See also: A beginner’s guide to modern classical music. Also, remember to get good headphones!

“Art jazz,” as I use the term, refers to that subset of jazz music that, rather than faithfully savoring the old styles, or re-interpreting old standards, tries to express new musical ideas, a la most modern classical music. Unfortunately, there are few guides to modern art jazz that are aimed at the beginner. The best guide I know of is by Piero Scaruffi, who rightly complains:

Most books on the history of jazz music, even the ones published very recently… tend to devote 80–90% of the pages to jazz before the Sixties, and then to quickly summarize (with countless omissions) the last 40 years… The paradox, of course, is that a lot more has happened “since” the 1960s than “until” the 1960s… by far, the greatest contributions of jazz to the history of humankind came in the second half of the century, for example with composers (repeat: composers) such as Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. …It is hard to name [Louis] Armstrong in the same sentence with Mozart or Stravinsky, but not difficult at all to mention Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton with those heavy-weights of classical music.

Scaruffi’s history of jazz thus focuses on the development of art jazz since ~1960. My contribution here is to focus on an even smaller set of pieces: art jazz since 1960 that is plausibly accessible to many new listeners. (So, no Anthony Braxton or Borbetomagus.)

I should also mention that while most jazz fans think mostly about jazz performers, I think mostly about jazz composers. Thus, many famous albums don’t appear in this guide because they are mostly filled with covers. Instead I focus on novel jazz compositions that push the art of jazz composition forward in some way. My focus on composers also means that many albums credited to a performer (e.g. Paul Bley’s Closer) are instead credited below to their primary composer (Carla Bley, in the case of Closer).

Note: This guide links to lots of music on YouTube or Spotify: wherever the music is available. While reading, I recommend you Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on Mac) to open those links in a new browser tab so you can hear the music play for a bit before reading further. Some of the Spotify links point to custom playlists I made, since many of the original albums that aren’t (directly) available on Spotify are reconstructable entirely from later compilation albums that are on Spotify. When I couldn’t find an album on Spotify or YouTube, I linked to another source instead. Here is a Spotify playlist of all the bolded albums listed below (in the main text, not those in the footnotes), in chronological order. Remember, these are not the “best” albums of art jazz. Instead, they are some of the best albums of art jazz that (1) are plausibly accessible to many new listeners, and that (2) are available on Spotify.

Update 1/7/2018: Albums I’ve listened to more recently, from all style categories, are in this Google doc, since I don’t have time to add them here.

Contents

A quick review of jazz up to ~1960

First, some context.

Jazz music emerged in the American South as a blend of ragtime, blues, spirituals, brass band music, and other influences. Depending on what you want to count as “jazz,” its origins date to somewhere from 1890–1915. The first jazz recordings came a bit later. A sampling of early jazz:

Many different threads of jazz music grew from this base.

The highly danceable swing jazz — think Benny Goodman, “Sing, Sing, Sing” — dominated American popular music from roughly 1935–1945.

Raymond Scott wrote frantic, quirky jazz pieces that Carl Stalling later licensed for use in cartoon soundtracks, for example “Powerhouse” (1937).

Bebop (aka bop) dropped the emphasis on danceability in favor of more complex structures, an often faster-than-danceable pace, and an existential mood, e.g. in Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” (1942), Monk’s “Round about Midnight” (1944), Parker’s “Ko ko” (1945), and Tristano’s “Spontaneous Combustion” (1947).

Cool jazz focused even less than bebop on rhythm and melody, and had a more relaxed tone, e.g. in MacGregor’s “Moon Dreams” (1948), Getz’s “Early Autumn” (1948), Mulligan’s “Venus de Milo” (1949), Konitz’s “Subconscious-Lee” (1949), and Modern Jazz Quartet’s “Vendôme” (1952).

Hard Bop was an outgrowth of bebop with simpler melodies and a more energetic sound, e.g. in Brown’s “Daahound” (1954), Silver’s “The Preacher” (1955), Rollins’ “Valse Hot” (1956), and Mobley’s “Lower Stratosphere” (1957).

Free jazz discarded fixed chord progressions and tempos, e.g. in Tristano’s “Intuition” (1949) and “Descent into the Maelstrom” (1953), Giuffre’s “Fugue” (1953), Taylor’s “Toll” (1958), and Coleman’s “Peace” (1959).

