cool jazz.’ The contrast with bebop could hardly be more striking.

Cecil Taylor, one of the leaders of this movement, once made a revealing aside. “To feel,” he explained, “is the most terrifying thing in this society.”4 We should approach avant-garde jazz with his injunction in mind, striving to feel rather than merely intellectualize the music.

By my estimate, around five thousand new jazz albums are released each year.

Perhaps all of us seek this kind of intimate revelation when we listen to music. I dwell on it here at some length because I want to urge newcomers to jazz to use this element of expression as an inviting entry point into the music.

They started using the term “ragging” to refer to any instance in which lots of syncopation was inserted into a song, and it didn’t need to be a ragtime piece; any kind of music, from a funeral dirge to an opera aria, could be ragged.

First, the musicians play the melody (or theme). Second, they improvise over the harmonies of the song—with some or all of the performers taking solos (these are the variations). Third, the musicians return to the melody for a final restatement of the theme.

Billy Strayhorn, Bill Challis, and Sy Oliver, worked almost entirely behind the scenes.

Starting in the 1980s, a different attitude prevailed. “Why choose?” asked many members of the up-and-coming generation. Why couldn’t a musician range freely through these riches, mixing and matching as passing moods dictated?

You can especially hear it in how an improviser starts and ends a phrase.