Jazz

There is only one photograph.

Buddy Bolden. Around 1905. New Orleans. A formal portrait: six men in a band, instruments in hand. Bolden holds his cornet, eyes steady. They called him King. He invented a sound that would become the foundational grammar of American music.

No one recorded it. No one wrote it down. By 1907, Bolden was committed to an asylum. He died there in 1931, having never heard a jazz record—not even his own, because none existed.

But the sound didn't die. It multiplied. It traveled north on trains and spread across oceans. It became the swing that moved a nation and the bebop that bewildered it. It became cool and hard and free. It became America's most original art form.

This is the story of that sound—how it was born in the collision of cultures, how it was stolen and reclaimed, how it died a thousand deaths and never stopped living. The sound of freedom in real time.

New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century was unlike any city in America. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, and American traditions collided in a cultural crucible that produced something unprecedented.

In Congo Square, enslaved Africans had been permitted to gather on Sundays, preserving rhythms and dances that would otherwise have been erased. After emancipation, these traditions merged with brass band music, blues, and European harmonies. Creole musicians, trained in European classical tradition, found themselves sharing stages with uptown Black musicians who played by ear.

It was in this collision that jazz was born—not in Storyville, as the myth would have it, but throughout New Orleans. In parks and parades. At funerals and celebrations. In dance halls where the distinction between Creole and Black, between written and improvised, between European and African, dissolved into something new.

Buddy Bolden stood at the center of this transformation. He rearranged the New Orleans dance band to accommodate the blues, creating a 'wide open' sound that could be heard across town. He never recorded. He never wrote down his arrangements. By the time technology could have captured him, he was already gone.

February 26, 1917. Victor Records, New York City. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band cuts 'Livery Stable Blues' and 'Dixie Jass Band One-Step.' The first commercial jazz recordings.

The band was white. Jazz was Black. This paradox would define the music's early documentation.

The ODJB had learned jazz in New Orleans, absorbing what Black musicians had invented. Their leader, Nick LaRocca, would later claim absurdly that jazz was 'strictly white man's music'—a claim definitively rejected by historians.

Two years earlier, Freddie Keppard, who held the 'King' title after Bolden, had reportedly refused Victor's offer to record. The story goes that he feared others would 'steal his stuff.' Whether strategic or shortsighted, his refusal allowed a white band to be 'first.'

The recording paradox was established: technology could capture sound, but not history. Who made the recording decided who got remembered. Black musicians had created jazz decades before 1917—but the archive would tell a different story.

The Great Migration moved six million Black Americans from the rural South to northern cities between 1910 and 1970. Jazz traveled with them.

The myth says jazz came north on riverboats after Storyville closed. The truth is different. Jazz migrated primarily via the Illinois Central Railroad—the same route that carried Black families to Chicago, Detroit, and beyond. Storyville's closure in 1917, ordered by the Navy, was what scholar Bruce Boyd Raeburn calls 'essentially a non-event' for jazz.

Chicago had jazz venues before Storyville closed. The Pekin Theater opened in 1904. Lincoln Gardens would become legendary. The South Side was becoming a second home for New Orleans jazz.

On July 8, 1922, a twenty-one-year-old cornetist arrived in Chicago. King Oliver had summoned him from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong stepped off the train, trumpet case in hand, and walked into Lincoln Gardens. Jazz would never be the same.

The Cotton Club in Harlem presented a paradox that defined the swing era: Black performers only, white audiences only. The finest jazz musicians in the world played for crowds who would not have dined beside them.

Duke Ellington's orchestra became the house band in 1927. His radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club brought jazz to millions—the first time many white Americans heard this music. But the club's jungle-themed decor and segregated seating made visible the exploitation at the heart of mainstream jazz success.

Yet jazz found ways to subvert. The Savoy Ballroom, also in Harlem, was genuinely integrated—the only major ballroom where Black and white dancers shared the floor. Benny Goodman integrated his groups, hiring Teddy Wilson (1935) and Lionel Hampton (1936) for what were among the first racially integrated major American bands.

On January 16, 1938, Goodman played Carnegie Hall—'jazz's coming out party,' they called it. The next year, Billie Holiday recorded 'Strange Fruit,' a protest against lynching. Jazz was becoming more than entertainment. It was becoming a weapon.

210 West 118th Street, Harlem. Minton's Playhouse. Monday nights. After hours. The laboratory where bebop was invented.

The house band featured Thelonious Monk on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums. Young musicians came to test themselves in cutting contests—playing faster, harder, stranger. They weren't trying to entertain. They were trying to create something that couldn't be stolen, that required mastery to play.

Charlie Parker's breakthrough came at Monroe's Uptown House in 1942—the moment he realized he could improvise using the higher intervals of chords, creating entirely new melodies. Dizzy Gillespie developed the harmonic architecture. Together, they built bebop.

Was bebop political protest? The question oversimplifies. Gillespie himself said they didn't make speeches. But bebop was both artistic revolution AND cultural assertion—a declaration that this music was art, not entertainment, that it belonged to the musicians who created it.

Blue Note Records created more than music. They created a visual language for modern jazz.

