International Jazz Day: The Story of a Genre That Keeps Reinventing Itself

To understand where jazz comes from, head to New Orleans at the end of the 19th century. A crossroads of African, Creole, French, and Caribbean cultures, the Louisiana city was bubbling with music. At Congo Square, located in today’s Louis Armstrong Park, enslaved people gathered every Sunday to dance and make their drums ring out. These polyrhythms from West Africa and the Caribbean would deeply nourish the music that emerged a few decades later.

Added to this rhythmic heritage were the work songs sung in cotton fields, the Negro spirituals of Baptist churches, the blues and its famous “blue notes,” as well as ragtime, that syncopated music born on saloon pianos. Add the street brass bands that brought life to weddings and parades, and you get the perfect breeding ground: a dialogue between Africa and Europe, between the street and the parlor, between written music and improvisation.

It’s impossible to talk about the origins of jazz without mentioning Charles “Buddy” Bolden. This African American cornetist, active between 1895 and 1906, is considered the first truly documented jazz musician. Legend has it that you could hear him playing from several blocks away. His major innovation was the Big Four, a rhythmic shift that breaks up the military march by emphasizing the fourth beat. It is the transition from the measured step of a brass band to the sway of a dance. Revolutionary.

A historical tragedy: no recordings by Bolden have survived. The musician succumbed to mental illness in 1907 and spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital. But his influence runs through the entire next generation, from King Oliver to Sidney Bechet, including a certain Louis Armstrong.

In 1917, the closure of the red-light district of Storyville forced musicians to move North. Chicago became their new playground, followed by New York. It was there that Louis Armstrong transformed jazz: with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, he brought the virtuoso soloist to the forefront and invented a vocabulary of soloing that would shape the entire 20th century.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the triumph of swing, its big bands, and its packed dance floors. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday became global stars. Jazz was now America’s dominant popular music.

After World War II, a group of young musicians found swing too tame. At Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse, Charlie Parker on alto saxophone, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, and Thelonious Monk on piano invented bebop: dizzying tempos, twisted harmonies, virtuosic improvisations. Jazz left the dance floor to become music for focused listening, almost scholarly.

Then came Miles Davis, the architect with a thousand faces. In 1949, he laid the foundations of cool jazz with Birth of the Cool: soft tones, finely crafted arrangements, the complete opposite of bebop’s fire. Ten years later, Kind of Blue (1959) ushered in modal jazz and became one of the best-selling albums in history. Later, Bitches Brew (1970) opened the door to jazz fusion by incorporating rock, funk, and electric instruments. Three revolutions from one man.