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# eJazzNews: Jazz News, Reviews & Artist Profiles

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## Posts
- [Acid Jazz: How UK DJs Built a Genre From Funk Samples and Jazz Loops](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/acid-jazz/): Acid jazz is a music genre that emerged from the UK club scene in the late 1980s, fusing jazz harmony and improvisation with funk grooves, soul vocals, and hip-hop production techniques. It peaked commercially between roughly 1990 and 1994, driven by London-based acts including Jamiroquai, The Brand New Heavies, Incognito, and US3. The genre grew directly out of rare groove DJ culture, where selectors like Gilles Peterson and Norman Jay were spinning obscure 1960s and 1970s funk and soul records in small London clubs, and the musicians who heard those sets decided to make new music that felt the same way.
- [Is Jazz Dead? An Honest Look at the State of the Music in 2026](https://ejazznews.com/features/is-jazz-dead/): Jazz is a living art form practiced by thousands of trained musicians worldwide, but the phrase "jazz is dead" has circulated in music criticism since at least the 1960s, most recently repopularized by the Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad label Jazz Is Dead, founded in 2017. Let's be clear about what this article argues: jazz is not dead. What died is jazz's centrality to popular commercial music, and those are two very different things.
- [What Was the Jazz Age? America in the 1920s and the Music That Defined It](https://ejazznews.com/features/what-was-the-jazz-age/): The Jazz Age was a period of American cultural history spanning approximately 1920 to 1933, defined by the mainstream rise of jazz music, a transformation in social mores, and an era of economic expansion that ended with the Great Depression. The term covers roughly the same years as the Roaring Twenties, though the two labels aren't identical: "Roaring Twenties" describes the economic and social mood, while "Jazz Age" names the music that gave that mood its pulse. Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized the phrase, first in his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age and later in his 1931 essay Echoes of the Jazz Age, where he declared the era finished. The period still shapes American culture today, from the template it set for youth rebellion to the racial dynamics it embedded in the music industry.
- [Jazz Piano: A Complete Guide to the Music, the Players, and the Albums](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-piano/): Jazz piano is a style of keyboard performance rooted in African American musical tradition, emerging from the ragtime and blues idioms of the early 1900s and evolving into one of the most technically demanding and harmonically rich performance practices in Western music. From Scott Joplin's syncopated rags around 1899 to the fully improvised solo concerts of Keith Jarrett in the 1970s and the neo-soul crossovers of Robert Glasper today, jazz piano has continuously reinvented itself while keeping improvisation at its core. No other instrument in jazz carries the same dual responsibility: the pianist must simultaneously provide melody, harmony, and rhythmic momentum, functioning as a one-person orchestra within any ensemble. That structural advantage explains why jazz piano players have driven so many of the genre's most important stylistic revolutions, and why jazz piano music remains one of the most searched and studied areas of the entire jazz tradition.
- [Jazz Fusion: The Complete Guide to Origins, Sound, and Essential Listening](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-fusion/): Jazz fusion is a music genre that emerged between approximately 1965 and 1970 by blending jazz harmony and improvisation with the rhythms and electric instrumentation of rock, funk, and R&B. Where traditional jazz relied on acoustic instruments and swing-feel rhythms, jazz fusion plugged in, turned up, and absorbed the energy of a generation raised on Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. The result was one of the most technically demanding and culturally charged genres in American music history, and its influence runs through everything from hip-hop production to modern film scoring.
- [P Bass vs Jazz Bass: Which Fender Bass Should You Buy?](https://ejazznews.com/features/p-bass-vs-jazz-bass/): The Fender Precision Bass and Fender Jazz Bass are two distinct electric bass guitar models introduced nine years apart, each built around a different design philosophy and tonal identity. In the p bass vs jazz bass debate, the short answer is this: choose the P Bass if you want a thick, fundamental-forward tone with dead-simple controls; choose the Jazz Bass if you want tonal flexibility, a slimmer neck profile, and a brighter, more articulate sound that rewards active shaping.
