Jazz grew up in dance halls, street parades and basement clubs, and much of its history was never written down. These stories follow the musicians, places, styles and records that shaped it: a cornet king nobody alive has heard, a trumpet bent by accident, a baseball pitch that lent the music its name and a landmark concert played on a faulty piano. Where a tale is legend rather than record, the story says so.
Every tile in a Jazz game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Musicians
nine stories
1The first king of jazz that nobody alive has heard
On the tile: Buddy Boldenc. 1898-1906
Buddy Bolden has been called the first king of jazz, yet no one alive has heard him play. From about 1898 to 1906 his loud cornet led dances in uptown New Orleans, and legend says it carried for miles. In 1907 he was committed to a state hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, where he lived until his death in 1931. If he ever made a recording, none has survived. His best-known trace is a band photograph from about 1905, and critics have even argued that it was printed backward.
2The New Year's Eve arrest that made a trumpet star
On the tile: Armstrong1912-1914
On New Year's Eve 1912, eleven-year-old Louis Armstrong celebrated in New Orleans by firing a pistol into the air. A court sent him to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, where he stayed until June 1914. It turned out to be his music school. The home's instructor, Peter Davis, taught him the cornet and the bugle, and Armstrong rose to lead its brass band, which played parades, parties and public events. In 1922 King Oliver sent for him to join his band in Chicago.
Jelly Roll Morton liked to claim that he invented jazz in 1902. He did not. But the boast had something behind it. A New Orleans Creole born in 1885 or 1890, depending on the source, Morton was already learning a blend of ragtime, blues and classical forms while Louis Armstrong was a toddler. After his first recordings in 1923 he became jazz's first important composer, leading his Red Hot Peppers. In 1938 musicologist Alan Lomax recorded about eight hours of Morton playing and talking for the Library of Congress, and much of it reached the public a decade later.
4The pianist who planned Louis Armstrong's big break
On the tile: Lil Hardin1925
By 1925 Louis Armstrong was unhappy playing in Fletcher Henderson's band in New York, which paid him $55 a week. His wife, the Fisk-educated pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, made a plan. She persuaded the owner of Chicago's Dreamland Cafe to pay Louis $75 a week and bill him as the World's Greatest Jazz Cornetist, spread the news in Chicago's Black press, and made sure OKeh Records knew he was coming back. That November he began recording with his Hot Five, with Lil on piano, its only formally trained musician.
In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize music jury found no new work worth the prize and instead recommended a special citation for Duke Ellington's lifetime of achievement. The Pulitzer board refused, and gave no music award that year. Two of the three jurors resigned. Ellington, then 66, answered with a joke: "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young." The board finally honored him in 1999, the centennial of his birth and 25 years after his death, with a special citation.
6The dancer who changed her act at the last minute
On the tile: Fitzgerald1934
In 1934 Ella Fitzgerald's name was pulled in a weekly drawing at Harlem's Apollo Theater, which won her a spot in Amateur Night. She went planning to dance. But that night the Edwards Sisters, a dazzling dance act, closed the main show, and she felt her dancing would not compare. Facing a rowdy crowd, she decided at the last minute to sing Hoagy Carmichael's Judy, a song she knew from a Connee Boswell record her mother loved. The audience fell quiet, then demanded an encore.
7The school fundraiser that became a swing orchestra
On the tile: Sweethearts1937-1949
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm began in 1937 as a fundraiser. Laurence C. Jones, founder of the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi, formed an all-girl dance band to tour and raise money for the mostly African American school. It grew into a professional swing orchestra based in Arlington, Virginia, and toured Europe with the USO in 1945. Its members were women of Black, white, Mexican and Chinese heritage, which broke segregation laws, so white players sometimes wore makeup onstage to pass as Black and avoid arrest.
8The Harlem apartment where bebop came to rehearse
On the tile: M. L. Williams1940s
In the 1940s pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams lived at 63 Hamilton Terrace in Harlem, and her modest apartment became a gathering place for young musicians. After her own nights at the club Café Society, she headed uptown to Minton's Playhouse, and later the talk and music moved to her place. Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and Billy Strayhorn came and went at all hours, sitting on her white rug and taking turns at her Baldwin upright. Monk would play a new tune for months, testing whether it was a hit.
