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# eJazzNews: Jazz News, Reviews & Artist Profiles

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## Posts
- [Easy Jazz Standards for Beginners: 10 Tunes to Learn First](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/easy-jazz-standards/): These are 10 easy jazz standards for beginners, listed in the order we suggest you learn them. Two blues tunes come first, "Bags' Groove" and "Watermelon Man," then Herbie Hancock's three-chord "Cantaloupe Island," then songs that teach the minor key and the ii-V-I progression, such as "Summertime," "Autumn Leaves" and "All of Me," and finally two AABA tunes, "Take the 'A' Train" and "Misty." For each tune you get the composer, the form, the usual key, what makes it easy (and where its one hard spot is) and a recording to learn it from.
- [How to Play Jazz Guitar: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/how-to-play-jazz-guitar/): Jazz guitar is a style of guitar playing rooted in jazz harmony, chromaticism, and improvisation, typically performed on hollow-body or semi-hollow electric guitars, and requires a fundamentally different approach to melody, rhythm, and chord voicing than rock or pop guitar. If you want to know how to play jazz guitar and actually sound like a jazz musician (not a rock guitarist who discovered 7th chords), expect a 1-3 year arc of deliberate, structured practice before the idiom feels natural.
- [Is Frank Sinatra Jazz? His Genre and the Case For and Against](https://ejazznews.com/features/is-frank-sinatra-jazz/): Not by the strict test, but he came closer than most pop singers of his era. Frank Sinatra is classified as a traditional pop singer: he rarely scatted and stayed close to the melody the songwriter wrote, while jazz singers treat the melody as material to improvise on. Yet he learned his trade in swing-era big bands, recorded with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and phrased so rhythmically that jazz musicians, Miles Davis among them, studied his records. The fair answer is that Sinatra was a pop singer who swung like a jazz musician, and the evidence on both sides follows.
- [The 25 Best Jazz Fusion Albums of All Time](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-fusion-albums/): These are the 25 best jazz fusion albums of all time in our ranking, from Miles Davis's In a Silent Way (1969) to Thundercat's Drunk (2017). No. 1 is Davis's Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970), on which a 13-piece band traded swing for loose, rock-influenced grooves on electric keyboards, guitar and bass. Every entry gives the label and year of the original release, what the record did, and the tracks to hear first.
- [20 Greatest Jazz Fusion Artists and Bands of All Time](https://ejazznews.com/features/jazz-fusion-artists/): These are the 20 jazz fusion artists and bands that did the most to shape the music, from Miles Davis's first electric records in 1969 to Snarky Puppy and Kamasi Washington today. Miles Davis is No. 1: Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) took fusion to a mass audience, and musicians from his 1969 sessions went on to lead Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever and the Headhunters. The list is grouped by period and ordered by influence, and every entry names the records to start with.
- [How to Play Jazz Piano: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/how-to-play-jazz-piano/): The five-step path through how to play jazz piano, scales, voicings, standards, transcription, comping and soloing, is a sequence, not a checklist. You don't finish one and move to the next; you cycle through all five, deepening each layer with every pass. Pick one tune from the list above. "Autumn Leaves" is the recommended starting point for beginner jazz piano: it contains the ii-V-I in two keys, it's slow enough to hear every chord change, and it's played at every jam session on earth. Learn the melody this week. Add shell voicings next week. The tradition of learning jazz at jam sessions and from records is as old as the music itself, and that tradition is still the most reliable path forward. The is your next stop for voicing depth, and the jazz piano complete guide gives you the full historical and stylistic context to understand where your playing fits in the music's century-long conversation.
- [What Is Jazz Dance? History, Styles, and the Moves That Define It](https://ejazznews.com/features/jazz-dance/): Jazz dance is not a historical artifact. It's a living, evolving form that runs through Broadway productions, competitive dance studios, commercial music videos, and social dance floors on every continent. Understanding what is jazz dance means understanding that its history is inseparable from African American cultural innovation, from Congo Square to the Savoy Ballroom to the stages where Dunham, Cole, Fosse, and Robbins built the theatrical tradition that still shapes how Americans perform and watch dance.
