New Orleans and the First Sound
Jazz emerged in New Orleans in the early twentieth century, shaped by a city where West African rhythms, Caribbean musical traditions, European harmony, brass band marches, ragtime, blues, and church music existed in close proximity. Congo Square, a public space where enslaved people had gathered since the early 1800s to drum and dance, preserved polyrhythmic practices that most of the South had suppressed. These rhythms bled into second-line parades, funeral processions, and the dance halls of Storyville, the city’s red-light district, which operated legally from 1897 to 1917.
Cornetist Buddy Bolden is widely cited as the first jazz musician. He never recorded, so his sound survives only in descriptions: a blues-inflected tone loud enough to be heard across town, paired with a loose, improvised approach to ragtime melody. By the 1910s, New Orleans ensembles had developed collective improvisation, where cornet, clarinet, and trombone simultaneously embellished a shared melody rather than taking turns.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band, a white group from New Orleans, made the first jazz recording on February 26, 1917, cutting “Livery Stable Blues” for Victor Records. The first recording by a Black jazz ensemble came later, when Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra recorded in Los Angeles in 1922. The gap reflects the recording industry, not the music’s actual history.
Migration and the Swing Era
When Storyville closed in 1917, many New Orleans musicians followed the Great Migration north. Joe “King” Oliver brought his Creole Jazz Band to Chicago’s South Side in 1918 and sent for his young protege Louis Armstrong in 1922. Armstrong’s recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven between 1925 and 1928 essentially invented the jazz solo. Before Armstrong, jazz was a group conversation. After him, a single voice could carry an entire performance. His 1928 “West End Blues” opens with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that set a new standard for the instrument.
In New York, Duke Ellington began broadcasting nationally from Harlem’s Cotton Club in 1927. His orchestra operated more like a compositional workshop than a jazz band: each player’s individual sound was a color Ellington blended into extended pieces beyond the 32-bar song form. In Kansas City, Count Basie stripped the big band to its rhythmic essentials, building arrangements on short riff patterns and a swinging four-beat pulse. The swing era, running roughly from 1933 to 1947, made jazz the popular music of the United States. Benny Goodman’s concert at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, was the first jazz performance in that venue.
Bebop and After
By the early 1940s, a younger generation found swing too predictable. In after-hours sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie developed bebop: faster tempos, complex chord substitutions, angular melodies, and solos built on harmonic rather than melodic logic. Its small-group format and virtuosic demands reoriented jazz from dance music into a listening art.
Pianist Thelonious Monk contributed compositions built on dissonance, space, and rhythmic displacement. The title track of his 1957 Brilliant Corners required so many takes that producer Orrin Keepnews spliced the final version from multiple attempts; only Sonny Rollins had mastered its 22-bar structure.
In 1949, Miles Davis gathered a nonet including arranger Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan to record sessions later collected as Birth of the Cool, favoring softer timbres and medium tempos. This “cool jazz” found a West Coast audience through Dave Brubeck, whose 1959 Time Out used time signatures rare in jazz. “Take Five,” composed by Paul Desmond in 5/4 time, became the first jazz single to sell over a million copies.
Hard bop pushed back against cool jazz’s restraint. Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers channeled gospel, blues, and the Black church into a driving small-group format, cycling through Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard across decades. Charles Mingus brought a composer’s ambition to the bass-led ensemble, blending Ellington’s orchestral thinking with raw intensity. His 1959 Mingus Ah Um included “Fables of Faubus,” a protest piece aimed at the Arkansas governor who had blocked school integration in Little Rock.
Modal, Free, and Electric
On March 2 and April 22, 1959, Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Rather than navigating rapid chord changes, the musicians improvised over scales, or modes. Davis handed out sketches rather than charts. Nearly every track was a first complete take. It became the best-selling jazz album in history.
Coltrane pursued the implications further. His A Love Supreme, recorded in a single session on December 9, 1964, is a four-part suite: “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” Ornette Coleman had arrived at even more radical territory first. His 1959 The Shape of Jazz to Come dispensed with chordal instruments entirely. Coleman played a plastic alto saxophone, and trumpeter Don Cherry used a pocket trumpet. The quartet improvised on melodic ideas rather than chord progressions, sparking what became known as free jazz.
Davis turned electric at the end of the decade. Bitches Brew, recorded in August 1969 with thirteen musicians and released in March 1970, layered electric keyboards, electric bass, and rock rhythms into long improvisations shaped by producer Teo Macero’s tape editing. Herbie Hancock took the electric direction further with Head Hunters in 1973, building grooves on synthesizers over funk rhythms. It became the first jazz album certified platinum.
The Music’s Grammar
Certain structural elements persist across jazz’s substyles. Improvisation is the central act: a musician composes in real time over a harmonic or modal framework. Swing feel subdivides the beat into an uneven long-short pattern rather than straight eighth notes. Blue notes, the flatted third, fifth, and seventh scale degrees borrowed from the blues, give melodies their characteristic tension. Call and response, rooted in West African and African American vocal traditions, shapes the dialogue between soloists and rhythm sections. Syncopation displaces accents off the strong beats. These elements recombine in every era, but the underlying grammar links Armstrong’s 1928 cadenza to Coltrane’s 1964 suite to Hancock’s 1973 funk workouts.
Essential Listening
- Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)
- John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965)
- Thelonious Monk – Brilliant Corners (1957)
- Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)
- Dave Brubeck Quartet – Time Out (1959)
- Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
- Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – Moanin’ (1958)
- Wayne Shorter – Speak No Evil (1966)
- Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1970)
- Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters (1973)
- Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (1956)
- Duke Ellington – Ellington at Newport (1956)