A History of Jazz

By Remi Erskine8 September 2026updated 13 September 2026

Jazz began in New Orleans around 1900, where brass band playing, ragtime, the blues and church music all landed in the same city at once. In a century it went from dance music to a language taught in conservatories worldwide. Here is each era, what changed in the music, and why it changed then.

1900 to now
8 eras
no single inventor

Where you run into this

Jazz
Music history
Improvisation

Play the ii V Iii7 - V7 - Imaj7

Where jazz came from

Four practices met in New Orleans around 1900:

Brass bands. Cheap army instruments after the Civil War put cornets, clarinets, trombones and drums in everyone's hands. That is the instrumentation of early jazz.
Ragtime. Written piano music, a strict march in the left hand and syncopation in the right. Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" from 1899 sold enormously as sheet music.
Blues. Bent pitch, blue notes, call and response, and the twelve-bar form. W.C. Handy published "Memphis Blues" in 1912.
Church and work song. Spirituals, gospel and field hollers brought collective improvising and the idea that a melody is something you treat.

New Orleans was the one city where this could happen. Enslaved people were allowed to drum and dance at Congo Square, regulated by law from 1817 rather than banned as in most of the South, so West African rhythms stayed alive. The city also had a separate, often classically trained Creole community. When segregation law replaced the older three-tier system around 1896, Creole musicians who read from the page ended up in the same bands as musicians who played by ear. That mixture is jazz.

Why jazz left New Orleans

The usual story is that the navy closed the Storyville district in November 1917, musicians lost their work and took the riverboat north. It is a good story and it is wrong.

Musicians had been touring since about 1907. The Original Creole Orchestra left in 1912, Tom Brown's band reached Chicago in 1915.
Hardly any of them worked in the brothels. Bands played dance halls, parks and parades, and those stayed open.
The Great Migration is the real cause. Between 1916 and 1970 about six million Black Americans left the southern states. Musicians followed their audience to Chicago's South Side, where the dance halls and the work were.

Chicago and the birth of the soloist

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recorded in 1923 with a young Louis Armstrong on second cornet, the first well documented sides by a Black New Orleans band.

Armstrong is the hinge. On the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925 to 1928 the weight shifts from three horns improvising together to one soloist building a story over a band, and the solo has been the heart of jazz ever since. He also brought swing to full strength: eighths laid back and played against the beat.

Meanwhile in New York, arranger Don Redman solved a different problem for Fletcher Henderson. Treat the saxophones as one voice, the trumpets as one and the trombones as one, then let those sections answer each other. That blueprint is the big band and it has not changed since.

The swing era, when jazz was pop music

From about 1935 to 1945 jazz was the popular music of America. That happened once. Four business facts explain the music:

Dance was the product. Ballrooms, not concert halls. Danceability set the tempo, the form and the length.
Radio made national stars. Live broadcasts from hotels and ballrooms reached the whole country in one evening.
The 78 gave three minutes a side. That is why a swing number lasts three minutes and the solos are short.
Segregation shaped the work. Black bands earned less and got worse routes, so they built riff-based head arrangements that needed little rehearsal. Count Basie's band is the example.

Why the big bands collapsed

Around 1946 a large number of orchestras broke up within months, for four reasons at once:

The war. Musicians were drafted, gasoline and rubber were rationed, and venues faced a curfew.
The recording ban. From 1 August 1942 the musicians' union banned instrumental recording. Singers were not members, so for two years there were vocal records and no band records. Attention moved from the bandleader to the singer and never moved back.
The dance tax. From 1944 the government taxed venues where people danced. Rooms with instrumental music you could not dance to fell outside it, which quietly favored small groups.
The arithmetic. Sixteen musicians cost several times what five do.

