​Maybe, like me, you somehow discovered early New Orleans jazz first and are gradually working your way through history to the modern day? Or maybe a later album you caught your ear and sent you down this road of jazz discovery?

Either way, this article will take you through the most important styles of jazz that should be on your listening list, one by one… Let’s get started!

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It may have only been around for a 100 years or so, but jazz music has evolved fast, with a wide variety of different styles and sub-genres emerging thanks to the work of groundbreaking jazz musicians.

Whilst many of these musicians weren’t thinking about labelling their music as a specific jazz style, the way that record labels and journalists needed to categorise these means it’s relatively easy for us to trace the journey of the music.

With that in mind, we’re going to take you step-by-step through history, covering all these areas:

• Early Jazz
• Big Band & Swing Music
• Bebop
• Gypsy Jazz
• Hard Bop
• Cool Jazz
• Modal Jazz
• Latin Jazz
• Free Jazz
• Fusion
• Modern Jazz

But first, let’s start at the beginning…

Because the term ‘jazz’ covers a very broad selection of music. Two recordings or musicians labelled as such may, at least superficially, appear to have very little in common with each other.

The first jazz recording was made in 1917 (by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) and in the century or so since then the music has seen some radical innovations and upheavals.

In comparison, within Western classical music the Baroque period lasted for around 150 years (c. 1600-1750) and the Romantic period lasted approximately 110 years (c. 1800-1910).

Whereas we’ve had all of the following styles of jazz – and more – in the space of only 100 or so years, with most types enjoying a period of dominance for only a decade or so.

As always, things are more complex than this…

People didn’t suddenly stop playing swing music when bebop appeared, and some musicians will have performed and recorded a range of different types of jazz.

Many don’t fit neatly into categories.

Many of these ‘labels’ were pushed by the media or record companies, and the musicians themselves may not have identified themselves along these lines.

Of course, with internet access in the 21st Century it’s easier than ever to discover almost the entire history of jazz at the touch of a button, and there are now present-day musicians who play in all different styles of jazz.

So read on for our style-by-style recap and make sure you stay tuned to the end of the article where we have a downloadable graphic showcasing the some of the most famous jazz musicians in each style.

Early Jazz

Otherwise known as Trad Jazz or New Orleans Jazz, Early Jazz developed in the 1910s in the ‘melting pot’ of New Orleans, as players combined influences including ragtime, blues and marching band music to create a style of jazz that was heavy on collective, polyphonic improvisation.

Trumpeter Louis Armstrong was jazz’s first major soloist, and his recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven are some of the most important of the 20th Century.

Bix Beiderbecke played in a lighter, ‘sweeter’ way than the more operatic Armstrong, with Bix’s trumpet often accompanied by the saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer.

Ragtime pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton was another key innovator of 1920s jazz and you can find out more about this joyous style of music in our article dedicated to Dixieland Jazz.

Key Early Jazz Recordings

Swing music & big band Jazz

From the early 1930s until the late 1940s big band swing was the most popular style of music in the USA, and many of the most important bandleaders were huge mainstream stars.

Bands usually containing between 11 and 20 musicians would play music that combined ensemble passages, often riff-based, with solo sections to entertain large audiences of dancers.

Duke Ellington, considered by many to be the greatest composer in jazz, was a key bandleader, as were virtuoso clarinettist Benny Goodman, pianist Count Basie, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, the ever-popular Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman.

The era also saw the emergence of a number of soloists, with Coleman Hawkins notably establishing the tenor saxophone as an important jazz instrument.

Lester Young, who like Hawkins first found fame with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, was also highly influential, as were alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges, pianists Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson, and trumpeters Roy Eldgridge and Rex Stewart.

Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday also first appeared singing with big bands during this period – as we highlighted in our guide to the best jazz singers of all time.

A number of factors contributed to the decline of the big band era, as it became harder for bandleaders to keep such large ensembles consistently employed.

Although many of the groups disbanded, a few – Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman and Stan Kenton in particular – were able to keep producing important records well beyond the 1940s.

Key big band recordings

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Here are a few of our favourites (including The Atomic Mr Basie which is reviewed here), taken from our complete round up of big band music.

Bebop

Bebop is a type of jazz known for its upbeat tempos and virtuosic soloing. It emerged in the 1940s with players such as alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell.

