses world
music, free jazz, bop and funk on Tin Can Alley (ECM).
1981
Guitarist Melvin Sparks made his name as a solid soul jazz player with the likes
of Charles Earland and Lou Donaldson. Another of his associates was drummer

Idris Muhammed, who appears on this, Sparks last album as a leader until a 1997
comeback, along with pianist Neal Creque and bassist Buster Williams. Sparks
wrote two of the tunes and Creque one, with the remaining two pieces the

standards "Misty" and "Speak Low." Certainly a period piece firmly in the Muse
aesthetic, it admirably carries on the soul jazz tradition.
1981
Trumpeter Miles Davis returns to jazz after a six year retirement. He is the
featured artist at the Kool Jazz Festival.
1982
The Kool Jazz Festival features Wynton and Branford Marsalis along with Bobby
McFerrin.

1982
Saxophonist Michael Brecker states (in an interview with Jazz Hot, Sept-Oct) that
his models were guitar players like Jimi Hendrix, not sax players.
1983
The CD is introduced to the general public. This new digital technology will

eventually spawn a huge nostalgia market for all types of music, including jazz.
One reason for this is that, even though CD's appear to be expensive, they are
virtually indestructible compared to vinyl.
1984
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis wins a jazz Grammy for the bop album Think of

One. Marsalis also wins a Grammy for classical music this same year. Later he
would state that it is harder to play jazz than classical.
1984
Miles Davis wins the Sonning Prize, an award from the Danish government
which normally goes to a non-jazz composer. This would result in the 1989
release Aura, composed by Palle Mikkelborg.
1984
Nigerian-born Sade Anu debuts with Diamond Life, a hybrid

of R&B passion, jazz finesse and pop accessibility that results in such hits as
"Smooth Operator" and "Your Love is King."
For more information about Sade, read Daniel Garrett's article Sade, a Smooth
Operator, sings of No Ordinary Love, and Is That A Crime?.
1985
On Cobra, recorded in 1985-86, alto sax player John Zorn combines many styles
of jazz in a novel "game piece" form of composition.
1986
The French government creates the Orchestre National de Jazz (ONJ).
1989
The British label Acid Jazz is recording groups with names like the Brand New
Heavies who play Jazz with a driving dance beat.
1989
Claude Barthelemy becomes director of the French Orchestre National de Jazz
(ONJ).
1990
British Acid Jazz band The Brand New Heavies break through with their selfentitled release. N'Dea Davenport adds vocal support to the pop-oriented tunes.

1990
Gunther Schuller reconstructs and records Charles Mingus' Epitaph for jazz
orchestra.
2008
Herbie Hancock's album River: The Joni Letters won the

GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year, making it the first

time a jazz artist has won Album of the Year since 1964.

Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, Corinne Bailey

Rae, Luciana Souza & Tina Turner, featured artists; Herbie

Hancock & Larry Klein, producers; Helik Hadar, engineer/mixer; Bernie

Grundman, mastering engineer.

Disclaimer: Though we have checked our facts, this timeline may contain

erroneous information. If you discover errors or omissions, please bring them to

our attention.

1.
2.
3.
4.
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7.
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50.

Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Miles Davis
Charlie Parker
John Coltrane
Dizzy Gillespie
Billie Holiday
Thelonious Monk
Charles Mingus
Count Basie
Lester Young
Ella Fitzgerald
Coleman Hawkins
Sonny Rollins
Sidney Bechet
Art Blakey
Ornette Coleman
Bill Evans
Art Tatum
Benny Goodman
Clifford Brown
Stan Getz
Jelly Roll Morton
Sarah Vaughan
Herbie Hancock
Bud Powell
Wayne Shorter
Fletcher Henderson
Django Reinhardt
Horace Silver
Dave Brubeck
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Cecil Taylor
King Oliver
Sun Ra
Gil Evans
Lionel Hampton
Art Pepper
Eric Dolphy
Oscar Peterson
Charlie Christian
Ben Webster
Fats Waller
Earl Hines
Woody Herman
Wes Montgomery
J. J. Johnson
John McLaughlin
Artie Shaw
Lee Morgan

Muhal Richard Adams

Gene Ammons
Nat King Cole
Alan Holdsworth
Dave Holland
Eddie Lang
James Moody
Oliver Nelson
Buddy Rich
Frank Sinatra
Joe Zawinul