- [The 25 Greatest Female Jazz Singers of All Time, Ranked](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-female-jazz-singers/): The best female jazz singers, from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Cécile McLorin Salvant, are the voices most responsible for bringing jazz to mainstream audiences, setting the harmonic and interpretive standards every vocalist since has been measured against. This ranked list of 25 artists spans the 1920s swing era through the contemporary jazz scene, ordered by commercial impact, critical acclaim, and documented influence on later artists, weighted in that order.
- [Cool Jazz: The Complete Guide to the Sound That Cooled Jazz Down](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/cool-jazz/): Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz that emerged in the United States between the late 1940s and early 1950s, characterized by melodic restraint, lighter tonal colors, slower vibrato, and a deliberate move away from the harmonic and rhythmic intensity of bebop. Where bebop burned hot and fast, cool jazz breathed. It favored space over density, lyricism over velocity, and compositional structure over spontaneous combustion. The genre takes its name from the music's emotional temperature, a composed, unruffled quality that stood in direct contrast to the feverish energy of the music it reacted against.
- [Hard Bop: How Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Brought Soul Back to Bebop](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/hard-bop/): Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that emerged in the mid-1950s as a deliberate intensification of bebop, fusing the harmonic complexity of bebop with the emotional directness of blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues. Rooted primarily in New York City, hard bop dominated the jazz space from roughly 1954 to the mid-1960s, producing a sound that was simultaneously sophisticated and viscerally soulful. Where bebop prized abstraction and velocity, hard bop reanchored jazz in the Black church and the blues tradition. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are universally recognized as its founding ensemble.
- [20 Popular Jazz Artists Today: The Modern Voices Defining the Genre](https://ejazznews.com/features/popular-jazz-artists-today/): The most popular jazz artists today are defined by their ability to bridge jazz's improvisational tradition with the sounds of hip-hop, global music, R&B, and electronic production, reaching new audiences without abandoning the genre's core vocabulary. This list of the best jazz artists today ranks 20 active musicians against three criteria: commercial reach (streaming presence, touring scale, label profile), critical acclaim (Grammy nominations and wins, coverage in the jazz press), and generational influence (cited by younger artists in published interviews, producer credits, documented mentorship). Every artist here released music or performed live in 2024 or 2025.
- [The 25 Greatest Jazz Artists of All Time, Ranked](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-artists-of-all-time/): A note on scope: searches for "top 10 best jazz artists of all time" and "top 100 jazz artists" reflect how wide this conversation runs. Twenty-five entries can't close it, but they can map the essential terrain. The artists below represent the strongest consensus across commercial, critical, and influence metrics available.
- [What to Wear to a Jazz Club: A Practical Guide for First-Timers](https://ejazznews.com/features/what-to-wear-to-a-jazz-club/): A jazz club is a live music venue where smart-casual attire is the widely accepted standard, meaning collared shirts and neat trousers for men, and dresses or tailored separates for women, though specific venues range from jeans-acceptable to jacket-required. Most US and UK jazz clubs don't require black tie, and you won't need a tuxedo. What you do need is a sense of the specific room you're walking into, because a basement speakeasy in Greenwich Village and a supper club on the Upper East Side are two entirely different propositions. This guide breaks down what to wear to a jazz club by venue type, gender presentation, season, and city, so you walk in looking like you belong.
- [Jazz Guitar Chords: The Complete Guide to Voicings, Progressions, and Theory](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-guitar-chords/): Jazz guitar chords are extended harmonies, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, built on guitar-specific voicings that prioritize the guide tones (3rd and 7th) over root-position stacks. Unlike the open-string triads and power chords that dominate pop and rock guitar, jazz chords treat the instrument as a harmonic conversation partner: every note earns its place, the root is often omitted entirely, and the rhythm is comped (syncopated, interactive) rather than strummed. Jazz guitarists from the bebop era onward, including Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel, moved toward close-voiced 7th chords precisely because those voicings blended with horns without cluttering the low register.