Founded by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff in 1939, Blue Note came to define the sound of hard bop and modal jazz in the 1950s and 60s. Wolff photographed the sessions—dramatic, high-contrast images that became as iconic as the music itself. Graphic designer Reid Miles translated these photographs into bold, modernist covers.

Rudy Van Gelder recorded most of these sessions in his Hackensack, New Jersey living room, developing a warm, present sound that became the Blue Note signature. When he built a dedicated studio in Englewood Cliffs in 1959, it continued the tradition. That studio entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.

Miles Davis charted a different course. 'Birth of the Cool' (1949-50) invented cool jazz. 'Kind of Blue' (1959)—the best-selling jazz album of all time—established modal jazz. He would keep reinventing himself for three more decades, always moving forward.

December 21, 1960. Atlantic Records. Ornette Coleman assembled two quartets—eight musicians—and recorded simultaneously for 37 minutes. He called the album 'Free Jazz.' The name stuck.

Free jazz abandoned the remaining rules: preset chord changes, fixed rhythm, traditional structure. Sun Ra took this further, pioneering what would later be called Afrofuturism—cosmic philosophy expressed through music, performance, and visual spectacle. He led his Arkestra for over 40 years, recording approximately 200 albums on his own El Saturn Records.

The backlash was fierce. Down Beat's review of 'Free Jazz' awarded both five stars and zero stars. Cecil Taylor's percussive, atonal piano divided audiences. But free jazz asked a question that couldn't be unasked: If improvisation is jazz's core value, why should any rules remain?

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in Chicago in 1965, institutionalized these experiments. Alice Coltrane, who replaced McCoy Tyner in her husband's group in 1966, brought spiritual depth and the harp to jazz—one of only a few harpists in the music's history.

Voice of America, 1955. Willis Conover begins hosting 'Music USA.' His voice would reach 30 million listeners behind the Iron Curtain—introducing jazz to millions who had never heard it. Unknown in America, Conover was famous throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The State Department recognized jazz's power. They sent musicians on cultural tours—Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman—as 'ambassadors of freedom.' Jazz became a weapon in the Cold War, demonstrating American creativity and, implicitly, American democracy.

The paradox was brutal. These musicians traveled abroad to represent freedom—then came home to Jim Crow, to segregated hotels and restaurants, to a country that treated them as second-class citizens. Armstrong, asked about representing America abroad, once pointed out the contradiction publicly.

Ellington toured the Soviet Union in 1971, the first time a major jazz orchestra had played there. Goodman had gone in 1962. Jazz won hearts the State Department couldn't reach through diplomacy alone—while laying bare the hypocrisy of 'freedom's' ambassadors returning to unfreedom.

August 12, 1958. Art Kane photographs 57 jazz greats on a Harlem stoop. 'A Great Day in Harlem.' Only three are women.

But women were everywhere—playing, arranging, managing, mentoring. Mary Lou Williams arranged for Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy (1929-1942), then wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Tommy Dorsey. She mentored Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Melba Liston was the first woman trombonist in major big bands—personally recruited by Dizzy Gillespie in 1948. For 40 years she collaborated with Randy Weston. She ghostwrote arrangements for Ellington, Basie, and Quincy Jones. NEA Jazz Master in 1987.

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the first racially-integrated all-female band in America (1937-1949). Named 'America's #1 All-Girl Orchestra' by Down Beat in 1944. They defied Jim Crow laws touring the South. National Recording Registry in 2011.

Lil Hardin Armstrong drove Louis Armstrong's solo career, played on the Hot Five recordings, and led her own bands. The narrative of jazz as male genius requires erasing these women. The history does not.

1987. Jazz at Lincoln Center founded. For the first time, jazz has its own permanent home in a major American cultural institution.

2004. Frederick P. Rose Hall opens—the first building designed specifically for jazz. Three performance venues. Year-round programming. Jazz has been institutionalized. Some called it preservation. Others called it ossification.

Wynton Marsalis, artistic director since 1991, leads the neo-traditionalist movement—honoring the masters, teaching the classics, maintaining standards. His 'Blood on the Fields' (1997) became the first jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. But critics ask: Is jazz now a museum piece?

The music answers. Kamasi Washington's 'The Epic' (2015) proved the market for ambitious, exploratory jazz. Esperanza Spalding won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011—the first jazz artist ever. Robert Glasper bridges jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. Tokyo rivals New York as a jazz capital.

The question was never whether jazz would survive. Jazz is improvisation—responding in the moment. As long as there are musicians willing to risk, to surprise, to converse, jazz lives. The sound of freedom in real time.

Jazz began with a man we can barely see—one photograph, no recordings, a sound that exists only in the memories of those who heard it.

But the sound multiplied. It traveled on trains and radio waves. It crossed oceans and infiltrated iron curtains. It was stolen and reclaimed, commercialized and preserved, declared dead and reborn.

What is jazz? It is improvisation—responding in the moment to what is happening now. It is conversation—call-and-response between instruments, between musicians, between performer and audience. It is the blues—telling the truth about life as it is lived. It is freedom—the sound of people making beauty despite everything that would silence them.

There is no final note. Jazz is not a museum piece to be preserved under glass. It is a living practice, renewed every time a musician picks up an instrument and begins to play—not what was written, not what was rehearsed, but what emerges in the moment.

The sound of freedom. In real time. Still playing.