- [The 25 Best Jazz Standards Every Jazz Musician Should Know](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-standards/): These are the 25 jazz standards we think every jazz musician should know, each with its composer, the year it was written and one recording to learn it from. "Body and Soul," "All the Things You Are," "Summertime" and "'Round Midnight" head the list, the same four that top the JazzStandards.com ranking of the most-recorded standards. The rest cover the forms you meet on any bandstand: ballads, the blues, rhythm changes, bebop heads, a calypso, a bossa and the modal tunes of the 1960s.
- [The 25 Best Louis Armstrong Songs, Ranked](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-louis-armstrong-songs/): These are the 25 best Louis Armstrong songs in our ranking, from the Hot Five records he made in Chicago in the 1920s to the ballads of his last years. "West End Blues" (1928) is No. 1, for the unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that opens it. "What a Wonderful World" (1967) is his most famous song today, and "Hello, Dolly!" was his biggest American hit, No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964. Each entry gives the label, the year and what to listen for.
- [What Is Acid Jazz? Meaning, Origins, Sound and Essential Records](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/acid-jazz/): Acid jazz is dance music built from jazz, funk, soul and hip-hop. It came out of London's club scene in the late 1980s, when DJs who played old jazz-funk and soul-jazz records gave their scene a name that poked fun at acid house, the sound then filling British clubs. The term is generally credited to DJ Gilles Peterson, and it stuck because he and Eddie Piller used it for their record label, Acid Jazz Records. The best-known acts are The Brand New Heavies, Incognito, Jamiroquai, Galliano and Us3, with Digable Planets and Guru's Jazzmatazz as the American counterparts.
- [Is Jazz Dead? An Honest Look at the State of the Music in 2026](https://ejazznews.com/features/is-jazz-dead/): No, jazz is not dead, but it is commercially small. In Nielsen Music's 2017 U.S. year-end report, jazz accounted for 1.0 percent of all music consumption, the same share as classical music, and it stopped being America's popular music in the 1960s. That commercial loss is what most "jazz is dead" arguments are really about. As an art form, with new albums, Grammy-winning young artists, festivals and conservatory programs, jazz in 2026 is very much alive.
- [What Was the Jazz Age? Meaning, Dates and Culture of the 1920s](https://ejazznews.com/features/what-was-the-jazz-age/): The Jazz Age was the period in the United States from the end of World War I to the stock market crash of October 1929, in other words the 1920s, when jazz became the new popular dance music and gave its name to a whole urban culture of speakeasies, flappers, new dances and looser social rules. F. Scott Fitzgerald made the name stick with his 1922 story collection Tales of the Jazz Age, and in a 1931 essay he dated the era from the May Day riots of 1919 to the crash of October 1929. Some accounts stretch it into the early 1930s, to the end of Prohibition in 1933.
- [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.
- [What Is Jazz Fusion? Meaning, History, Sound and Where to Start](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-fusion/): Jazz fusion, also called jazz-rock or simply fusion, is jazz improvisation and harmony played with the electric instruments and rhythms of rock, funk and R&B. It took shape in the late 1960s, and Miles Davis's In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970) are the records most often named as its starting point. In the 1970s, bands led by Davis's former sidemen, above all Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, took the style into the top 20 of the Billboard album chart.
- [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: Characteristics, History, Key Musicians and Albums](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/cool-jazz/): Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz that took shape in the late 1940s as a calmer alternative to and flourished through the 1950s. It is marked by moderate tempos, a light tone with little vibrato, carefully arranged ensemble writing and ideas borrowed from classical music. Its starting point is usually traced to the nonet led by , whose 1949 and 1950 recordings for Capitol were collected in 1957 as Birth of the Cool; its best-known players include Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet.
- [Hard Bop: How Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Brought Soul Back to Bebop](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/hard-bop/): Hard bop is the style of jazz that grew out of bebop in the mid-1950s: it kept bebop's fast-moving chord changes, small groups and long improvised solos, and added the blues, gospel and rhythm and blues its players had grown up with. Compared with bebop, the themes are simpler and easier to sing, the drumming is heavier and the feeling is closer to the church and the R&B club. Its first home was New York, its central band was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, co-founded with pianist Horace Silver, and its most important label was Blue Note. It was the leading style in small-group jazz from about 1955 until the second half of the 1960s.