9The trumpet that got better when someone fell on it
On the tile: Gillespie1953
On January 6, 1953, Dizzy Gillespie threw a party for his wife, Lorraine, at Snookie's in Manhattan. While he stepped out for a quick radio interview, the dance duo Stump and Stumpy began clowning on the bandstand, and Stumpy fell onto Gillespie's trumpet, bending the bell upward. It was her birthday, so Gillespie played the damaged horn anyway, and he liked the sound, which reached his ears sooner. He had his wife draw it, sent the picture to the Martin company, and they built him one. The upturned bell became his trademark.
1The Sunday gathering ground behind New Orleans music
On the tile: Congo Square1817
In 1817 New Orleans passed an ordinance confining the dance gatherings of enslaved people to one place chosen by the mayor: Congo Square. On Sunday afternoons, field hands, domestic workers and free people of color met there by the hundreds, and some reports say thousands. They formed circles for dances such as the bamboula and the calinda, played on drums made from barrels and carved logs. Many scholars believe this ground helped give birth to jazz, and its rhythms still echo in second-line parades.
2The art gallery that turned into Preservation Hall
On the tile: Preservation1950s-1960s
In the 1950s Larry Borenstein ran a small art gallery at 726 St. Peter Street in the French Quarter. Minding it kept him from the city's few remaining traditional jazz concerts, so he invited the musicians to hold rehearsal sessions in the gallery. Many were elderly players who had been contemporaries of Buddy Bolden. In 1960 a honeymooning couple from Pennsylvania, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, followed some musicians there and soon moved to New Orleans. Borenstein handed the nightly operation to Allan Jaffe, and Preservation Hall was born.
The Savoy Ballroom opened on March 12, 1926, on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, stretching the whole block between 140th and 141st Streets. It was one of the first racially integrated public places in the country. Two bandstands kept music going all night and set up famous battles of the bands, including Chick Webb against Benny Goodman. About 700,000 people came each year, and the spring-loaded wooden floor had to be replaced every three years. Regulars called it the Track, and the Lindy Hop grew up there.
4The Harlem club where Cab Calloway filled in for Duke
On the tile: Cotton Club1927-1930
Harlem's Cotton Club kept a strict segregation policy: its entertainers and workers were African American, while its management and customers were white. Duke Ellington's orchestra became the house band in 1927, and live radio broadcasts from the club made him a star. When Ellington left for Hollywood in 1930 to make the movie Check and Double-Check, the club needed someone who could match his popularity. It turned to a virtually unknown singer and bandleader, a former law student named Cab Calloway, who kept the job for years.
Minton's Playhouse sat inside the Hotel Cecil on West 118th Street in Harlem, a building from the 1890s that was listed in the Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans, from 1941 to 1961. On Monday nights, when most theaters were dark, musicians including guitarist Charlie Christian and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie held informal jam sessions there, with Thelonious Monk as house pianist. Those nights made Minton's an after-hours laboratory for bebop. The club closed in 1974 after a fire damaged the building.
6The optometrist who recorded jazz legends at home
On the tile: Van Gelder1953-1959
Some of the most celebrated jazz records of the 1950s were made in a family home in Hackensack, New Jersey. Rudy Van Gelder was an optometrist with a practice in nearby Teaneck who recorded in his spare time. When his parents built the house in 1946, they added a double-pane interior window to one bedroom, just like a studio control room. Beginning in 1953 he recorded Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey. In 1959 he gave up optometry and built a studio in Englewood Cliffs.
The Newport Jazz Festival began partly because summers in a Rhode Island resort town seemed dull. Socialite Elaine Lorillard complained that the scene was "terribly boring," and she and her husband, Louis, a tobacco heir, urged club owner George Wein to organize a jazz festival there. Louis gave $20,000. Wein had never known of a large jazz festival, so he improvised. The first one, in 1954, went ahead in pouring rain with Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young, and it became a template for festivals everywhere.
In 1965, on their first wedding anniversary, Franzo and Marina King got front-row seats to hear John Coltrane at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. They say they felt the Holy Spirit walk onstage with him, and they called that night their sound baptism. The couple built a spiritual community around his music, with his album A Love Supreme as its central text; one early version was an after-hours jazz club. Decades later the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church still holds Sunday services beneath icons of Coltrane.
9The Yokohama cafe that hid its records from the war
On the tile: Jazz Kissa1933
In 1933 a young man named Mamoru Yoshida opened Chigusa, a jazz cafe in Yokohama, Japan. During World War II the government banned jazz along with other music from enemy nations, so Yoshida hid his 6,000 jazz records in his attic. In 1945 an air raid burned the cafe and the collection. Three years later he reopened near an American military base and started over. Listening cafes like his, called jazz kissa, flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s, and at their peak Japan had more than 600.