51. David Murray

52. Chick Corea
53. Modern Jazz Quartet
54. Max Roach
55. Anthony Braxton
56. Bix Beiderbecke
57. Cannonball Adderley
58. Dexter Gordon
59. Keith Jarrett
60. Lee Konitz
61. Stan Kenton
62. Chet Baker
63. Roy Eldridge
64. Joe Henderson
65. McCoy Tyner
66. Gerry Mulligan
67. Benny Carter
68. Teddy Wilson
69. Lennie Tristano
70. Freddie Hubbard
71. Jimmy Smith
72. Mary Lou Williams
73. George Russell
74. Fats Navarro
75. Albert Ayler
76. Bennie Moten
77. Jimmie Lunceford
78. Wynton Marsalis
79. Charlie Haden
80. Erroll Garner
81. Billy Strayhorn
82. Meade Lux Lewis
83. Pat Metheny
84. Jack Teagarden
85. Johnny Hodges
86. Chick Webb
87. Jimmy Giuffre
88. Jaco Pastorius
89. Hank Mobley
90. Elvin Jones
91. Evan Parker
92. Paul Chambers
93. Ron Carter
94. Philly Joe Jones
95. Carla Bley
96. Bennie Golson
97. James Carter
98. Donald Byrd
99. Johnny Dodds
100. Glenn Miller

Louis Arm

Duke Ellin

Miles Da

Charlie P

Ten Jazz Albums to Hear Before You Die

By Sound of the City Tue., Nov. 13 2012 at 3:00 AM
15 Comments

Categories: Jazz
By Joseph Lapin
Because there are multiple decades of jazz, it's almost impossible to pick the top
10 albums of all time; the hip cats with their canes and cool shades will throw

their used saxophone reeds in my direction and call me a young whippersnapper.

But so many people out there, young or even a bit older, are curious about jazz,
and they're not exactly sure where to start. Think of this as a jazz bucket list,
filled with masterpieces of a true American music. Let's go!
10. Ornette Coleman
The Shape of Jazz to Come
The title of this album, when it came out in 1959, was the equivalent of Babe Ruth
pointing to the fences or Muhammad Ali proclaiming he was the greatest. It was an
album that said, you hear this sound, you hear what I'm laying down, everything is
about to change. Ornette Coleman went from playing the sax to the trumpet, and he
received scorn from Miles Davis who publicly questioned Coleman's sanity and
technical ability. And because the album is often credited as being the anchor to
avant-garde jazz albums, it might just sound a bit strange to the newbie's ear. But
Coleman was trying to move away from tradition, shattering conventional ideas of
harmony and axing the piano, to create a new dimension of sound. Give it a shot -free of expectations.
9. Sonny Rollins
The Bridge
When you put on The Bridge, take a tumbler of whiskey and imagine you're staring out
at New York City. After a sabbatical from music, Sonny Rollins returned triumphantly in
1962 with this work, whose title track was named after the Williamsburg Bridge, which
connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. It's where Rollins used to head to practice. He's a
sax player who wanted to be his own man, an individual. This album is accessible to
the novice.

8. Herbie Hancock
Head Hunters
Herbie Hancock helped bring the synthesizer and the Fender Rhodes Electric Piano to
mass appeal. This 1973 album was influenced by Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. Even
if you don't like jazz but you love funk and soul, you'll likely enjoy this one. At one
point, Head Hunters was the best selling jazz album of all time. Be warned though,
there is experimentation happening here. Still, the funky drums should keep you
driving forward.
7. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Ella and Louis
Imagine it's a Friday morning, and you have the day off. It's you and your significant
other. You have nowhere to go, and it's raining. Well, this is the album you need to be
playing to create that perfect atmosphere -- an album with so much space, soaring
trumpet solos, and a duet so unique and soulful even a jazz newbie can't ignore its
grip on their heartstrings. It's a 1956 album dripping with nostalgia. Plus, the band
features Oscar Peterson (piano) and Buddy "Freaking" Rich (drums). Best to listen to
an album with such a dreamy atmosphere to ensure, at least once, that you feel
romantic and drenched in "Moonlight in Vermont."
6. Miles Davis
Bitches Brew
I'm not saying that you have to like this album. But it's one you just have to listen to
before you die; it's kind of like looking at Abstract Expressionism or listening to Morton
Feldman -- it just might not jive with you. Bitches Brew was released in 1970. The
first time I heard this album, I thought it was a joke. In fact, I was kind of pissed.
Where was the melody? Where was the catchy rhythm? Well, it's so shocking the
first time you hear it that it forces you to question what jazz and music can be. It
makes you think about structure and limitations of our current music. The prison of
the human ear. Ah, enough of that. Just listen to the album. Chaos and cacophony
defined.
5. The Thelonious Monk Quartet
Monk's Dream
Probably one of the hippest figures in jazz, Thelonious Monk was a genius who was
able to see notes on the piano that didn't even exist in Western music. When he would
sit down on the piano, he would strike two half notes (notes next to each other that
sound awful when played together) to simulate the imaginary notes between the two
piano keys. He was so out there and amazing, and Monk's Dream (1963) is just one
example, an imprint of strange and beautiful blaps and boops that were being
electrified in his mind. The work is about color; it's a visual experience as much as an
auditory one.
4. The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Time Out
This 1959 album was the soundtrack for parties in New York City and the staple in any
bachelor pad. Without it juicing the sophisticated and artsy minds of New Yorkers and
beatniks alike, many of us probably wouldn't have been born. At the time, it was
considered an artsy piece, but today, the deviation from standard time and the hip
swing might just feel traditional. Songs like "Take Five" have been ubiquitous in our