- [20 Popular Jazz Artists Today: The Modern Voices Defining the Genre](https://ejazznews.com/features/popular-jazz-artists-today/): These are 20 of the most popular jazz artists working today: musicians and bands who released new music or toured between 2024 and 2026 and whose audiences reach well beyond the jazz club. Jon Batiste, Kamasi Washington and Samara Joy are the biggest names, all three with Grammy wins at the 2026 ceremony, and the list also covers today's leading singers, the London scene around Ezra Collective, and instrumentalists such as Brad Mehldau and Hiromi. Each entry gives the facts behind the pick and a record to start with.
- [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: Essential Shapes, Voicings and Progressions](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-guitar-chords/): Jazz guitar chords are seventh chords and their extensions (9ths, 11ths and 13ths), played as moveable shapes without open strings so that one fingering works in every key. Five chord types cover most of the symbols on a jazz lead sheet: major 7, dominant 7, minor 7, minor 7♭5 and diminished 7. Learn each one with its root on the sixth string and on the fifth string and you have the ten core shapes below. From there come the three-note shell voicings, drop-2 voicings, 9th and 13th chords, and the ii-V-I progression that ties them together.
- [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 20 Most Famous Jazz Songs of All Time](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/): These are 25 of Duke Ellington's best songs, in chronological order from "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (1926) to "Lotus Blossom" (1967). The best known are "Mood Indigo," "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," "Sophisticated Lady," "In a Sentimental Mood" and "Satin Doll," plus the band's theme, "Take the 'A' Train," which Billy Strayhorn wrote. Each entry gives the composer credit, when the song was first recorded and the versions to hear first.
- [Modal Jazz: How Miles Davis Replaced Chord Changes With Scales](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/modal-jazz/): Modal jazz is jazz in which the soloists improvise on a scale, or mode, that stays in place for eight, sixteen or more bars, instead of on a chord progression that changes every bar or two. Miles Davis brought the approach into the mainstream with the title track of Milestones (1958) and with Kind of Blue (1959), whose opening track, "So What," uses just two scales: 16 bars of D Dorian, 8 of E♭ Dorian and 8 more of D Dorian. John Coltrane's quartet took the idea further between 1960 and 1965, while pianists such as Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock developed the open chord voicings in fourths that go with it.
- [Jazz Piano Chords: Chord Chart, Voicings, and Progressions](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-piano-chords/): Jazz piano chords are seventh chords rather than triads: where a pop pianist plays C major as C-E-G, a jazz pianist starts from Cmaj7 (C-E-G-B) and often adds a ninth on top. Five seventh-chord types account for most of the symbols on a lead sheet, and three ways of voicing them (shell, rootless and quartal) cover most playing situations. Below you will find a chord chart, the voicings written out note by note, the ii-V-I in three keys and a practice plan.
- [Louis Armstrong Quotes: 30 Memorable Lines from Satchmo Himself](https://ejazznews.com/features/louis-armstrong-quotes/): These 30 Louis Armstrong quotes all have a source you can check: his books Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954), his letters, interviews in Life, Ebony and Harper's, and newspaper reports from 1957 to his death in 1971. The source is given with every quote. Lines that circulate under his name without a traceable origin, including the famous "if you gotta ask" definition of jazz, are covered in a separate section near the end.
- [The Best Jazz Clubs in NYC: 13 Rooms to Hear Live Jazz](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-clubs-nyc/): The best jazz clubs in NYC are the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, Smalls and Mezzrow in Greenwich Village, Birdland and Dizzy's Club in Midtown, Smoke on the Upper West Side, Bill's Place in Harlem, and Ornithology and Bar LunÀtico in Brooklyn. Below are 13 clubs that were presenting jazz in October 2026, grouped by neighborhood, with what each room is like, what a night costs and how to get in. If you have one night, go to the Vanguard; if you want to stay out until 4am, go to Smalls.
- [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: The Musicians, Cities and Records of the Decade](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-history/jazz-music-1920s/): Jazz music in the 1920s moved out of New Orleans to Chicago and New York, onto records and onto the radio, and changed from a band music built on collective improvisation into a music of star soloists and written arrangements. The players who drove that change were King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, while blues singers such as Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith opened up a record market aimed at Black buyers. This page follows the music city by city and ends with the recordings to start with; for the wider culture of Prohibition, flappers and the Harlem Renaissance, see our guide to .