- [Jazz Guitar: A Complete Guide to the Music, the Players, and the Instruments](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-guitar/): Jazz guitar is a style of guitar playing, and a family of instruments, central to jazz music from the 1920s to the present day, encompassing everything from the warm-toned archtop rhythm work of the swing era to the harmonically sophisticated single-note lines of bebop and beyond. Jazz guitarists play hollow-body archtop electrics, semi-hollow thinlines, and nylon-string classical guitars, depending on the subgenre. The instrument serves a dual role: anchoring the rhythm section through comping (chord accompaniment) while also functioning as a front-line soloist.
- [The 30 Greatest Jazz Songs of All Time, Ranked by Our Critics](https://ejazznews.com/features/famous-jazz-songs/): The 30 greatest jazz songs of all time, ranked — from Armstrong's "West End Blues" to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" — with the definitive recording and why each one still matters.
- [The 25 Best Duke Ellington Songs Every Jazz Listener Should Know](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-duke-ellington-songs/): Duke Ellington songs form the largest single body of work in the American jazz canon, comprising more than 1,000 original compositions recorded across five decades on labels including Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, Capitol, Reprise, and Fantasy. Scholarly consensus places the total above 1,000 works, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History archives catalog hundreds of original scores, making Ellington the most prolific composer in jazz history by any reasonable measure. The 25 songs below are drawn from a duke ellington discography spanning roughly 50 studio albums and the years 1926 to 1974. Selection criteria weigh historical first-recording dates, measurable influence on the jazz standard repertoire, documented cover frequency, streaming longevity, and structural innovation, not personal preference or editorial ranking by fame alone. This is a companion piece to the eJazzNews artist profiles section, where deeper biographical context lives.
- [Modal Jazz: How Miles Davis Replaced Chord Changes With Scales](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/modal-jazz/): Modal jazz is a style of jazz improvisation, originating between 1958 and the mid-1960s, in which musicians improvise over static or slowly-changing scales (modes) rather than working through the rapid chord changes that defined bebop. Where bebop demanded that soloists outline a new chord every two to four beats, modal jazz plants a single scale as the harmonic foundation for eight, sixteen, or even thirty-two bars at a stretch. That shift sounds simple on paper. In practice, it changed everything: the role of the rhythm section, the shape of a melody, and the very definition of what jazz improvisation could be.
- [Jazz Piano Chords: The Complete Guide to Voicings, Progressions, and Theory](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-piano-chords/): Jazz piano chords are multi-note harmonies built from stacked thirds, typically 7th chords extended with 9ths, 11ths, or 13ths, that define the sound of jazz through tension, color, and voice leading. Where pop and rock piano leans on triads (three-note chords), jazz treats the 7th chord as its baseline, then layers extensions on top to create the rich, complex sound you hear on every jazz recording from the 1940s onward.
- [Louis Armstrong Quotes: 40 Memorable Lines from Satchmo Himself](https://ejazznews.com/features/louis-armstrong-quotes/): Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), nicknamed Satchmo and Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter, vocalist, and composer whose recorded and documented words reveal the same improvisational genius as his music. Armstrong was one of the most prolific writers in jazz history: the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, holds thousands of pages of personal letters, typed essays, and diary entries. He published two autobiographies, Swing That Music (1936, Longmans, Green) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954, Prentice-Hall), and a posthumous collection, Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Brothers (1999, Oxford University Press), preserves his idiosyncratic lowercase spelling and phonetic punctuation exactly as he wrote it.
- [The Best Jazz Clubs in NYC: A Complete Guide for 2026](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-clubs-nyc/): New York City is home to more than 60 active jazz venues, making it the densest concentration of live jazz clubs anywhere in the world, from 78-year-old Greenwich Village institutions to intimate Brooklyn listening rooms that opened within the last decade. This guide covers 15 verified venues across four neighborhoods, each with cover charges, drink minimums, best nights, active residencies, and booking links, updated for 2026.