The earliest known printed use of the word jazz came from baseball, not music. On April 2, 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined Ben's Jazz Curve, in which a pitcher named Ben Henderson described a new pitch. "I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it," he said. In that early sportswriting the word meant lively or energetic. By 1915 it was being applied to a new kind of music in Chicago.
2The rough, voice-like brass that set Ellington apart
On the tile: Jungle Sound1927
In the mid-1920s Duke Ellington's band found a raw new voice. Trumpeter Bubber Miley, who had been influenced by King Oliver, and trombonist Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton used rough-edged, slurred, voice-like sounds that pulled the music away from the sweet style of ordinary dance bands. Their jungle sound took shape in East St. Louis Toodle-Oo and grew in Black and Tan Fantasy, recorded in April 1927. That year the band began its famous residency at Harlem's Cotton Club.
3The swing band that first recorded under another name
On the tile: Kansas City1935-1936
While Benny Goodman's band crossed the country in 1935, a bluesier swing was brewing in Kansas City. That year bandleader Bennie Moten died, and pianist Bill Basie, from Red Bank, New Jersey, formed a band around Moten's former players. Its members included a young tenor saxophonist named Lester Young. The band built a following through radio broadcasts from the Reno Club, driven by Walter Page's walking bass and Jo Jones's light cymbal beat. Its first recordings, made in 1936 by a small group of its players, came out as Jones-Smith Incorporated for contractual reasons.
When bebop arrived in the early 1940s, some swing stars thought it was a bad mistake. Bandleader Tommy Dorsey said "bebop has set music back 20 years," and Louis Armstrong grumbled about its weird chords. The style was built by young sidemen, among them Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk, who met at after-hours jam sessions. They packed extra notes into familiar chords and changed chords far more often. Parker had taught himself saxophone in every key, not knowing that jazz players usually stuck to three or four.
5The famous quartet that formed because a club had no piano
On the tile: West Coast1952
In 1952 baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was playing The Haig, a club in Los Angeles, and a young trumpeter named Chet Baker began sitting in. The club had gotten rid of its piano, because vibraphonist Red Norvo, a regular there, handled the keyboard role. So Mulligan and Baker worked out how to play without one. Their quartet of baritone sax, trumpet, bass and drums wove quiet, intertwining lines, and the crowds grew. The pianoless quartet became a signature sound of cool jazz and a model for bands ever since.
6The quartet that played jazz in tuxedos and concert halls
On the tile: Chamber Jazz1950s
The Modern Jazz Quartet grew out of the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie's late-1940s big band, and in the early 1950s it found a quiet, chamber-music sound. Determined to win jazz the respect given to classical musicians, the four wore tuxedos, played concert halls rather than nightclubs, and gave recitals instead of jams. Pianist John Lewis, fascinated by both Bach and the blues, set jazz inside forms like rondos and fugues. His tune Django, a tribute to the guitarist Django Reinhardt, is still played by jazz musicians everywhere.
7The saxophonist who first thought his horn was a toy
On the tile: Free Jazz1959
When Ornette Coleman's mother told him to look under the bed in Fort Worth, Texas, he found a saxophone and thought it was a toy. He largely taught himself to play. Touring with minstrel and blues bands as a young man, he was criticized by bandleaders for his freer style. In Los Angeles he found kindred spirits, including bassist Charlie Haden and trumpeter Don Cherry, and formed his first important band with them. In the late 1950s some dismissed him as a fraud. Fifty years later, closing London's 2009 Meltdown festival, he drew a standing ovation.
8The State Department tour behind a bossa nova hit
On the tile: Bossa Nova1961-1962
In 1961 guitarist Charlie Byrd toured South America for the State Department and, in Brazil, fell for bossa nova, a relaxed style of samba shaped by Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto. The name means new trend or new wave. Back home, Byrd played the music for saxophonist Stan Getz, who persuaded Verve Records to back an album. Jazz Samba, released in 1962 and featuring Desafinado, sold half a million copies within 18 months and topped Billboard's pop album chart, a rare feat for jazz.
In 1959, 16-year-old Mulatu Astatke was sent from Addis Ababa to school in Britain, and he was supposed to become an aeronautical engineer. Music got in the way. He studied in London, played vibraphone in Soho clubs, enrolled at Berklee in Boston and explored jazz and Latin music in New York. Returning home in 1969, he blended the pentatonic modes of Ethiopian music with American jazz and named the result Ethio jazz. Decades later a French enthusiast reissued his early recordings, and they found a devoted cult following.
