The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

George Lewis,

Lu Watters founded a traditional jazz group in 1940, the Yerba Buena Jazz Band,

Turk Murphy,

Claude Thornhill Orchestra.

Orchestra USA

American Jazz Orchestra.

Jobim’s compositions, with their mixture of impressionist harmonies, distinctive melodies, and bittersweet lyrics, rank among the finest popular songs of the era.

In time, “The Girl from Ipanema” became an overplayed cocktail lounge anthem. But Jobim’s entire body of work is distinguished by dozens of outstanding pieces, and his name is not out of place alongside those of Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, and Porter in the pantheon of those who made art song out of pop tunes.

João Gilberto was the perfect performer of this music. His gently stuttering guitar beat epitomized the bossa rhythm, and his whispering vocals p...

Los Angeles–based saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards, and Wardell Gray

Many other gifted players—Harold Land, Curtis Counce, Dupree Bolton, Frank Butler, Carl Perkins, Pony Poindexter, Roy Porter—met similar fates.

Perhaps even more important than clubs like the Lighthouse were the independent record companies on the West Coast, notably Les Koenig’s Contemporary label, Richard Bock’s Pacific label, and the Weiss brothers’ Fantasy outfit.

Capitol Records in Hollywood would enter the big leagues with its quasi-monopoly on sophisticated pop, as sung by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Nancy Wilson, and other name

Although the West Coast sound has often been criticized as overly stylized and conventional, the work of many leaders of the movement—Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers, Dave Brubeck—reveals the exact opposite: a playful curiosity and a desire to experiment and broaden the scope of jazz music were the calling cards of their efforts.

It was perhaps this very openness to new sounds that allowed many later leaders of the jazz avant-garde—Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Paul Bley—to hone their styles while resident on the Coast.

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper embodied a similar contradiction between the man and his music.

series of exceptional albums for the Galaxy and Contemporary labels documented this transformation and enabled Pepper to mount a major comeback after more than a decade of semi-obscurity.

Art Pepper, Bud Shank, Lennie Niehaus, and Paul Desmond, among others, exemplified this warm, dulcet-toned approach.

Tadd Dameron.

Critics would later acknowledge Davis’s 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival as the turning point in his career.

Denny Zeitlin’s

voracious reader, Coltrane’s interests ranged widely, with everything from Aristotle to Edgar Cayce finding its way to his bookshelves, as well as The Autobiography of a Yogi (suggested by Sonny Rollins) and Krishnamurti’s Commentaries on Living (recommended by Bill Evans).

For his practice sessions, Coltrane favored Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns.

Benny Golson

Jazztet, a combo that he led with Art Farmer.

Woody Shaw,

Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’s 1951 recording with Bill Doggett was a pioneering effort in popularizing the tenor-and-organ combination.

Around this same time, Wild Bill Davis established an organ trio that would also prove influential. But it was not until the arrival of Jimmy Smith on the jazz scene in the mid-1950s that the Hammond organ achieved wide recognition as a legitimate jazz instrument.

Larry Young,

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms—although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political.

Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher whose writings were widely read during this period, had built a theory of aesthetics on such grounds, celebrating art that refused to follow the strict ordering, the bureaucratic control, the confining rules of modern capitalist society. Jacques Attali, in his influential 1977 manifesto Noise, proclaimed that music—defined as “the organization of noise”—“symbolically signifies the channeling of violence.”

Impure at its birth, jazz grew ever more so as it evolved. Its history is marked by a fondness for musical miscegenation, by its desire to couple with other styles and idioms, producing new, radically different progeny.

It showed no pretensions, mixing as easily with vernacular musics—the American popular song, the Cuban son, the Brazilian samba, the Argentinian tango—as with concert hall fare. Jazz in its contemporary form bears traces of all these passages. It is the most glorious of mongrels.

It had become more than a style of music—it was a perspective that seemingly could encompass all sounds.

Brecker Brothers

Zappa always chose to distance himself from jazz—it was, he joked, the “music of unemployment.” On other occasions, he would announce: “Jazz is not dead. . . . It just smells funny.”

Us3’s debut recording quickly became the fastest-selling jazz-rap effort to date, attracting many buyers who neither hung out at dance halls nor went to jazz clubs. The band became the first Blue Note recording act to go platinum, selling a million copies in the United States—an ironic turn of events given how much of the creative energy on this CD resulted from appropriating the work of jazz legends who had never enjoyed much financial success.

Bill Laswell tinkered with tapes from the trumpeter’s electric period to create new versions of the old music. Laswell is credited with “reconstruction & mix translation” on the resulting Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969–1974 release—vague descriptors, but all too indicative of the new state of affairs in jazz in which the roles of musician, producer, and engineer were not quite as distinct as they once were.

While Davis was making cover versions of pop hits, the M-Base Collective, a group of young New York players that included Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Geri Allen, and Cassandra Wilson, was taking a different approach to revitalizing funk-oriented playing in the jazz world.

As a result, jazz would be forever linked with a style of easy listening music that many opinion leaders in the art form would prefer not to exist—or at least not inside the gated jazz community—and which, they griped, simply encroached on the livelihoods of legit acts in their field.

At a time when jazz was largely excluded from television and commercial radio, and its most cherished masters could walk unrecognized down the streets of every major city in the land, the word jazz still retained a mystique that marketers often try to usurp.

The publication of Albert Murray’s book Stomping the Blues in 1976 served as an influential attempt to recall jazz to its origins as African American music.

Her 1956 release Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook ranks among the biggest-selling jazz albums of the decade, put Verve on a firm financial footing, and even impressed Cole Porter himself, who reportedly remarked: “My, what marvelous diction that girl has.”

Pass’s 1973 solo recording Virtuoso attracted attention for the guitarist’s speed of execution and astonishing technical mastery of the instrument.

Inspiring comparisons with Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, Virtuoso justifiably ranks among the half-dozen most important recordings of modern jazz guitar music.

Carmen McRae and Betty Carter, who had first recorded as leaders in the 1950s, made clear that the Billie Holiday tradition could still sound fresh and new decades later.

Sheila Jordan took a similar tack, avoiding conventional readings of standards in favor of a more deeply personalized approach, best shown in her collaborations with pianist Steve Kuhn.

Mel Tormé, who had refined a virtuosic singing style in his early years and flirted with crossover stardom, now found a ready audience for his serious jazz work in this period, which included successful projects with George Shearing, Marty Paich, and others.

Tony Bennett, who had expanded his audience as a pop-oriented singer in the 1960s, rediscovered his jazz roots during the following decade, as demonstrated most clearly in two m...

Rather than being its cause, Marsalis’s success was very much a product of this emerging historical consciousness.