- [What to Wear to a Jazz Club: The Complete Style Guide](https://ejazznews.com/features/jazz-club-outfit/): A jazz club outfit sits somewhere between smart casual and cocktail chic, polished enough to respect the room, relaxed enough to let you sink into a set and forget you're wearing anything at all. Whether you're heading to a basement room in the West Village or a panoramic-view concert hall above Columbus Circle, knowing what to wear takes the guesswork out of the night and lets you focus on the music.
- [Michael Franks: The Jazz-Pop Songwriter Behind Popsicle Toes](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/michael-franks/): Michael Franks is the American jazz-pop singer-songwriter behind "Popsicle Toes." A complete, fact-checked guide to his life, albums, signature songs, sound, marriage to Claudia, and where he is today.
- [Jazz in the 1920s: How the Jazz Age Shaped American Culture](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-history/jazz-music-1920s/): Jazz music in the 1920s was the defining American soundtrack of the decade, a genre born from African American musical traditions in New Orleans that, by 1920, had migrated north to Chicago and east to New York, transforming popular culture, reshaping race relations in public entertainment, and giving the era its permanent nickname: the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized that label with his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age, cementing jazz not just as music but as a cultural shorthand for modernity, rebellion, and the rupture with Victorian America.
- [Jazz Appreciation Month 2026: History, Events, and How to Celebrate](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/jazz-appreciation-month/): Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) is an annual observance held every April in the United States and Canada, created by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2001 to celebrate jazz as a living American art form. In 2026, the month carries extra weight: it marks 25 years since JAM's founding, a milestone the Smithsonian itself has highlighted, coinciding with the United States' 250th anniversary. The full calendar runs April 1 through April 30, with UNESCO's International Jazz Day anchoring the final day. This article covers JAM's history, its ongoing significance, what's happening in 2026, and practical ways to get involved, from first-time listeners to seasoned fans.
- [Montreux Jazz Festival 2026: The 60th Anniversary Complete Guide](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/montreux-jazz-festival-2026/): The Montreux Jazz Festival is an annual music festival held on the shores of Lake Geneva in Montreux, Switzerland, founded in 1967 by Claude Nobs, and widely regarded as one of the most prestigious music festivals in the world. The montreux jazz festival 2026 marks the event's 60th edition, running from 3 to 18 July 2026 across 16 days of paid and free programming in the newly renovated Montreux Music & Convention Centre, now known as 2M2C, returning after a three-year, CHF 94 million renovation. To signal the scale of the occasion, Swiss fashion designer Kévin Germanier created the official poster, the first time in the festival's history that a fashion designer has held that role. Six decades in, Montreux still sets the standard.
- [1920s Jazz Singers: The Voices of the Jazz Age](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/1920s-jazz-singers/): The 1920s jazz singers who shaped the Jazz Age were primarily African American women rooted in the blues and vaudeville traditions, recording for independent "race record" labels at a moment when the United States was transitioning from live-only performance to a commercial recorded-music economy. These voices, from Bessie Smith's gut-punch phrasing to Louis Armstrong's first scat improvisations, collectively invented what it means to be a jazz singer in the modern sense, and every vocalist who followed owes them a direct debt. For a broader view of how these artists fit into the full sweep of vocal jazz history, explore .
- [Jazz Improvisation: The Complete Guide for Musicians](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-improvisation/): Jazz improvisation is the real-time spontaneous creation of melody, harmony, or rhythm over a pre-established chord progression, song form, or modal framework, and it is the defining musical characteristic that separates jazz from every other genre. Every major jazz subgenre, from bebop to modal to fusion, centers improvisation as its structural engine. The improvised statement a musician delivers is called a solo; each complete pass through the song's form during that solo is called a chorus. When two musicians alternate improvised phrases of four bars each, they're trading fours, a practice as old as jazz itself.