culture -- movies, television, and (sadly) malls. It's an album that screams Don Draper
and nightcaps. Check it out and find yourself whisked away to another time and place.
3. Charles Mingus
Ah Um
Charles Mingus is the godfather of the upright bass, and in 1959, he put out Ah Um,
which many consider to be a masterpiece and cemented his status as a legendary
composer. He combined elements of gospel and blues. The opening track, "Better
Get It Into Your Soul," is not just a ruckus jubilation; it's a command -- the driving
brass, the dixie-land rapture and the voice calling out in joy -- to stop doing whatever
you're doing and take into your heart and body this music. It's a roller coaster ride
through fast and slow tempos, cacophony and perfect harmony, and a touch of
madness.
2. John Coltrane
Blue Train
John Coltrane is clearly one of the leaders of the jazz identity. If you think about the
course of hip-hop, then can you really imagine groups like Tribe Called Quest or even
someone like Tupac without a cultural and musical prophet like Coltrane? Of course, A
Love Supreme is an incredible album, but Blue Train just has so much life and color
that it's impossible to ignore. Recorded in 1957 on Blue Note, Blue Train was
Coltrane's favorite album. It will likely become one of yours soon, too.
1. Miles Davis
Kind of Blue
I can still remember the first time I heard this album. I was 17, and I was driving my
Subaru Legacy Wagon in the rain. I drove the car to my grandparent's house, and put
it on. It was only about a five-minute drive, but I ended parked outside of their house,
the windshield wipers swatting away rain -- the album blaring. I sat in the driveway
until the album ended, and, well, music was never the same for me. It's a
composition, released in 1959, that is often considered the definitive jazz album.
Honestly, there are some jazz purists who probably would die if they found out our
generation was unfamiliar with it. Just listen to who was featured: Coltrane, Bill Evans,
Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb. If you're about to go sky diving,
and you're not sure if you're going to survive, play this album on the car ride over.
Why is it so great? Let's not try to put it into words. It might be something unsayable.

Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time

The jazz albums listed below are among the greatest ever recorded. Mostly

selected from the "modern" jazz music era of 40's to the 70's, these recordings

captured some of the passion and emotion that these musicians spent a lifetime
developing.

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

While it is one of the best selling jazz albums of all time (4X Platinum), many
consider this to be THE best jazz album of all time. This may be because this
unrehearsed recording session from 1959 marks a great turning point in jazz

history as well as showcasing the top form of some legendary musicians. Miles
showed up to the Columbia recording studios with some rough melodies and

chords jotted down and the band proceeded to track each song in a couple takes.
That's how Miles liked to do it, he made sure the music was spontaneous and in
the moment. This album also started a departure from bebop as the songs are

simple melodies over very simple chord progressions leaving room for the deep

improvisational exploration in the spur of the moment. What a treat it is to listen

to time and time agai

A Love Supreme - John Coltrane

This album completely revolutionized the jazz scene in 1965 and even today its
influence can be found in many musical styles. Instead of showcasing the complex and
dense harmonic post-bebop language he had developed with Davis and Monk,
Coltrane plays over simple chords freely with raw spiritual passion. The four songs on
this album convey emotions of anger, joy, sadness, ecstasy, tragedy and triumph.
Many types artists such as writers or painters who use this album to inspire energy
and passion from within themselves for their own personal art. This album also marked
a turning point in Coltrane's playing as he ventured into performing music from it's
deepest, most spiritual roots rather from a technical perspective.

