Jazz
1895 – 17 Jul 196785 items
musicusaFrom the back streets of New Orleans to “A Love Supreme”
In the 1890s, a few blocks from Congo Square, where enslaved and free Black New Orleanians had once danced and drummed on Sunday afternoons, a cornetist named Buddy Bolden began playing the blues loud and ragged for dancers. Seventy years later the music that came out of his city had been through eight styles, a great migration and a cold war: from brass bands and brothel parlours to Chicago speakeasies, Harlem ballrooms, Kansas City jam sessions, Carnegie Hall, the after-hours clubs of 52nd Street, the State Department’s world tours and the studio where John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in a single evening.
How it is laid out
Overlapping bands for the styles, each starting as the one before it was still being played: New Orleans, Chicago hot jazz, swing, bebop, cool and West Coast, hard bop, modal and free jazz. Other bands frame the scenes and the forces around them: Storyville, the Great Migration, Pendergast’s Kansas City, 52nd Street and the recording ban.
Records are dated by the day they were recorded, which the session logs preserve; release days are given only where they are known.
The map runs from New Orleans to Chicago, Harlem, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Newport and Paris, with stops in Mississippi, Accra and North Dakota.
Threads to follow
Follow recording for the records and the sessions, live for the halls, clubs and festivals, and big bands for the orchestras. rights follows segregation: who was recorded first, who was paid, who could sit where. migration follows the musicians north and west, worldwide follows jazz abroad, and women, business, radio and diplomacy are threads shared with the other timelines.
Race is part of this story from the first record to the last: the notes use the words of the time only where they name something, such as “race records”. Dates are Gregorian and local throughout.
Items
Plessy v. Ferguson
Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”
Louis Armstrong is born
“Jazz” appears in print
The Clef Club Orchestra plays Carnegie Hall
The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s first record
Storyville closes
The Hellfighters band tours France
Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”
Kid Ory’s band records in Santa Monica
Armstrong joins King Oliver in Chicago
Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues”
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band records at Gennett
Jelly Roll Morton records with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings
Paul Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music”
Armstrong joins Fletcher Henderson in New York
La Revue nègre opens in Paris
“Heebie Jeebies”
Bix Beiderbecke’s “Singin’ the Blues”
“West End Blues”
Coleman Hawkins meets Lester Young at the Cherry Blossom
Ella Fitzgerald wins Amateur Night at the Apollo
The Quintette du Hot Club de France records
Benny Goodman at the Palomar
Teddy Wilson plays with Goodman in public
John Hammond hears Count Basie on the radio
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm
Bessie Smith dies after a car crash
Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall
Jelly Roll Morton records for the Library of Congress
Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit”
Coleman Hawkins’s “Body and Soul”
Monk and Clarke at Minton’s Playhouse
Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige”
The first Jazz at the Philharmonic
Gillespie and Parker record “Salt Peanuts”
Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko”
Charlie Parker is committed to Camarillo
Gillespie and Chano Pozo’s “Manteca”
The Birth of the Cool nonet’s first session
The Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker
Los Angeles’s Black and white musicians’ unions merge
Miles Davis’s “Walkin’”
The first Newport Jazz Festival
Willis Conover’s “Music USA” goes on the air
Charlie Parker dies
Miles Davis’s “’Round Midnight” at Newport
Dizzy Gillespie’s State Department tour
Louis Armstrong plays Accra
Ellington at Newport
Armstrong: “the government can go to hell”
Coltrane records “Giant Steps”
Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus”
Ornette Coleman records “The Shape of Jazz to Come”
Billie Holiday dies
Kind of Blue is released
Miles Davis is beaten outside Birdland
Ornette Coleman opens at the Five Spot
Brubeck’s “Time Out” is released
Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s “We Insist!”
Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”
Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”
Coltrane records “Alabama”
Coltrane records “A Love Supreme”
John Coltrane dies