A reaction to the swing era which came before and was largely focused upon music for dancing and entertainment, bebop was fiercely intellectual and very much meant for serious listening.

Its improvised complex linear phrases are full of surprising accents and chromatic passing notes, often delivered at very fast tempos.

Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem was a key breeding ground, with Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian exploring the new sounds at all-night jam sessions.

Players would often write intricate new melodies over the chord progressions of existing jazz standards, in part so they could claim the composition royalties themselves. Examples of famous jazz songs from the bebop era include ‘Ornithology’ (based upon ‘How High The Moon’), ‘Donna Lee’ (based upon ‘Indiana’) and ‘Anthropology’ (based upon ‘I Got Rhythm’).

You can check out our overview of the best bebop artists in jazz history here.

Key bebop recordings

Gypsy jazz

Guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grapelli created the first major European jazz group when they established the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the late 1930s.

With an instrumentation that only featured string instruments, without drums (Reinhardt, Grapelli, two rhythm guitarists and double bass), the Quintette’s softer sound allowed the pair’s virtuosic soloing to be heard clearly.

Gypsy jazz remains popular as a sub-genre that is influenced by the American jazz tradition but is very much a unique style, with its own language and repertoire, much of which is composed by Reinhardt.

This type of jazz has been continued by more recent musicians including Biréli Lagrène and the Rosenberg Trio.

Key gypsy jazz recording

Cool Jazz

In the late 1940s and through the 1950s a softer, more relaxed style of playing was marketed as an alternative to the ‘hotter’, more frantic bebop that was dominant at the time.

Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, with impressionistic arrangements by Gil Evans, is a key sound, as are Gerry Mulligan’s chordless quartet and the cerebral work of pianist-teacher Lennie Tristano and his disciples.

Many players, including Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Mulligan, were highly influenced by the swing era saxophonist Lester Young. Artists such as Dave Brubeck and the Modern Jazz Quartet utilised complex arrangements that were influenced by classical music.

West Coast jazz – bringing to mind images of sun-soaked 1950s Los Angeles, and musicians like Chet Baker, Art Pepper and Bud Shank – is another subgenre which has some crossover with Cool jazz.

Key cool jazz recordings

You can the rest of our pick of 10 of the most famous Cool jazz albums and musicians in this article.

Hard Bop & Soul Jazz

Hard bop is arguably one of the most popular types of jazz, bringing together the harmonic invention of bebop with a dash of blues and soul music.

In the mid-1950s, the sounds of bebop began to be blended with the influence of rhythm and blues and gospel music, to create a funkier type of music with simpler melodies and a more overt blues influence.

Some view this as a conscious move towards a more Afrocentric sound as a reaction against Cool jazz, which placed relatively little emphasis upon the blues.

Blue Note Records released many of the artists pioneering this new sound: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (initially with Horace Silver on piano – Silver’s church-influenced ‘The Preacher’ is a good example of the style), Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd and others.

Trumpeter Clifford Brown’s group with Max Roach was also extremely important, as was Miles Davis’s First Great Quintet.

An extension of hard bop is soul jazz, which places more importance upon the influence of gospel music and rhythm and blues. It became popular in the mid/late 1960s, often featuring the sound of the Hammond organ.

Key hard bop albums

Check out the rest of our favourite hard bop albums in jazz history here

Modal jazz

Western harmony traditionally relies upon a tonal key centre with related chords and cadences.

Modal harmony, however, takes a chord and corresponding scale (or mode), where it may remain for some time or move to another, possibly unrelated mode.

Jazz musicians began to experiment with composing in this way in the late 1950s, inspired by theoretical work of George Russell. Miles Davis’s ‘Milestones’ (from the album of the same name) and ‘So What’ (from Kind of Blue) are key early examaples, where players improvise within a mode for extended periods; John Coltrane would intensify this approach with his classic 1960s quartet.

During the mid-1960s composers like Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson further utilised ‘non-functional harmony’, writing music that moved more quickly between chords and corresponding scales in sometimes surprising ways.

Key modal jazz recordings

Check out our in-depth guide to the most important modal jazz albums in history here.

Bossa nova and Latin jazz

The Latin jazz genre describes a highly rhythmic style of jazz which incorporates influences from either Afro-Brazilian or Afro-Cuban music.

