America's Music

Jazz didn't emerge from one place or one moment. It was the result of a century of cultural collision in the American South, and nowhere was that collision more intense than New Orleans. The city was uniquely positioned: a French and Spanish colonial port, the largest slave market in North America, and after the Louisiana Purchase, increasingly American. It was a city where the races mixed in ways that were not permitted elsewhere, and that mixing produced something musically unprecedented.

Congo Square, a public gathering place in New Orleans, was one of the few places in the antebellum South where enslaved people were permitted to gather on Sundays and make music. The drumming, singing, and dancing that happened there preserved African musical traditions that had been systematically suppressed elsewhere. Those traditions didn't disappear when the Civil War ended. They went underground, evolved, and eventually found their way into the brothels and dance halls of Storyville, the city's legalized red-light district that operated from 1897 to 1917.

Storyville was the incubator. The district employed hundreds of musicians, creating an unprecedented demand for live entertainment in the small hours of the morning. Cornetist Buddy Bolden is generally credited as the first musician to play what we would recognize as jazz, sometime around 1895, leading a band that blended blues, ragtime, and the improvisational call-and-response of the African church tradition. He died in a Louisiana asylum in 1931, and no recordings of him survive. His music lives only in the memories of those who heard it.

Jelly Roll Morton, a Creole pianist and composer, later claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, which is almost certainly not true but reflects how real the sense of origin felt to those involved. Morton was genuinely important: his compositions and arrangements gave the emerging music structure without killing its spontaneity. King Oliver, a cornetist from outside New Orleans, became the music's first documented superstar, leading a tight, swinging band that would, in 1922, summon a young Louis Armstrong from New Orleans to Chicago. The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recordings in 1917, for Victor Records, and put the word in print for the first time.

Swing was the decade jazz became America's pop music. Not jazz-influenced pop, not jazz-adjacent pop. Jazz itself, played by big bands of fourteen to eighteen musicians, was the most commercially successful music in the country from roughly 1935 to 1945. Benny Goodman's performance at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938 is the symbolic beginning: a packed house, a standing ovation, and a statement that this music born in the brothels of New Orleans had arrived at the most prestigious concert hall in the country.

The big bands required arrangers, and the great arrangers of the swing era, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Billy Strayhorn (writing for Ellington), and Glenn Miller, created a formal vocabulary for jazz orchestration that is still in use today. Count Basie brought the Kansas City sound to national audiences: looser, bluesier, with more space than the New York bands, and a rhythm section that swung with an ease that made the east coast bands sound effortful. Billie Holiday sang with the Artie Shaw and Goodman orchestras before striking out as a solo artist, and her recordings from this period established the jazz vocalist as a fully equal voice to the instrumentalists.

The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, which had opened in 1926, reached its peak in the swing era as the home of the Lindy Hop, the athletic partner dance that became the visual embodiment of swing's energy. Coleman Hawkins recorded "Body and Soul" in 1939, a solo improvisation that barely acknowledged the melody, and it became a hit record, demonstrating that jazz audiences would follow the music wherever it needed to go. The swing era ended not with a bang but with wartime economics: big bands were expensive, hotels preferred smaller groups, and a generation of musicians was about to start meeting after hours in Harlem to figure out where the music could go next.

If you could only save one decade of jazz, most musicians and critics would choose the 1960s. The concentration of quality and innovation across every sub-genre, from the modal refinement of Miles Davis to the free jazz explosion of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor to the spiritual intensity of John Coltrane's final decade, is unequaled in the music's history. "Kind of Blue" (1959) straddles the eras as a transitional record: Miles's second great sextet with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, recording in a single day, inventing modal jazz, making the best-selling jazz record in history almost as an afterthought.

Coltrane's trajectory through the decade is the most dramatic arc in jazz history. From the disciplined post-bop of "Giant Steps" in 1960 to the classic quartet's meditative intensity on "A Love Supreme" in 1964 to the screaming, forty-five-minute free improvisations of his final years, he compressed what would normally take a generation of musicians into seven years. "A Love Supreme" is a four-part suite recorded in a single session, a sustained act of spiritual autobiography that remains the most emotionally complete record jazz has produced.

Ornette Coleman arrived in New York in 1959 with a white plastic alto saxophone and a set of ideas that the jazz establishment initially refused to take seriously. His "The Shape of Jazz to Come" proposed that melody, rhythm, and harmony could be independent variables rather than locked components, that improvisation could happen without a fixed chord structure, that the music could be free in a deeper sense than anyone had attempted. Within a year, the debate about whether this was genius or nonsense had split the jazz community, and the argument was really a proxy for a larger argument about tradition, authority, and the right to define a music.