- [Jazz Appreciation Month: History, Events, and How to Celebrate](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/jazz-appreciation-month/): Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) runs every year from April 1 to April 30. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History created it in 2001 to honor jazz as both a historic and a living American art form, and the month closes on April 30 with UNESCO's International Jazz Day. Anyone can take part: most JAM events are organized locally by schools, libraries, clubs and other organizations, and the simplest way to join in is to spend some of April listening to jazz with intent.
- [Montreux Jazz Festival: History, Dates, Venues, Tickets and Free Stages](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/montreux-jazz-festival/): The Montreux Jazz Festival runs for 16 days every July on the Lake Geneva waterfront in Montreux, Switzerland, and its 61st edition is scheduled for 2 to 17 July 2027. The two paid venues are inside the renovated Montreux Music & Convention Centre (2m2c): the Auditorium Stravinski, with a capacity of 4,000, and the standing-only Montreux Jazz Lab, which holds 2,000. Most of the festival's 700-plus concerts and activities take place on free stages along the quays, and the paid programme is announced, with tickets going on sale, in April.
- [1920s Jazz Singers: The Voices of the Jazz Age](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/1920s-jazz-singers/): The 1920s jazz singers who mattered most were the Black blues women whose records opened a new market, led by Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, together with Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong, who carried that style toward jazz and pop. This list covers 16 singers who made their name on record between 1920 and 1929, grouped by style: the blues singers, the vaudeville and Broadway singers, and the men who brought scat and microphone singing. Each entry gives dates, what the singer did in the decade and a recording to start with.
- [Jazz Improvisation: A Guide to Styles, Techniques and Practice](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-improvisation/): Jazz improvisation is the spontaneous invention of melody and accompaniment during a performance, played over a chord progression and song form the band agrees on in advance. An improvised passage by one player is called a solo, one pass through the tune's form is a chorus, and short alternating solos are called trading fours or eights. It is a learnable skill, built by listening, copying recorded solos and playing with other musicians.
- [Jazz Chord Progressions: The Essential Guide for Musicians](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-chord-progressions/): Jazz chord progressions are the chord sequences that jazz standards are built from, and a small set of them covers most of the repertoire. The most common is the ii-V-I, which in C major is Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7. Below are seven progressions in a sensible learning order, each with chord symbols, Roman numerals, standards that use it and a way to play it on piano or guitar.
- [What Is Bebop Jazz? Meaning, Characteristics, Musicians and Records](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/bebop-jazz/): Bebop, often shortened to bop, is a style of jazz that took shape in New York in the early 1940s and became the basis of modern jazz after 1945. It is played by small groups, usually saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass and drums, at fast tempos over complex, quickly changing chords, and the improvised solo is the main event: the band states the melody, each soloist improvises on its chord changes, and the melody returns at the end. Its main creators were alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. Unlike the swing music it grew out of, bebop was made for listening, not for dancing.
- [Best Jazz Albums for Beginners: 15 Records to Start Your Collection](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/best-jazz-albums-for-beginners/): Start with three records: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959), the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out (1959) and Getz/Gilberto (1964) by Stan Getz and João Gilberto. All three are built on tunes you can hum after one play, and together they cover the calm modal sound of Davis's sextet, Brubeck's catchy experiments with unusual meters and the soft Brazilian bossa nova that took "The Girl from Ipanema" into the US Top 5. The other 12 albums below, released between 1956 and 1973, were chosen on the same basis: a clear melody early on, a steady beat and nothing you need to study first, and each entry names the one track to play first.
- [The Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time: 20 Voices from Ella to Esperanza](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-singers/): These are the 20 greatest jazz singers of all time in our selection: women and men from the 1920s to today, arranged by era and chosen for their records and their influence on the singers who followed. Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are the four we consider essential, and the list ends with five singers still recording, among them Samara Joy and Esperanza Spalding. Separate guides, linked below, go deeper on female, male, modern, Black and 1920s jazz singers.
- [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/): These are 15 jazz singers who are recording and performing now and shaping how jazz is sung today: ten women and five men, each with at least one album as a leader since 2015. Cécile McLorin Salvant and Samara Joy, three-time winners of the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, head the list. The men range from Gregory Porter's gospel-rooted baritone and Kurt Elling's vocalese to José James's mix of jazz and hip-hop, Michael Mayo's layered harmonies and Jamie Cullum's jazz-pop.
