Cool Cats, Hot Music And All That's Jazz

By David E. Thigpen

The uprising that began when Louis Armstrong blew his first hot notes grew into a revolution. Continually shifting--Big Band, bebop, cool--and propelled by the sorcery of improvisation, jazz absorbs, transforms, discards, but always replenishes itself. Here are some of the other cats who made things swing.

--By David E. Thigpen

DUKE ELLINGTON (1899-1974) From the 1930s to the '50s, the master composer's Big Band was jazz's gold standard, creating such classics as Black, Brown and Beige. Duke's compositions--timelessly elegant and invested with rich textures and emotional fullness--helped push jazz to unparalleled heights. Just as his popularity seemed to be fading, he reignited his legend with the fiery 1956 recording Ellington at Newport.

CHARLIE PARKER (1920-1955) With startling impact, the musical quantum leap known as Bebop shook the jazz world in the mid-1940s. Its prime energy source was sax man Parker. Unhinging improvisation from song melody, jumping into dissonances and spinning out complex lines, Parker created the sound that dominated postwar jazz. His 1953 recording Jazz at Massey Hall catches this revolutionary in full flight.

MILES DAVIS (1926-1991) Kind of Blue, Davis' landmark 1959 recording with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, was the apotheosis of Cool Jazz. Distilling the music to an almost bare essence, Davis and arranger Bill Evans created a lean, sensuous sound that broke with the intensity of bebop and attracted thousands of new listeners to jazz. Davis' warm, amber tone was the model for a generation of trumpeters.

QUINCY JONES (1933- ) Two months before Miles Davis' jazz-rock hybrid Bitches Brew came out in 1969, Jones released Walking in Space, a jazz-R.-and-B.-pop Fusion album that let air into the narrow confines of purist jazz. Jones would drift farther from his jazz roots, eventually producing Michael Jackson's Thriller album, but Walking in Space helped open the door to the electric-jazz era of the '70s.

WYNTON MARSALIS (1961- ) A master soloist and bandleader and a Pulitzer prizewinning composer, Marsalis has championed Neo-Traditionalism. Committed to the belief that the style created in the years between Armstrong and Davis is America's true classical music, he cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center. His seminal album, Standard Time, Vol. 1 (1987), treats works by Ellington and Parker with passionate devotion.