We've got the jazz: music as modern history
Jazz is the foundation of almost everything we listen to today.
Jazz is a living document of history and culture. Simultaneously youthful and historic, singular yet difficult to define, it's a music capable of containing a multitude of feelings from brilliant, conflicted and era-defining artists, often in the same note.
Jazz is a fluid form of music that has gone through many iterations over more than 100 years, yet one element has remained almost ever-present: improvisation. During Prohibition in the 1920s, speakeasies pulsed to the fast, syncopated hot jazz of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. These illicit venues helped turn the music into a cultural phenomenon, and define an era that author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the "Jazz Age."
Swing jazz
During the Great Migration in the United States, jazz travelled north to Chicago and New York. Louis Armstrong placed the improvised solo at the music's center, stretching phrases behind and ahead of the beat and helping define swing's rhythmic elasticity. By the 1930s, big bands carried that feeling into larger arrangements, dividing brass and reeds into sections supported by piano, guitar, walking bass and drums. Duke Ellington expanded what swing could contain.
Growing up in a stable middle-class Washington, D.C. household, Ellington moved to New York in time for the Harlem Renaissance. He absorbed the ragtime and early piano styles of James P. Johnson and Willie "the Lion" Smith and expanded jazz compositionally, using the individual tones of his orchestra as a palette as heard in the autumnal classic "In a Sentimental Mood" (1935).
Bebop
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were among bebop's principal architects, playing alto saxophone and trumpet respectively with blistering speed, complex harmonic knowledge and near-telepathic interplay. Between them, they produced defining compositions including Gillespie's "Groovin' High" (1947 but released here in 1955) and the co-written "Anthropology" (performed live in 1949).
Thelonious Monk was another important bridge from this period. He played how he looked, with extreme eccentricity. Monk used dissonant chords and treated the piano like a percussion instrument attacking the keys with ferocity, which contrasted powerfully with the short sharp gaps of silence he deployed strategically in classics like "Straight, No Chaser" (1967).
Monk's avant-garde style was originally dismissed by critics as awkward and record labels as "too difficult" for mass market acceptance. Even Miles Davis famously remarked that he wondered why Monk insisted on playing combinations of chords that "sounded wrong". However, alongside Duke Ellington, Monk's compositions are among the most widely performed jazz works.
Bebop often took the chord sequences of popular songs — particularly 32-bar AABA standards, comprising two repeated sections, a contrasting bridge and a final return — and replaced their melodies with intricate new compositions.
Cool and modal jazz
The 1950s produced several responses to bebop. Cool jazz was inspired by the serene style of Lester Young, but is most strongly associated with Miles Davis, who started out playing bebop but was less aggressive and busy with his playing than pioneers such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Cool jazz generally favored slower, quieter dynamics and restrained phrasing using little to no vibrato.
Artists like Davis, Chet Baker and Stan Getz made jazz with a classical influence and lighter tones with unusual instruments like the French horn, tuba, flute or oboe. Unsurprisingly, the languid style flourished in California during the 1950s with Chet Baker Sings (1954) among the defining albums of the period thanks to its blend of smooth trumpet playing and soft, melancholic vocals.
The era's defining jazz album retained cool jazz's space and restraint while bringing modal jazz to a much wider audience. Kind of Blue (1959) by Miles Davis has sold more than five million copies in the US alone since its release and is widely recognized as one of the most influential jazz records of all time. For many, Kind of Blue isn't just a jazz album but the jazz album, opening the door to generation after generation of new listeners.
The band assembled for Kind of Blue included John Coltrane (who was months away from recording Giant Steps [1960]), Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb — an extraordinary concentration of players who would shape the following decade of jazz.
Cool jazz describes an overall style and feeling, while modal jazz describes how the music is harmonically organised. Instead of moving rapidly through a sequence of chords, a composition may remain in one mode, a scale with its own interval pattern and tonal character, for several bars.
On "So What" (1959), for example, the musicians improvise for 16 bars in D Dorian, move for eight bars to E-flat Dorian, then return to D. Both modal and cool created alternatives to the crowded harmonies and rhythmic language of bebop, but it's inaccurate to describe one as a synonym of the other.
John Coltrane's "Impressions" (1963) and later modal explorations are built from relatively static harmony but sound nothing like the restraint associated with Chet Baker. On Kind of Blue, Miles Davis brought the two together: the music retained cool jazz's space and restraint while using modes to give its improvisers greater melodic freedom.
Free and spiritual jazz
Modal jazz reduced the number of chord changes, giving soloists greater melodic freedom over scales or modes. At the same time, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and later Albert Ayler pushed into free jazz, loosening or abandoning predetermined chords and conventional song structures.