- [Jazz Chord Progressions: The Essential Guide for Musicians](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-chord-progressions/): Jazz chord progressions are recurring harmonic sequences, built primarily from seventh chords and their extensions, that form the structural foundation of jazz standards, bebop heads, blues forms, and modal compositions. Master seven core progressions and you'll recognize the harmonic logic behind hundreds of recorded standards, from Charlie Parker's bebop heads to John Coltrane's most demanding compositions.
- [What Is Bebop Jazz? The Complete Guide to Jazz’s Most Revolutionary Style](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/bebop-jazz/): Bebop jazz is a style of jazz that emerged in New York City in the early to mid-1940s, defined by fast tempos (typically 180-300+ BPM), complex chromatic harmony, and virtuosic improvisation over chord changes rather than melody. It is the single most consequential turning point in jazz history: the moment the music stopped being popular entertainment and started being an art form musicians composed and performed on their own terms.
- [Best Jazz Albums for Beginners: 15 Records to Start Your Collection](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/best-jazz-albums-for-beginners/): The best jazz albums for beginners are records chosen not just for critical acclaim, but for immediate accessibility, short tracks, familiar melodies, steady grooves, and minimal harmonic abstraction. This list of 15 albums isn't about what critics consider most important; it's about what actually sounds good on first listen, before you know a thing about music theory.
- [The Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time: 20 Voices from Ella to Esperanza](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-singers/): Jazz singers are vocalists who interpret the jazz repertoire using techniques such as scat, blue notes, melodic improvisation, and advanced rhythmic phrasing, a tradition stretching from Louis Armstrong's 1920s recordings to Cécile McLorin Salvant's 21st-century work. These are the 20 greatest jazz singers of all time, spanning roughly a century of vocal jazz history, each profiled with an essential album and a signature track.
- [The 25 Greatest Female Jazz Singers of All Time: Women Who Defined Jazz Vocals](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/female-jazz-singers/): Female jazz singers have shaped the sound, soul, and language of jazz since the 1920s, producing the genre's most celebrated voices, from Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday to Cécile McLorin Salvant and Samara Joy. This ranking spans more than a century of jazz vocal history, covering classic, post-bop, contemporary, and new-generation artists who form an unbroken lineage from the Harlem Renaissance to the 2020s.
- [Modern Jazz Singers: 15 Contemporary Voices Defining Jazz Today](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/modern-jazz-singers/): Modern jazz singers are vocalists working in the jazz tradition post-2000 who combine improvisational technique, harmonic sophistication, and original artistic vision while actively recording and performing in the contemporary scene. Right now, jazz vocal is in one of its most globally connected, stylistically diverse phases in decades, and the 15 artists below prove it. For readers who want the full sweep of the form, covers the tradition from its roots forward. This article focuses exclusively on 2015-2026 releases and current activity: no nostalgia, no retrospectives, just the jazz singers today who are actually shaping what the music sounds like right now.
- [Black Jazz Singers: The African American Vocalists Who Built Jazz](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/black-jazz-singers/): Black jazz singers are the originators and defining voices of jazz as an art form, African American vocalists whose techniques, repertoire, and cultural authority shaped the music from its blues and gospel roots in the early 20th century through to its contemporary expressions today. This is not a ranking. It's a cultural history, organized by era, covering more than 20 singers who collectively built a tradition that remains very much alive.
- [The 20 Greatest Male Jazz Singers of All Time: Men Who Defined Jazz Vocals](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/male-jazz-singers/): Male jazz singers have shaped the sound of American music for over a century, from the gravelly swing-era voice of Louis Armstrong to the contemporary R&B-inflected baritone of Gregory Porter. This ranking covers 20 voices spanning the 1920s through the present, drawn from and focused exclusively on male vocalists. Selection criteria include recorded influence, vocal innovation, catalog breadth, critical recognition documented in DownBeat and JazzTimes, and demonstrable impact on subsequent generations of male jazz singers. The list spans famous male jazz singers from the pre-swing era through today's streaming generation, with particular attention to the whose innovations define the art form's core vocabulary.