The civil rights movement shaped the music in ways both explicit and atmospheric. Charles Mingus wrote "Fables of Faubus" (1959) in direct response to Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus blocking school integration. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" (1960) was unambiguous political music. Coltrane's "Alabama" (1963) was a direct elegy for the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. The music was not separate from the movement. In many cases, the musicians were the movement.

Wynton Marsalis arrived in New York in 1979 from New Orleans, twenty-two years old, technically the equal of any trumpet player alive, and with a program. He believed that jazz had lost its way in the fusion years, that the music needed to return to its acoustic foundations, and he was going to lead that return. His self-titled debut album for Columbia in 1982 was followed in 1983 by "Think of One" and, simultaneously, a classical trumpet record, making him the first musician to win Grammy Awards in jazz and classical in the same year. His institutional power grew throughout the decade: Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he would eventually direct, began in 1987.

The neo-traditionalist movement Marsalis represented produced genuine music and genuine controversy. His fellow "Young Lions," Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and Marcus Roberts, were accomplished musicians who brought hard bop's rigor back to recordings that sounded new to audiences who had grown up with fusion and smooth jazz. The critics who opposed them argued that the movement was nostalgic rather than creative, that returning to the 1950s idiom could not produce the same urgency those musicians had felt, and that the music's future required accepting the twenty-odd years of experimentation rather than erasing them.

Smooth jazz emerged simultaneously as the decade's commercial form and became one of jazz's most persistent controversies. Grover Washington Jr., Kenny G., and the Yellowjackets produced accessible, radio-friendly music that sold millions of records and introduced a generation to jazz's sonic landscape, however simplified. The jazz critical establishment largely refused to acknowledge smooth jazz as jazz at all, a debate that continues to illuminate the difficulty of defining a music that has been redefining itself for a century. Dexter Gordon's appearance in Bertrand Tavernier's film "'Round Midnight" (1986) brought the bebop generation to a new audience and earned Gordon an Academy Award nomination at age sixty-three. Miles Davis's "Tutu" (1986) applied electronic production to his acoustic voice with mixed but fascinating results.

The story that Ken Burns implied was over in 1960 turned out to be nowhere near finished. The first two decades of the twenty-first century produced a jazz revival that drew from every previous era without being nostalgic about any of them, and spread the music globally in ways that the 1960s experimenters had only theorized. Robert Glasper's "Black Radio" (2012) placed a jazz pianist's harmonic vocabulary in direct conversation with neo-soul, hip hop, and R&B, featuring Erykah Badu, Mos Def, and Lalah Hathaway, and won the Grammy for Best R&B Album, not Best Jazz Album, which may have been the point.

Kamasi Washington's "The Epic" (2015) was the statement record of the era: three hours of sweeping, spiritually ambitious jazz that drew equally from John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the entire Los Angeles jazz community that had been quietly developing for decades. Washington had been a session musician for Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly" (2015), one of the decade's most acclaimed records in any genre, and the album's use of live jazz musicians signaled something larger: jazz was no longer a separate category to be sampled and referenced but a living practice that contemporary Black American music needed to directly engage.

The UK produced its own new jazz wave, centered on the South London scene around Tomorrow's Warriors and the Total Refreshment Centre. Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Ezra Collective, and the Comet Is Coming created a music that drew from jazz, grime, Afrobeat, and electronic music with an ease that reflected a generation raised on all of those sounds simultaneously. In the United States, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, Christian Scott, Thundercat, and Flying Lotus (Alice Coltrane's great-nephew) were extending the music in directions that the previous generation hadn't imagined. Japanese jazz, long documented on the Three Blind Mice and East Wind labels, found a global audience through streaming and crate-digging culture. The music that began on Congo Square in New Orleans had become genuinely planetary.

The streaming era has been, against all expectations, good for jazz. Niche catalogues that survived in physical format only through specialist record shops now reach audiences worldwide. Ryo Fukui's "Scenery," recorded in Sapporo in 1976, became a viral sensation. Older Blue Note records charted on streaming platforms. New artists with small label budgets could reach audiences that would have been inaccessible twenty years earlier. Jazz had survived commercialism, fusion, free jazz, the death of the record shop, and the digital revolution. It is still arguing with itself. It is still changing. It is still, unmistakably, alive.