Bebop

From about 1940 musicians met after their big band work at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian. What changed:

Tempo and phrasing. Faster, long lines of even eighths, accents in unexpected places.
Harmony. More chords per bar, inserted two-five moves, tritone substitutions, and the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth used as melody.
The rhythm section. Kenny Clarke moved the pulse to the ride cymbal, which freed the bass drum for irregular accents. The bassist took over the four-to-the-bar.
Contrafacts. New melodies over the chords of existing songs. "Ko-Ko" runs on "Cherokee", "Ornithology" on "How High the Moon". A chord scheme carries no copyright, a melody does.

It was a position as much as a style. This generation refused the entertainer role and presented themselves as artists making listening music. The price was commercial: you cannot dance to it, and within ten years jazz had lost its place as popular music.

Cool, hard bop and modal jazz

By 1949 bebop had settled, and three answers followed.

Cool jazz softened everything: lower tempos, less vibrato, more written material. Miles Davis's nonet recorded the sides later collected as "Birth of the Cool" in 1949 and 1950. Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" from 1959 was the first jazz record to sell a million copies.
Hard bop did the opposite from about 1954: louder, bluesier, with gospel harmony and a backbeat. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers ran for forty years as an academy for young players, and "Moanin'" from 1958 is the calling card.
Modal jazz answered busy harmony. On "Kind of Blue", recorded in two sessions in 1959, "So What" uses two chords across thirty-two bars, sixteen in D Dorian and eight a half step up. The space is the point. See modal harmony and the modes.

Free jazz and fusion

Ornette Coleman's quartet played the Five Spot in New York in 1959 with no pianist, which was the condition for what he wanted: keep a theme and a pulse, drop the fixed chord scheme, let the soloist decide where the harmony goes. It lined up with the civil rights movement and musicians said so directly, from Max Roach's "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" in 1960 to John Coltrane's "Alabama" after the Birmingham church bombing in 1963.

Free jazz sold badly, and many musicians moved to Europe. Fusion went the other way. By the late 1960s rock and soul had the audiences, and "Bitches Brew", recorded in August 1969, answered with a large electric band, rock rhythms and editing: producer Teo Macero cut the album together from hours of studio tape, an idea borrowed from rock production. See A History of Electronic Music. Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Herbie Hancock's "Head Hunters" all came out of that band.

Jazz today

Jazz moved from the bandstand to the classroom. Once the big bands were gone there were not enough stages to train a generation, so education became the infrastructure. That built a worldwide network of schools and raised the technical level, and it also narrowed the canon and made access a matter of tuition money.

The other change is that the border with neighboring genres has gone. Robert Glasper's "Black Radio" appeared in 2012, and Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly" in 2015 featured Glasper, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. In London a scene grew out of the Tomorrow's Warriors youth program, with Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective, who won the Mercury Prize in 2023. Their audience stands and dances, which had not happened to jazz in seventy years.

Frequently asked questions

When did jazz start?: There is no exact date. The practices came together in New Orleans around 1900 and the first jazz record was made on 26 February 1917.
Who invented jazz?: Nobody. Cornettist Buddy Bolden, active from about 1895 to 1907, is the first player contemporaries credited with a new way of playing, and no recording of him survives.
What is the difference between swing and bebop?: Swing is dance music for a large band at moderate tempo with short solos. Bebop is listening music for four or five players, faster, with more chords per bar and melodies you cannot hum.
Why is Kind of Blue so famous?: It is the best selling jazz album ever made, and it showed that a whole solo can rest on two chords.
Do I need to read music to play jazz?: No. Many major figures played by ear. Reading helps once you work from charts, and the harmony is the part to study first.
Where do I start listening?: One record per era: the Hot Five sides, a Basie or Ellington track, Parker's "Ko-Ko", "Kind of Blue", "Bitches Brew", and something from the current London scene.

In closing

Every style here solves a concrete problem. Section writing solves how to make a big band sound loose, bebop answers the collapse of the big band economy, modal jazz answers harmony that has become too busy, fusion answers an empty room. Technology sets the shape too: three minutes a side keeps the swing solo short, and the LP makes the long hard bop solo possible. To understand a style, ask what it was the answer to.

Keep going

All 5 articles