The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

His clarinet playing from this period captures a laconic elegance, galaxies apart from the pyrotechnics of the Benny Goodman/Artie Shaw schools then in fashion, while his tenor efforts produced classic saxophone statements on “Lester Leaps In” and “Dickie’s Dream.”

Young is even more in the spotlight on his stellar trio recordings with pianist Nat King Cole f...

But perhaps the most unusual combo performance from this period finds Young and several Basie colleagues joining Goodman for a 1940 session that also featured Charlie Christian. This music, unreleased for many years, adds another valuable perspective on Young’s saxophone work, which stands out, even i...

his live recordings in Washington, DC, from 1956, preserved on tape by pianist Bill Potts and released commercially only decades later, testify that Young could still play eloquently in his final years.

Of all of Young’s legacies from his best years, his recordings with singer Billie Holiday hold a special position in the jazz pantheon.

By the middle of the 1940s, subpar jazz players or maudlin violins had replaced the all-star bands of earlier years.

The next year Holiday appeared on a television show, The Sound of Jazz, fronting a superb band that also reunited her with Lester Young, and delivered a finely etched performance of “Fine and Mellow.”

It is often cited, with justification, as the most moving jazz moment ever captured on film.

Indeed, the riff—in essence, a repeated motif over changing harmonies, sometimes given a syncopated kick through a displacement caused by a contrast between the length of the phrase and the underlying meter—may have been the undisputed musical signature of the era (as witnessed by the success of “Opus One,” “In the Mood,” “A String of Pearls,” “Flying Home,” and other like numbers), but apparently no one had told Ellington.

Jimmy Blanton—

From its earliest days, jazz had been a forward-looking art, continually incorporating new techniques, more expansive harmonies, more complex rhythms, more intricate melodies.

The concept of progress has played a modest role in most ethnic and folk music traditions. Those who draw connections between jazz and African music miss this important difference.

Almost from the start, jazz players embraced a different mandate, accepting their role as entertainers and pursuing experimentation with an ardent zeal.

Given this feat, the rise of a more overt modernism in the early 1940s should not be viewed as an abrupt shift, as a major discontinuity in the music’s history. It was simply an extension of jazz’s inherent tendency to mutate, to change, to grow.

Jazz had already revealed its ability to swallow other musical idioms—the march, the blues, the spiritual, the American popular song, the rag—and make them a part of itself.

To do the same with Stravinsky and Hindemith, Schoenberg and Ravel presented, no doubt, an extraordinary challe...

It survived in the interstices of the jazz world.

In short, modern jazz was an underground movement, setting the pattern for all the future underground movements of the jazz world, initiating the bunker mentality that survives to this day in the world of progressive jazz.

One recalls Parker’s alleged statement that an improviser should be able to use any note against any chord—it was simply a matter of placing it in the right context.

The rhythmic pulse of this new music instead traced its lineage to the Midwest and Southwest, and especially to Kansas City.

The shimmering high-hat sound of a Jo Jones, the crackling guitar lines of a Charlie Christian, the 4/4 walking lines of a Walter Page or a Jimmy Blanton, the sparse piano comping of a Count Basie—each anticipated crucial elements that would come to define the bebop rhythmic sensibility.

This combative, macho culture is rarely discussed, but has long persisted as a core value within the jazz community, perhaps to an excessive degree.

Kenny Clarke

Cab Calloway,

Billy Eckstine

Sonny Stitt

Fats Navarro,

Tadd Dameron,

Gil Fuller,

Phil Woods,

Jackie McLean,

It’s not the notes you play, it’s those you leave out,” he had once cryptically explained—

Herbie Nichols, Richard Twardzik, Randy Weston, Mal Waldron, and Elmo Hope,

Lennie Tristano’s impact on the development of jazz piano is perhaps even more difficult to gauge than Monk’s. During most of his life, Tristano remained an outsider in the jazz world.

But, for the most part, Tristano preferred to make music in the company of his students and disciples. Two of these, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, become major jazz figures in their own right.

Examples of this musical chemistry can be found not just on the sessions with Tristano but also in other settings, for example, their artful 1955 collaboration for the Atlantic label and their stunning 1959 sessions with Bill Evans at the Half Note.

Throughout his career, Oscar Peterson wore the heavy mantle of being cited as heir and successor to Art Tatum as the greatest virtuoso of modern jazz piano.

Charlie Barnet had been the first to draw on the emerging modern

Woody Herman,

The First Herman Herd

Jimmy Giuffre

Stan Kenton

Art Pepper

Maynard Ferguson,

Frank Rosolino

Lee Konitz

Zoot Sims

Like Ellington, Sun Ra rarely featured his own piano work—although his few solo recordings, especially the magnificent Monorails and Satellites session from 1966, showed that he needed no accompanists to weave his richly textured musical tapestries.

Joe Williams

Bunk Johnson,