- [The Greatest Jazz Pianists: 20 Piano Masters Who Defined the Instrument](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-pianists/): Jazz pianists are instrumentalists who serve as harmonic architects, rhythmic engines, and melodic soloists simultaneously, a role no other instrument in the genre demands to the same degree. From Scott Joplin's ragtime experiments in the late 1890s through Robert Glasper's hip-hop-inflected neo-soul, the piano has sat at the center of jazz for more than 120 years, shaping every style the music has produced.
- [Jazz Saxophone Players: 15 Legends Who Defined the Sound of Jazz](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-saxophone-players/): Jazz saxophone players are the instrumental architects of jazz music, from Coleman Hawkins' first significant recorded tenor work in the early 1920s to Lakecia Benjamin's 21st-century alto voice, and no instrument has shaped the genre's identity more decisively than the saxophone. Adolphe Sax patented the instrument on June 28, 1846, and within a century it had become the defining voice of an entirely new American art form.
- [New Orleans Jazz Fest 2026: Lineup, Tickets, Schedule, and What to Know](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/new-orleans-jazz-fest-2026/): The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known universally as Jazz Fest, is an annual eight-day music, culture, and food celebration held at the Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots in New Orleans, Louisiana, spanning two consecutive Thursday-to-Sunday weekends each spring. The new orleans jazz fest 2026 edition runs April 23-26 (Weekend 1) and April 30-May 3 (Weekend 2), presented once again by Shell.
- [Jazz Drummers: 15 Rhythm Masters Who Drove the Beat of Jazz](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-drummers/): Jazz drummers are the rhythmic architects of the genre, responsible not only for timekeeping but for shaping the harmonic conversation, building tension, and defining the emotional temperature of every performance. Unlike drummers in virtually any other style, the best jazz drummers function as full melodic conversationalists, responding to soloists, redirecting the band's energy, and making compositional decisions in real time.
- [Jazz Trumpet Players: 15 Legends from Louis Armstrong to Ambrose Akinmusire](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-trumpet-players/): Jazz trumpet players form the most storied instrumental lineage in American music, a 100-year succession of innovators who built jazz itself, from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five recordings of the 1920s through the genre-bending experiments of Ambrose Akinmusire today. This list spans 15 players across six distinct eras, and what separates a good trumpet player from a legend is simple: legends change what's possible on the instrument.
- [The Greatest Jazz Guitarists: 15 Players Who Shaped Jazz Guitar](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-guitarists/): Jazz guitarists are instrumentalists who apply jazz harmony, improvisation, and swing rhythm to the guitar, a tradition stretching from Django Reinhardt's 1930s Gypsy innovations through Charlie Christian's electrified bebop groundwork to contemporary voices like Julian Lage. The guitar spent decades as jazz's most underestimated instrument, buried beneath brass and woodwinds until electric amplification gave it a voice loud enough to lead.
- [Jazz Scales: The 7 Essential Scales Every Jazz Musician Needs to Know](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-scales/): Jazz scales are the melodic building blocks that define the harmonic language of jazz, forming the foundation of improvisation, composition, and ear training for players at every level. Master these seven scales and you hold the core vocabulary every working jazz musician draws on, whether they’re comping (accompanying) behind a vocalist or soloing through a 32-bar standard.
- [The 10 Best Miles Davis Albums, Ranked by Our Critics](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-miles-davis-albums/): Miles Davis (1926–1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader whose recorded output across six decades produced some of the most influential albums in the history of music. The best Miles Davis albums span bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, covering five genuinely distinct careers from a single artist. No other musician in the 20th century reinvented his sound as many times, or with as much artistic authority, as Davis did.
- [Miles Davis Quotes: 40 Memorable Quotes from the Prince of Darkness](https://ejazznews.com/features/miles-davis-quotes/): Miles Davis left behind a body of words as provocative, spare, and irreverent as his music. These Miles Davis quotes span his entire career, from his bebop years alongside Charlie Parker to his electric fusion experiments of the 1970s — movements that span several distinct types of jazz. Born May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois, and known to followers as both "the Prince of Darkness" and "the Dark Magus," Davis died on September 28, 1991, leaving a spoken legacy that musicians, writers, and readers still argue over today.
