How to Listen to Jazz

Count Basie performing on Randall’s Island in 1938,

professionalization.

Johnny Hodges play “Come Sunday” on the recording of Duke Ellington’s debut Carnegie Hall concert on January 23, 1943.

Every revolution generated a counter-revolution; every breakthrough left audiences asking, “What’s next?”

Goodman served as the key catalyst in introducing mainstream America to the wonders of hot big band jazz.

Melody lines and improvised phrases got longer, faster, and more intricate. They are often filled with color tones, chromatic notes that would cause a dissonance if held for more than a fraction of a second, but when used appropriately in the middle of a phrase impart a pleasing balance between tension and release.

The biggest breakthrough came with the birth of the slow jazz ballad.

Third Stream, which aimed at nothing less than a large-scale merging of the classical and jazz idioms into a new hybrid.

The avant-garde advocates may have fallen short of their implicit goal of defining the final stage of jazz history, the sound of the future—in fact, other “newest of the new thing” approaches would emerge in their wake—but they laid the groundwork for their successors by the very boldness with which they questioned aural hierarchies and disrupted c