The 12 best Jazz tracks of all time
Jazz
A century of American improvised music, from New Orleans marching bands to modal abstraction, compressed here into one doorway rather than a survey. Every genre on this map that values a soloist owes it something.
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Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five / West End Blues
The opening cadenza is twelve unaccompanied seconds that reorganised the music around the individual soloist. Everything about jazz as a personal statement starts in that phrase.
Miles Davis / So What
Two chords and an instruction to stop running changes. Kind of Blue remains the best-selling jazz record ever made because it is also one of the calmest and most radical.
John Coltrane / Acknowledgement
A four-note cell moved through every key, then sung. A Love Supreme is devotional music that requires no shared belief to level you, which is a very rare achievement.
Charlie Parker / Ko-Ko
Bebop's founding document, taken at a tempo designed to exclude people who could not keep up. Parker's phrasing is still the standard against which improvisation is measured.
Billie Holiday / Strange Fruit
Her own label refused it, so she released it elsewhere. The most uncomfortable three minutes in American popular music, sung with almost no inflection, which is why it works.
Thelonious Monk / 'Round Midnight
The most recorded composition by any jazz musician, and nobody plays it like its author. Monk's sense of where a note should not go is the whole style.
Coleman Hawkins / Body and Soul
Hawkins states the melody once and then abandons it for three minutes of pure invention, on a hit single, in 1939. A commercial risk that permanently raised the ceiling.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet / Take Five
A jazz single in five-four that went into the charts. Paul Desmond's tune, Joe Morello's drums, and the unlikely proof that odd metres can be effortless.
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers / Moanin'
Hard bop's calling card — gospel call and response welded to bebop technique. The most direct line from the church to the jazz club, and it swings enormously.
Herbie Hancock / Maiden Voyage
Suspended chords that never resolve and a rhythm section that floats rather than drives. The record that made harmonic ambiguity feel like weather rather than like theory.
Benny Goodman / Sing, Sing, Sing
Gene Krupa's tom pattern turned a dance band into a phenomenon, and made the drummer a star for the first time. Swing at its most physically irresponsible.
Original Dixieland Jass Band / Livery Stable Blues
The first jazz record, made by white musicians playing a Black New Orleans music, which is the industry's original sin stated on the very first release. Included for that, not despite it.