Time Out - The Dave Brubeck Quartet

Dave Brubeck created a masterpiece which became the first instrumental jazz

album to sell over a million copies. The single, "Take Five" was a number one
hit on music charts which is outstanding for a jazz song, especially a song with

5/4 time signature. This album had a strong influence from Eastern European
culture as Brubeck used many of their rhythms and time signatures. The complex

rhythms he uses sound unique yet very natural and easy to listen to, probably the
reason for it's success.
Ellington At Newport - Duke Ellington

This historic concert was a triumphant moment for Ellington's band... It was 1956
and many big bands were struggling due to the rise of bebop and modern small

group format. So at the 3rd annual Newport Jazz Festival, Ellington attempted to

please the crowd with some new suites and arrangements, but the crowd was very
sedated as usual. Then finally on a two-section song, Dimuendo and Crescendo in
Blue, Duke had the two sections connect with a sax solo by Paul Gonzalves and

allowed him to play the solo as long as he felt like playing. He only usually took
a couple choruses but this time Gonzalves took a 27 chorus solo that eventually

had the crowd off its feet and dancing! This historical moment changed the face

of jazz and also gave Ellington's band some new success. Duke's band continued
in this popularity for 18 more years.
Jazz At Massey Hall - The Quintet

This album appears reissued under the name "The Greatest Concert Ever". It is an
all star lineup of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus,

and Max Roach; all who were prominent in the development of bebop about 15
years beforehand (1953) and thus were all seasoned veterans by the time of the
concert. This is the only recording of these five legends playing together and

everyone plays brilliantly. In addition, the recording quality is very good for it's
time so it is a great album to really hear these masters perform at their best.
The Best of the Hot 5 & Hot 7 Recordings - Louis Armstrong

No greatest jazz album list is complete without Louis Armstrong. Besides being a

legendary entertainer and musician, he helped bring jazz out of it's dixieland roots

into a more contemporary sound. This album is a compilation of some of his best
recordings from his early years in the 1920's as he set up the template for

modern jazz era to come having musician taking turns soloing individually rather
than the group jam style of dixieland. The musicians on these recordings are
tight, joyous, and even a little silly at times. Louis Armstrong is jazz's first
superstar and this album showcases him at his best.
Blue Train - John Coltrane

Recorded in 1957, this album was Coltrane's first album as a leader. It's very
interesting to hear how Coltrane was playing before he started heading to the

freer, passionate playing that he later evolved to during the mid 60's. Did you
know that only a few years earlier, Coltrane was considered just a mediocre
player? He studied and performed so much that he has became an icon of

musical discipline. He was known to constantly practice after gigs late into the
night while other band members partied. These songs and performances show his
immense strength and power he had developed up to this point.
Getz/Gilberto - Stan Getz & Joo Gilberto

This album was very popular and even won the 1965 Grammy Award for Best
Album. Additionally, it created a bossa nova craze in the United States as people
embraced it's lush chords and subtle, mellow style. Stan Getz, Joao and Astrud
Gilberto are extremely graceful and intimate as they float along through this

wonderful material composed by the great Antonio Carlos Jobim. I think the best
word to describe this album is relaxing.
Mingus Ah Um - Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus had a way of making his bands sound complex, original, and of
course swing like crazy. In addition to the swinging tunes, there are some

amazing ballads filled with colorful and inventive horn arrangements. I personally
love the song "Fables of Faubus", a track dedicated to the infamous former

governor of Arkansas who strongly opposed racial integration in schools in 1957.

It is a great example of musicians using their art to make a powerful political
statement.

Concert By the Sea - Erroll Garner

Errol Garner is a legendary pianist who has a wonderful recognizable style. It's

worth mentioning that he couldn't read a note of written music and plays entirely
by ear. This album is very interesting both harmonically and rhythmically. His

left hand swings so hard in a way that was not typical of other pianists. While
his playing exudes joy he is also quite technically fluent and plays extravagant

arrangements of many popular standards like Autumn Leaves and I'll Remember
April.

Bitches Brew - Miles Davis

This album was a triumph for Miles Davis later in his career in 1970. Two

drummers, two bassists, three keyboardists consisting mostly of free spontaneous

electric improvisation. Also for the first time, the recording tape was sliced and
diced a bit in the studio to make certain parts repeat and to add effects which

was unheard of on a jazz record. Yet even with all that... or maybe because of all
that... it is Miles' second best selling album of all time behind Kind of Blue.

When it was released, people were debating whether it was a great album or just
experimental nonsense but today in hindsight it is easy to see that it is truly is a
timeless masterpiece.
Saxophone Colossus - Sonny Rollins

This is one of Sonny Rollins best albums he ever recorded among the hundreds
he has made over a long lifetime that still continues today. Recorded in 1956,

every song is feels so sophisticated yet soulful and smooth. It only has five songs

but each one is a hit and Sonny's playing never fails. Sonny plays complex bebop
that is very accessible because he plays every note with conviction and has a
great sense of melody.