- [Black Jazz Singers: 27 Vocalists from Ma Rainey to Samara Joy](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/black-jazz-singers/): These are 27 Black jazz singers, women and men, arranged by era from the 1920s to today. The list starts with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, two of the first stars of recorded blues, and runs through Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to Samara Joy, who has won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album three times since 2023. Each entry gives dates, what the singer did, and a recording to start with.
- [The 20 Greatest Male Jazz Singers of All Time](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/male-jazz-singers/): These are the 20 male jazz singers who did the most to shape how jazz is sung, ranked on phrasing, improvisation and the recordings other singers learned from rather than on sales. Louis Armstrong is No. 1: his 1926 Hot Five record "Heebie Jeebies" made scat singing a hit, and his phrasing was a formative influence on Bing Crosby and the crooners who followed. The list runs from the 1920s to today, and its second half covers the men who came up from the 1990s on, including Harry Connick Jr., Kurt Elling, Gregory Porter and José James.
- [The Greatest Jazz Pianists: 20 Piano Masters Who Defined the Instrument](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-pianists/): These are 20 jazz pianists who changed how the instrument is played, listed by year of birth from Duke Ellington (born 1899) to Robert Glasper (born 1978), each with the records to start with. The selection rests on influence and recordings, not fame. If you want one name for the greatest, it is Art Tatum, the pianist the others measured themselves against: Teddy Wilson said that "Art Tatum was the master of all of us." After the list come the women who shaped jazz piano, today's modern players and where to hear them in New York.
- [Jazz Saxophone Players: 15 Greats from Coleman Hawkins to Lakecia Benjamin](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-saxophone-players/): These are 15 jazz saxophone players who changed how the instrument is played, from Coleman Hawkins, one of the first major soloists on the tenor, to the alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin. Charlie Parker and John Coltrane sit at the center: Parker built the language of bebop on alto in the 1940s, and Coltrane carried the tenor and soprano from hard bop to free jazz. Each entry explains why the player matters and names a record to start with.
- [New Orleans Jazz Fest: Dates, Tickets, Stages, and What to Know](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-events/new-orleans-jazz-fest/): The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, better known as Jazz Fest, runs over two Thursday-to-Sunday weekends at the end of April and the start of May at the Fair Grounds Race Course, 1751 Gentilly Boulevard, New Orleans. The next edition is scheduled for April 22-25 and April 29-May 2, 2027, with gates open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day. Tickets are sold on nojazzfest.com and go on sale when the lineup is announced, and everything on the grounds is paid for by card or phone because the festival is cashless.
- [Jazz Drummers: 15 Greats from Art Blakey to Marcus Gilmore](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-drummers/): These 15 jazz drummers changed what the drum kit does in a jazz band, from Art Blakey and Max Roach, who built the drum language of bebop and hard bop, to Terri Lyne Carrington and Makaya McCraven, who are still making records today. They are listed in order of birth, not ranked, and each entry says what the drummer changed and names a record to start with. The swing-era drummers who came first, including Gene Krupa, Jo Jones and Buddy Rich, have their own section before the list.
- [Jazz Trumpet Players: 15 Greats from Louis Armstrong to Ambrose Akinmusire](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-trumpet-players/): These are 15 jazz trumpet players who changed how the instrument is played, from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five records of the 1920s to Ambrose Akinmusire, who won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007. Armstrong comes first because he moved jazz from collective improvisation to the featured solo, and nearly every trumpeter after him built on that. The list runs in chronological order rather than as a ranking, and each entry gives the reason the player matters and a record to start with.
- [The Greatest Jazz Guitarists: 15 Players Who Shaped Jazz Guitar](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/jazz-guitarists/): These are 15 jazz guitarists who changed what the guitar can do in jazz, listed by year of birth from Django Reinhardt (born 1910) to Julian Lage (born 1987), each with the records to start with. The selection rests on influence and recordings, not fame. If you want one name for the greatest, three have the strongest claim: Reinhardt showed in the 1930s that a guitarist could lead a jazz group, Charlie Christian made the electric guitar a solo instrument, and Wes Montgomery won the DownBeat Critics' Poll for guitar six times in the 1960s.
- [Jazz Scales: The 7 Essential Scales Every Jazz Musician Needs to Know](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-scales/): The seven essential jazz scales are the major scale, the Dorian and Mixolydian modes, the melodic minor scale, the blues scale, the bebop dominant scale and the whole-tone scale. Each one belongs to a type of chord, so the real skill is matching scale to chord: Dorian over minor seventh chords, Mixolydian or bebop dominant over dominant sevenths, the major scale over major sevenths. Below are all seven with formulas and spellings, a chord-scale chart and a practice method.