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Jazz has always included what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as a ‘Spanish tinge’, dating back to the music’s origins in the melting pot of New Orleans in the early 20th Century.

In the late 1940s Dizzy Gillespie pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz with his big band, and in collaboration with the composer and percussionist Chano Pozo, who wrote the Latin jazz standards ‘Manteca’ and ‘Tin Tin Deo’.

In the mid-1960s Bossa nova, a fusion of Brazilian samba and jazz harmony, became incredibly popular, with American saxophonist Stan Getz recording a Grammy-winning collaboration with Brazilian guitarist/singer Joao Gilberto, which has remained one of the most important jazz albums of all time.

The album’s biggest hit was ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, which like many of the most famous Bossa novas was composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim.

Numerous jazz musicians have since taken inspiration from various types of Latin music.

Key latin jazz albums

Free jazz & Avant garde

Free jazz developed in America during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, as musicians sought to break down and reject conventions within bebop and hard bop that they found restrictive, including harmony and chord changes, regular tempos, and compositional forms.

Ornette Coleman’s ground-breaking quartet played music that was swinging, bluesy and based upon memorable melodies, but with solo sections that dispensed with rigid form and harmony.

American free jazz in the 1960s was often proudly Afrocentric, with links to the civil rights movement.

The term Avant garde jazz is often used interchangeably with free jazz, but it may also use more written material, often taking influence from contemporary classical music.

European ‘improvised music’ began to develop later in the 1960. It tends to be less connected to the jazz tradition than earlier American free jazz, and often doesn’t contain any prepared material at all.

Best free jazz albums

Check our our round up of 10 of the great free jazz albums in history or head straight to the most iconic: Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz To Come (1959)

Jazz Fusion

Jazz fusion burst onto the scene in the late 1960s as jazz musicians began to use electric instruments and incorporate the influence of the rock and funk that were popular at the time.

Larry Coryell’s Free Spirits was an important band early in the new music’s development, as was Charles Lloyd’s quartet, which played to large audiences and was associated with the psychedelic rock scene of the day.

Miles Davis recorded Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way in 1969, both of which were controversial with jazz purists, with long tunes and loose, improvised forms.

Herbie Hancock’s funky brand of fusion in the 1970s also incorporated elements of disco and soul, while others, like Weather Report and some of Wayne Shorter’s solo work utilised intricate forms and chord sequences.

This adding of other more commercial genres to jazz arguably led to the emergence of Smooth Jazz in the 1980s too.

Key Fusion albums

We put together a list of 10 of the most influential jazz fusion albums of all time which you can read in full, or else here’s our quick list:

Modern / Contemporary Jazz

As the name suggests, ‘modern’ jazz is heavily dependant on what era you’re living in.

Back in the 1940s, for example, bebop was considered modern compared to the big band swing that came before it.

But, in 21st century jazz speak, we’re usually referring to a type of music that has emerged from the 1990s onwards and covers a range of sub-genres in a more current way than styles like swing, bebop and modal jazz.

As ever, though, lines can be blurred and it may incorporate elements of all these styles.

From a musical perspective, modern jazz today can be highly demanding to play, often utilising non-functional harmony, intricate melodies and odd time signatures.

It might take influence from other genres, such as 20th Century classical music or sounds from non-western cultures.

And while it can sometimes have a reputation for being rather challenging for the listener, a number of modern jazz artists today have managed to create accessible and highly melodic material from relatively complex source materials.

Key Contemporary Jazz albums

• Esperanza Spalding – Chamber Music Society
• Brad Mehdlau – Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard
• Vijay Iyer – Break Stuff
• Kurt Rosenwinkel – The Next Step
• Jason Moran – The Bandwagon
• Ambrose Akinmusire – A Rift in Decorum
• Marius Neset – Pinball

You can find our in-depth coverage of this style, along with videos of all the artists mentioned above, on our article entitled What is Modern Jazz?

Thanks for reading!

Of course, there are many more sub-genres and niches of jazz music – as well as all sorts of twists and turns inside each of these – but we hope this article has given you a broad, chronological overview of some of the most famous or important types of jazz in its relatively short history.

You can find all our articles about jazz here or, if you’re feeling brave, dive into the age-old topic of what is jazz…

Looking for more niche sub-genres connected to this style? Check out our guides to Electro Swing and Acid Jazz.

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Category: WHICH