From a Storyville cornet to Bitches Brew. Eighteen pages on the music America gave the world.
Jazz coalesced in New Orleans in the first decade of the 20th century — Black and Creole musicians fusing blues, ragtime, brass-band march music, and Caribbean rhythms in dance halls, parade routes, and the red-light district called Storyville.
The first jazz record — Livery Stable Blues by the Original Dixieland Jass Band — was cut in 1917, by a white group; it sold over a million. Buddy Bolden, the legendary cornetist named in nearly every origin account, was committed to a state hospital in 1907 and never recorded. By 1917 the U.S. Navy had shut down Storyville to keep sailors out, and the music followed the Mississippi north to Chicago.
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (Chicago, 1923) put the new music on wax with full personality. His second cornetist, Louis Armstrong, then went to New York and made the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (1925–1928) — the records on which jazz becomes a soloist's art.
1935 to 1945. Jazz becomes pop music. Three minutes per side, fifteen players in matching jackets, the rhythm section riding a steady four.
Benny Goodman's January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert — featuring Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa, and a closing Sing, Sing, Sing — is the moment the music moved into the cultural center. Count Basie's band out of Kansas City built a different vocabulary: blues-based, head arrangements, Lester Young's tenor floating over Jo Jones' high-hat. Duke Ellington — the era's greatest composer — wrote for specific players in his band, voicing chords the way no other arranger did. Billie Holiday's first Columbia sides are from this period; so are Ella Fitzgerald's with the Chick Webb Orchestra.
1944 onward. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke. Faster tempos, harmonic substitutions, melodies that sound like solos and solos that sound like the melody.
Bebop happened in small clubs — Minton's in Harlem, the Onyx and the Three Deuces on 52nd Street — and on small-group records made for Dial and Savoy. Parker's Ko Ko (1945, on the changes of Cherokee) is a fair candidate for the moment the new language is fully formed. Bebop's harmonic vocabulary — flat-five substitutes, ii–V–I patterns sliding chromatically — became the standard tongue of every jazz musician after.
COOL — Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions (1949–50, with Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz) traded heat for color. Lennie Tristano taught from a New York studio. The West Coast — Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck — turned the new language quieter, and put it on college campuses. Brubeck's Time Out (1959) and its 5/4 hit Take Five made jazz a Billboard fixture again.
HARD BOP — Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley, the early Coltrane: bop reconnected to gospel, blues, and the church. Blue Note Records, with Rudy Van Gelder engineering and Reid Miles designing the sleeves, was the label of record. Bobby Timmons' Moanin' (1958), Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder (1964), Horace Silver's Song for My Father (1965).
In 1959 — the same year Miles cut Kind of Blue — Ornette Coleman opened a six-week run at the Five Spot in New York with an alto saxophone made of plastic and no piano in the band. The album was titled The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Free jazz dissolved fixed chord changes and steady tempo. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1964) is its consecration; Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders pushed further. The AACM in Chicago (founded 1965) — Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams — extended free playing into composed structures and ritual. Ornette's late-period harmolodic theory and Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960) named a movement.
Miles Davis plugged in. In a Silent Way (1969) used a Fender Rhodes wash; Bitches Brew (1970) was edited together by producer Teo Macero from hours of tape. The personnel — Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette — went on to form Weather Report, Return to Forever, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Headhunters. Hancock's Head Hunters (1973) was the first jazz record to go platinum.
The post-fusion landscape splintered: ECM-style chamber jazz (Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, 1975), the M-Base school (Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson), the hip-hop-literate young guns (Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding), the British post-fusion of Sons of Kemet and Nubya Garcia.
The Hot Fives & Sevens (1925–28). Made the soloist central.
Composer-bandleader. Far East Suite, Black, Brown and Beige.
Lady Day. Strange Fruit (1939); Lady in Satin (1958).
Bird. The Dial and Savoy sessions; Charlie Parker with Strings.
Co-founder of bebop, importer of Afro-Cuban rhythm.
Angular, the secret architect. Brilliant Corners (1956).
Five style changes in one career. Kind of Blue (1959); Bitches Brew (1970).
From sideman to spiritual seeker. Giant Steps; A Love Supreme.
Free jazz prophet. The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959).
Harpist, organist, composer. Journey in Satchidananda (1971).
Pianist, electric pioneer. Maiden Voyage; Head Hunters.
The new West Coast. The Epic (2015).
Paul Desmond's tune, in 5/4. The single went gold; the album, Time Out, became Columbia's first million-selling jazz LP.