The first jazz record ever released came from the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a group of white New Orleans musicians whose slapstick shows had packed Reisenweber's restaurant in New York. In February 1917 they recorded Livery Stable Blues and Dixie Jass Band One Step for Victor. The band had tried recording for Columbia in January, but that session failed, and Columbia released the band's records only after Victor's was a hit. It turned jazz into a national craze, although a white band being first reflected the unfairness of the era.
2The hit other musicians said was full of wrong notes
On the tile: Body and Soul1939
Coleman Hawkins, often called the father of the tenor saxophone, had been living in Europe since 1934 when he came home in 1939. Soon after, he recorded the ballad Body and Soul, replacing familiar riffs with brisk arpeggios and long, unbroken lines. Other musicians said he was playing wrong notes, which Hawkins found funny. The record stayed a jukebox hit into the 1950s and became a textbook lesson in ballad playing. Yet Hawkins never played that solo exactly the same way again.
3The concert recordings that were lost for 12 years
On the tile: Carnegie 19381938
In the 1930s the idea of jazz as concert-hall music seemed almost laughable. Yet on January 16, 1938, Benny Goodman's band played Carnegie Hall, joined by stars from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras in a racially integrated jam session. The show sold out weeks ahead, with the best seats at $2.75. Pianist Jess Stacy's unplanned solo on Sing, Sing, Sing, near the end of the night, became legend. But recordings of the night were presumed lost until 1950, when Goodman's sister-in-law came across a set of acetates.
In 1948, 22-year-old Miles Davis joined young musicians rehearsing at arranger Gil Evans's apartment in New York. Evans, Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz had worked with Claude Thornhill's band and believed bebop's energy could be explored with instruments like the French horn. Their nine-piece band recorded for Capitol and played a handful of gigs at the Royal Roost before breaking up as a commercial disaster. But the music, which came to be known as Birth of the Cool, pointed the way for 1950s jazz and laid foundations for Kind of Blue.
5The bebop summit that lost its crowd to a boxing match
On the tile: Massey Hall1953
In 1953 the New Jazz Society of Toronto brought the giants of bebop to Massey Hall: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Attendance was poor because the show clashed with a heavyweight fight, Rocky Marciano against Jersey Joe Walcott. Parker played a plastic saxophone and was credited as Charlie Chan because of his contract with Mercury Records. Mingus recorded the concert, though his bass was so faint he dubbed it in later. Years afterward, President Jimmy Carter sang one of its tunes, Salt Peanuts, at a White House jazz festival.
By 1956 Duke Ellington's orchestra was struggling, and at that year's Newport Jazz Festival four of his players were missing when the evening began. Then he called Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, an old arrangement, and tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played 27 straight choruses of blues. Backstage, drummer Jo Jones egged him on, slapping a rolled-up newspaper against the stage. A woman in the crowd began to dance, then others joined her. Ellington's faded reputation revived overnight, and he soon appeared on the cover of Time.
Kind of Blue began as sketches rather than finished tunes. Working with pianist Bill Evans, Miles Davis drew up a few basic outlines, and when the musicians arrived at the studio on March 2, 1959, that is what they were given. Davis wanted to capture their spontaneity on the first take. A year earlier he had slipped Evans a piece of paper marked with two chords, G minor and A augmented, and told him to see what he could do. From it Evans built the chords of Blue in Green. The second session came seven weeks later.
Take Five was a late addition to Dave Brubeck's 1959 album Time Out. Drummer Joe Morello liked to slip into five-four time during his solos and kept asking for a song in that meter, until saxophonist Paul Desmond said he would write one. Rehearsal tapes from 1959, unheard for decades, catch the quartet struggling with an earlier version in a different groove, trying it 12 times. The final recording took two takes, and Desmond thought it was a throwaway. He once joked about spending his royalties on a new electric shaver.
9The show tune that knocked the Beatles off the top
On the tile: Hello, Dolly!1964
In late 1963 Louis Armstrong and his All Stars recorded the title song for an upcoming Broadway musical, Hello, Dolly. Armstrong did not expect much from it. But after the show opened in 1964, his record took off, and by May it had reached No. 1, knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts at the height of Beatlemania. Armstrong was 62 years old. The record also won him the Grammy for best male vocal performance.