- [The 10 Best Miles Davis Albums, Ranked](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-miles-davis-albums/): Our ranking of the 10 best Miles Davis albums puts Kind of Blue (1959) at No. 1, ahead of Bitches Brew (1970) and In a Silent Way (1969). The list covers every stage of his recording career, from the Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949-1950 to the funk of On the Corner (1972), and for each album we give the label, the recording dates, the band and the tracks to hear first.
- [Miles Davis Quotes: 30 Memorable Quotes from the Prince of Darkness](https://ejazznews.com/features/miles-davis-quotes/): These 30 Miles Davis quotes all have a source you can check: his 1989 autobiography, interviews and articles in Playboy, The Jazz Review, Jet and the International Herald Tribune, and first-hand accounts from musicians who played in his bands. The source is given with every quote. Popular lines that circulate on quote sites without any traceable origin are not in the list; they are covered in a separate section near the end.
- [Miles Davis Biography: Life, Albums, Wives and Children](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/miles-davis/): Miles Davis (1926-1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader and composer who changed the direction of jazz several times: he led the Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949-1950, recorded Kind of Blue (1959), one of the best-selling jazz albums ever (5x Platinum in the US), and took jazz electric with In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). He was married three times, to dancer Frances Taylor, singer Betty Mabry (later Betty Davis) and actress Cicely Tyson, and had four children: Cheryl, Gregory and Miles IV with his high school girlfriend Irene Birth, and Erin with Marguerite Eskridge. He died in Santa Monica, California, on September 28, 1991, aged 65, from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure.
- [The 25 Best Jazz Albums of All Time](https://ejazznews.com/features/best-jazz-albums-of-all-time/): These are the 25 best jazz albums of all time in our ranking, from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five sides of the 1920s to Kamasi Washington's The Epic (2015). Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) is No. 1: a sextet with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans recorded it with almost no rehearsal, building tunes on scales instead of fast chord changes, and only one jazz album holds a higher US sales certification. Every entry gives the label and year of the original release and the tracks to hear first.
- [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: The 14 Main Jazz Styles and Genres Explained](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/types-of-jazz/): The main types of jazz, roughly in the order they appeared, are New Orleans jazz (Dixieland), swing, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz and fusion, with Latin jazz developing alongside them from the 1940s. Later styles such as smooth jazz, acid jazz and nu jazz grew out of fusion, funk and club culture. Below, each of the 14 main styles gets its period, its sound and one or two recordings to start with, followed by a few offshoots you will also see named.
- [Terence Blanchard: From New Orleans Trumpet to the Metropolitan Opera](https://ejazznews.com/artist-profiles/terence-blanchard/): Terence Blanchard (born March 13, 1962, in New Orleans) is the trumpeter who replaced Wynton Marsalis in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1982, recorded for Columbia Records, and in 2021 became the first Black composer to have an opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera, with Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Alongside his own bands he has scored most of Spike Lee's films since Jungle Fever (1991), earning Oscar nominations for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2024 and leads SFJAZZ in San Francisco as its executive artistic director.
- [What Instruments Are Used in Jazz? The Main Jazz Instruments and What They Do](https://ejazznews.com/jazz-education/jazz-instruments/): The main instruments used in jazz are the saxophone, trumpet and trombone, which play the melodies and most of the solos, and the piano, double bass, drums and guitar of the rhythm section, which supply the beat and the chords underneath. Clarinet, flute, vibraphone, Hammond organ and Latin percussion such as congas and bongos are standard in particular styles. The wind instrument most closely tied to jazz is the saxophone.
- [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 Havana-born pianist, composer and educator who began his professional career at 16 in Diákara, the Afro-Cuban jazz group of former Irakere member Oscar Valdés. His 2007 debut, Dayramir & Habana enTRANCé, won three Cubadisco awards, and in 2010 he became the first Cuban national to receive Berklee College of Music's Presidential Scholarship. Based in New York since 2013, he is best known for The Grand Concourse (2018), which DownBeat called "a tour de force," and for V.I.D.A. (2024), the album marking his 25 years as a professional musician.

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