The music instead relied on timbre, intensity and spontaneous group interaction. Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders took this freedom into more meditative territory, combining jazz with devotional music, drones and non-Western instrumentation.
What does Alice Coltrane sound like, for those who only know the name? Heavenly harp, like a thousand silver coins on a spiral staircase. She met John Coltrane in the early 1960s, several years after he had kicked an ugly heroin habit (a scourge of many in jazz music) and partway through an intense spiritual reawakening and prolific period of music making.
The result? His 1964 masterpiece, A Love Supreme: a four-part suite structured like a devotional prayer. The album was both a musical triumph and a literal offering of gratitude to God for delivering him from addiction. In the original liner notes, Coltrane wrote of experiencing a "richness, a joy and a completeness" that drove his subsequent art.
Alice and John had three children together and married in 1965. They meditated together, studied texts and are said to have shared a deep creative connection. John died two years later, aged just 40, due to liver cancer. It's often overlooked, but Alice had a long history in music before meeting John, with foundations in European classical, gospel and straight-up bebop. Yet, having joined John's band in 1966, she embraced a looser style of play.
After John's death, Alice made the harp and organ central to her own expansive jazz language. This culminated in Journey in Satchidananda (1971), an album that featured guest and primary collaborator Pharoah Sanders. Alice's sweeping, celestial harp playing set her apart from contemporaries and helped form a bridge between avant-garde jazz and cosmic spiritualism.
Once again, critics were confounded by the unorthodoxy of the sound, not to mention long-held biases against women in jazz and Alice's music was often framed within the context of her more famous husband. Yet time has prevailed, and decades later Alice Coltrane continues to influence many forms of music: the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia has covered her, chart-topping rapper Doja Cat spent part of her childhood living at Alice's California ashram and her great-nephew is Flying Lotus, one of the most singular voices in electronic music.
Jazz fusion
From the late 1960s, Miles Davis, Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra incorporated electric keyboards, amplified instruments, rock volume, funk rhythms and studio processing into jazz fusion. Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters (1973) pushed fusion firmly towards funk.
Head Hunters was a huge commercial success, reaching #13 on the Billboard 200 and eventually becoming the first platinum record in jazz. Its reception exposed a familiar fault line: the influential DownBeat awarded it five stars, noting that "jazz could indeed morph into new forms" even in its seventh decade. Yet purists dismissed its synthesizers, repetitive grooves, and mass appeal as pop. The album is now a jazz-funk landmark, preserved in both the National Recording Registry and the Grammy Hall of Fame.
In the decades that followed, jazz intersected with soul, disco, house, electronic music and, perhaps most notably, hip hop. Sampling returned figures such as Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd and Grover Washington, Jr. to new audiences, while Guru's Jazzmatazz, A Tribe Called Quest, Madlib and Robert Glasper made the relationship between jazz and hip hop explicit.
Contemporary jazz is less a single sound than a shared set of practices: improvisation, rhythmic conversation, reinterpretation and musical risk. Kamasi Washington draws on spiritual jazz and orchestral scale; Esperanza Spalding moves between jazz, funk and art-pop; Makaya McCraven builds compositions through live improvisation and hip hop-influenced editing. Britain's Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective combine jazz with Afrobeat, dub, grime and club culture.
More than a century in, jazz continues to reinvent its past. Explore its many forms in Soundtrack's extensive jazz catalog.
Featured jazz playlists by Soundtrack
Jazz Virtuosos
Classics and rare cuts from the masters of jazz, including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wayner Shorter, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker.
Feel-good Jazz
From swing all the way through to fusion. Keep the good times going with this playlist featuring Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Benny Goodman, Peggy Lee, Oscar Peterson, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Washington.
Jazzy Dinner
Sophisticated jazz for an elevated dining experience. Featuring Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Anita O'Day, Dean Martin, Johnny Hartman and Ella Fitzgerald. Bon appétit.
Global Jazz
Artists from east to west: Featuring Avishai Cohen, Babylon Orchestra, Dhafer Youssef, Driss El Maloumi, Hadouk Trio and Mehmet Polat.
Future Jazz
The sound of what's next. Featuring genre-bending cuts from Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper, Kamaal Williams, Butcher Brown, Gianni Brezzo, Kiefer and Makaya McCraven.
Get your jazz with Soundtrack
Jazz music isn't just a sound; it's a way of thinking about how we express emotions. Whether you're looking for peaceful cool jazz or frenetic jazz fusion, take a deep dive through Soundtrack's jazz music playlists today.