- [Miles Davis: The Complete Biography — Life, Music, Wives, and Legacy](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/miles-davis/): Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. His recordings across six decades helped define bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion. No other single figure reshaped the direction of jazz as many times, or as decisively, as Miles Davis did during his 47-year career. That name, Miles Davis, appears in conversations about music history the way Einstein appears in conversations about physics: as shorthand for a kind of thinking that didn’t exist before and couldn’t be ignored after.
- [The 50 Best Jazz Albums of All Time, Ranked by Our Critics](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-albums-of-all-time/): The best jazz albums of all time span more than a century of American music, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings of 1925 through the genre-blurring jazz of the 2020s, a body of work that earned jazz its designation as, in the words of the U.S. Congress in 1987, “a rare and valuable national American treasure.” This ranked list of 50 essential recordings is the most thorough guide eJazzNews has published, built to serve both first-time listeners and serious vinyl collectors. Last updated: April 2026.
- [Famous Jazz Musicians: 30 Artists Who Shaped the Sound of Jazz](https://ejazznews.com/features/famous-jazz-musicians/): Famous jazz musicians are the composers, improvisers, and bandleaders whose recordings, techniques, and innovations defined jazz as one of America's most enduring original art forms, from New Orleans brass bands in the early 1900s to today's Grammy-winning avant-garde artists. Jazz has produced more than a century of giants, and while no single list can claim to be exhaustive, 30 names appear in virtually every serious conversation about the music's history and direction.
- [Types of Jazz: Every Jazz Genre and Subgenre Explained](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/types-of-jazz/): Jazz is an American-born musical genre defined by improvisation, syncopated rhythm, and expressive performance, encompassing more than 16 distinct types of jazz that evolved continuously from the 1890s to the present day. Understanding the types of jazz starts with recognizing that jazz isn't one sound. It's a methodology, a philosophy of music-making that has worn radically different sonic clothes across more than a century.
- [Terence Blanchard: From New Orleans Trumpet to the Metropolitan Opera](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/terence-blanchard/): Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962, New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator. Blanchard has won eight Grammy Awards, scored more than 80 film and television projects, written two operas including the first opera by a Black composer performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and serves as Executive Artistic Director of SFJAZZ. That's not a career. That's four careers running simultaneously, each one feeding the others.
- [What Instruments Are Used in Jazz? The Complete Guide to Every Jazz Instrument](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-instruments/): The instruments used in jazz are trumpet, saxophone, double bass, piano, drums, trombone, guitar, clarinet, flute, vibraphone, and organ — the specific acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments that form the core vocabulary of jazz music. Each is selected for its capacity for improvisation, expressive pitch manipulation, and rhythmic conversation within an ensemble. No other musical tradition places quite the same demands on its instruments: they must whisper, shout, bend, growl, and hold a conversation simultaneously with five other musicians, all without a conductor telling them when to move.
- [Karl Berger’s Stone Workshop Orchestra](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-news/karl-berger-stone-workshop-orchestra/): Karl Berger spent six decades proving that improvisation is not chaos — it is conversation. Born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1935, the vibraphonist and pianist became one of the most influential figures in free jazz education, a musician whose impact on how improvised music is taught far outweighs his name recognition.
- [Dayramir Gonzalez: Award-Winning Cuban Jazz Pianist and Composer](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/dayramir-gonzalez-cuban-jazz-pianist/): Dayramir González is a Grammy-nominated Cuban jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and educator from Havana, Cuba. As a leading voice in Afro-Cuban jazz today, he bridges Cuban rhythmic traditions with contemporary jazz harmony, earning headline performances at Carnegie Hall, the Havana Jazz Festival, and SFJazz Center. Born Dayramir González Vicet, he carries a lineage running from Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte straight through Berklee College of Music and into New York City's Latin jazz community.

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