Classic albums

In search of relatively accessible art jazz from ~1960 onward, let’s start with the most-played art jazz tracks that were released from 1959-1970. Obviously this isn’t a pure measure of accessibility, since people will often play tracks based on what they’re told is good rather than what they find enjoyable. But here’s the list (as of this writing) nonetheless:

If you find yourself liking the bebop, cool jazz, and hard bop selections above, there’s a good chance you’ll like nearly all of the well-reviewed albums from those genres, and you can just listen to all the best albums from those genres on lists compiled elsewhere, including:

Post-bop

From here on, I’ll be listing a lot of albums, so I’ll also begin to bold the standout albums. Since my own methods for judging the best in jazz are still developing, I decided to simply bold all albums appearing on Scaruffi’s ranked decade lists, which he says are more accurate than his overall list. Since Scaruffi has no decade lists starting with the 2000s, I’ve bolded Scaruffi’s #1 album for each year after 1999.

The way I’m using the term, “post-bop” is a catch-all term for jazz music that is heavily influenced by bebop and/or hard bop, but which either “moves beyond” bebop/hard bop in various stylistic ways (e.g. the Davis quintet’s albums below), or which borrows heavily from other styles (world musics, free jazz, etc.), without being primarily free jazz, avant-garde jazz, jazz-rock, or some other major jazz genre.

Because post-bop is so varied, some varieties of it are a lot more accessible than other varieties, so I can’t as easily say “If you like these 5 examples of post-bop, you’ll probably like all the best-reviewed albums in the genre,” as I did with bebop, hard bop, and cool jazz. So, this is where I start providing some real value, since I’m not aware of anyone else who has tried to make a long list of the most accessible good albums of post-bop.

According to one critic, the founding albums of post-bop — which are all pretty accessible, to my ears — were recorded from 1965–1968 by Miles Davis’ 2nd quintet:

Personally, I would trace the origins of post-bop much further back, at least to Charles Mingus. To my ears, the most accessible of his many great albums are:

Here are some other good and (relatively) accessible post-bop albums, grouped by artist:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

World jazz

I use the term “world jazz” for albums which fuse jazz styles (e.g. post-bop) with very heavy doses of world folk musics. Some recommended and accessible albums are:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

Third stream*

Gunther Schuller coined the term “third stream” in 1957 to refer “a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz and classical music.” (Had Schuller known that Chuck Berry was inventing rock music that very moment, perhaps he would have coined the term “fourth stream” instead.)

Schuller clarified that “third stream” music wasn’t jazz played with classical instruments, nor classical music played by a jazz band, nor the insertion of a bit of Ravel between bebop chord changes, nor a jazz fugue. Rather, third stream music is compositionally inspired by classical and jazz music roughly equally, although Schuller stressed that improvisation must be important in third stream music as it is in jazz.

Milhaud’s La Création du monde (1923) and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and other early fusion attempts mixed classical and jazz influences, though most of them didn’t count as third stream music by Schuller’s definition because they didn’t involve improvisation.

On this page, I’m going to be less strict than Schuller was about the improvisation rule, and I’ll “compensate” for that by preferring composers who came primarily from the jazz world rather than primarily from the classical world. Call it “third stream*” if you like.

Then, from among third stream* recordings, I’ll try to list the ones which seem most “accessible”:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

For a while, it looked like third stream music might be the future of jazz. Instead, free jazz came along and crushed it. Then, after the free jazz revolution, the basic idea of third stream was reborn in “creative” jazz, this time heavily influenced by free jazz.

Free jazz

“Free jazz” is what you’d guess from the name. It’s jazz that often does one or more of the following: (1) forgoes planned chord progressions, (2) forgoes planned tempos, (3) forgoes planned melodies in favor of pure improvisation, and/or (4) forgoes other standard compositional or performance assumptions. At the extreme, it consists in a bunch of players improvising for 10+ minutes without any pre-planned rhythms or chord progressions or modes or anything. As such, much of free jazz sounds like random screeching noises to most people, and it requires serious effort to find true examples of free jazz that are at least somewhat “accessible.” As such, my standards for what counts as “accessible” are even looser for this section than they are for most other sections.

Though the earliest free jazz tracks go back to 1944, the genre is usually considered to have been launched in the late 1950s, by Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. As it happens, Coleman also produced a few of the most melodic and accessible albums of free jazz:

Other good and relatively accessible free jazz albums and tracks include:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

Creative jazz

“Creative” jazz, in my usage, refers more to a school than to a style, but it has its own section here because there are stylistic similarities between the artists in the creative school, and because otherwise I’d have to dump all these artists into the already-too-large-and-diverse “other avant-garde jazz” section.

