Jazz through the ages.
“Jazz is restless,” trombonist J.J. Johnson once said. “It won’t stay put and it never will.” The history of jazz music reflects that restlessness and tumult, starting from the genre’s African American ragtime roots, through the height of the Jazz Age during Prohibition, the popularization of jazz during the 1950s and 60s, and the fusion and foreign influences that characterize jazz today. In honor of Jazz Appreciation Month, we celebrate the movers and shakers that helped shape one of music’s most dynamic genres.
Buddy Bolden’s Band, circa 1905
The Original Dixieland Jass Band, 1918
Ray Miller Orchestra, early 1920s
Bessie Smith, 1936
Duke Ellington and his band at the Hurricane cabaret, 1943
Count Basie’s band and Ethel Waters from the film Stage Door Canteen, 1943
Mary Lou Williams, 1946
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Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington, 1946
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Sarah Vaughan at Café Society, 1946
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Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis at Three Deuces, 1947
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Ella Fitzgerald with Dizzy Gillespie at Downbeat, 1947
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Billie Holiday at Downbeat, 1947
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Harry Gibson, 1948
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Louis Armstrong, 1953
Anita O’Day at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1958
Benny Goodman and Jackie Searle, 1960
Dave Brubeck Quartet, 1967
Dizzy Gillespie and Mickey Roker, 1977
Betty Carter at the Great American Music Hall, 1979
Nina Simone, 1982
Amina Claudine Myers, 1983
Etta James at San Jose Music in the Park, 2000
Cassandra Wilson, 2006
Herbie Hancock, 2008
Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis, and Norah Jones, 2010
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Top Image: Elisabeth D’Orcy