In 1965, Muhal Richard Abrams co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a non-profit devoted to “nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original [jazz] music.” The style of AACM composers, or thoroughly AACM-influenced composers, was most often a blend of free jazz and the classical avantgarde, with a special focus on the timbres and textures of the music. In a stylistic sense, creative jazz was a continuation of third stream music. But culturally, it was more directly a descendent of the free jazz tradition.

Creative jazz is home to many of the most complicated, intellectually challenging compositions of jazz, comparable to e.g. the works of Babbitt, Stockhausen, or Ferneyhough from the classical tradition. Some creative jazz composers, especially Anthony Braxton, wrote long, dense volumes on music theory, invented special musical notations to capture their musical ideas, and published intimidating-looking musical scores like the one to the right (from the score for Braxton’s Composition No. 76.)

I should mention that if an artist is clearly part of the “creative” tradition, I’m not going to think very hard about whether an album is best characterized as post-bop, avantgarde jazz, jazz fusion, creative jazz, or indeed contemporary classical. If it sounds like any of those and the composer is firmly in the creative jazz tradition, I’m usually just going to classify it as creative jazz. For this reason, most of the albums listed below are not very representative of “creative jazz,” because the albums accessible enough to make this list tended to be “on the border” with other genres, but that happened to be composed by a musician associated with the creative school.

As with my free jazz section, my standards for what counts as “accessible” in this section must be even looser than they are for most other sections. Also as with my free jazz section, most of the key albums in this genre will only be mentioned in footnotes, because they aren’t as accessible as those below:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

Jazz fusion

Creative jazz was always a difficult, obscure tradition with a limited audience. After free jazz, the next “mainstream” movement within jazz was jazz fusion. Starting in the late 1960s, dozens of artists fused jazz with rock, R&B, funk, country, and even pop music. Many of the jazz greats who had gone through post-bop and free jazz phases next turned their attention to fusion.

As jazz artists stepped toward rock, rock artists stepped toward jazz: see Frank Zappa, Soft Machine, Colosseum, Caravan, and Chicago. Below, I focus on fusion artists who primarily trace their lineage to jazz rather than rock (or country, etc.), even though some fusion artists from the rock tradition recorded albums that were “jazzier” than some of the fusion albums recorded by artists from the jazz tradition. (Note that I’ve excluded all “new age jazz” that I felt was closer to “new age” than to “jazz.”)

Unsurprisingly, jazz fusion is often the genre of jazz most accessible to those raised on rock and pop music, so this section contains a lot of recommended “accessible” albums. It is also probably the jazz genre with the highest number of popular but artistically dubious/worthless albums. The result is that whereas the vast majority of “notable” albums in free jazz and creative jazz were relegated to my footnotes as “inaccessible” (even given my relaxed accessibility standards for those genres), the vast majority of “notable” albums in fusion jazz are relegated to my footnotes as “dull” — i.e., not artistically ambitious, or just bad.

As usual, I suggest you start with the bolded albums.

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

ECM style jazz

ECM style jazz, named after the record label that released many of the earliest albums in this style, combines several elements:

free jazz’s willingness to abandon structure for lengthy periods of total improvisation

cool jazz’s relatively subdued aesthetic (not free jazz’s violent, dissonant aesthetic)

third stream’s interest in classical forms (not so much creative jazz’s interest in less accessible post-1940 contemporary classical music)

Describing the earliest ECM style artists, RYM adds:

Their approach is usually described as “ascetic,” “restrained,” or “meditative” and their playing can be characterized by long, slow-pacing gestures that are preferred to displays of virtuosity, usage of silence, subdued expressivity and attention to “spatial” organization in music. They approach their instruments in more traditional way compared to free jazz, not pushing them to their expressive limits. ECM style jazz is tonal, although it doesn’t operate with instantly recognizable melodies, it is often quite static and close to Impressionism in its treatment of textures and atmospheres. Rhythmically the music is straight (often in straight eight-notes) and doesn’t have the “swing” feel that’s common to majority of jazz. The adjectives usually associated with ECM style are “dreamy,” “ethereal,” “icy,” etc.

Here are some relatively accessible ECM style jazz albums:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)

Other avant-garde jazz

This is my catch-all category for avant-garde jazz that I couldn’t really place under other headings, such as free jazz or creative jazz. Most albums in this category are too inaccessible for this list, even given more relaxed standards for what counts as “accessible” (as I did for the free jazz and creative jazz categories). But here are some (highly diverse) exceptions:

(For more albums, see my supplemental Google doc.)