Louis Armstrong
Born August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, LA
Died July 6, 1971, in New York City
“My whole life has been happiness,” Louis Armstrong liked to say, and he managed to make everyone who heard him feel that no matter how bad things got, everything was bound to turn out all right...
Count
Basie
Born August 21, 1904, in Red Bank, NJ
Died April 26, 1984, in Hollywood, FL
“I’ve always played happy music,” William “Count” Basie once said. “Music that people can tap their feet to... That’s what I intend to keep on playing.” He kept that pledge for nearly fifty years...
Sidney Bechet
Born May 14, 1897, in New Orleans, LA
Died May 14, 1959, in Paris, France
“There’s this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving,” Sidney Bechet wrote. No jazz musician was more restless – or played more memorable music – than this master of the clarinet and soprano saxophone...
Buddy Bolden
Born September 6, 1877, in New Orleans, LA
Died November 4, 1931, in Jackson, LA
The growls and shouts that attended the birth of jazz came, by most accounts, from New Orleans cornet king Buddy Bolden. Though he was never recorded, he remains among the most revered of all jazz musicians...
Dave
Brubeck
Born December 6, 1920, in Concord, CA
“Dave Brubeck “plays ... like where the blues was born,” said stride legend Willie “the Lion” Smith. “You could put [his music] on at anybody’s house, and they’d dance all night.”...
Betty
Carter
Born May 16, 1930, in Flint, MI
Died September 26, 1998, in New York City
“It was very important in those days for a musician or a singer to become an individual,” Betty Carter once said. “You had to be yourself if you were going to succeed.” Born Lillie Mae Jones in 1930, the vocalist was an iconoclast from the start...
Ornette
Coleman
Born March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, TX
“The theme you play at the start of the number is the territory,” Ornette Coleman said, “and what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure.” Coleman relished the adventure as few had before him...
John Coltrane
Born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, NC
Died July 17, 1967, in New York City
“My music,” John Coltrane said, “is the spiritual expression of what I am’Äîmy faith, my knowledge, my being...” The grandson of ministers, he began his career in the blues clubs of Philadelphia...
Miles
Davis
Born May 25, 1926, in Alton, IL
Died September 28, 1991, in New York City
“The difference between me and other musicians,” Miles Davis once said, “is that I’ve got charisma.” He became a cultural icon, nearly as well known for his elegant clothes, plain-spoken opinions and rejection of every remnant of minstrelsy as for his music...
Duke Ellington
Born April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C.
Died May 24, 1974, in New York City
“If jazz means anything,” Edward Kennedy Ellington once said, “it is freedom of expression.” No one in the history of jazz expressed himself more freely -- or with more variety or swing or sophistication...
Ella
Fitzgerald
Born April 25, 1917, in Newport News, VA
Died June 15, 1996, in Beverly Hills, CA
“If the musicians like what I do,” Ella Fitzgerald once said, “then I feel I’m really singing.” She was really singing all her life...
Stan Getz
Born February 2, 1927, in Philadelphia, PA
Died June 6, 1991, in Malibu, CA
“The saxophone is an imitation of the human voice,” tenor saxophonist Stan Getz once said. His own voice was breathy, light, feminine, and so touching that it captured the attention of the public without sacrificing the respect of jazz aficionados...
Dizzy
Gillespie
Born October 21, 1917, in Cheraw, SC
Died January 6, 1993, in New York City
“You only have so many notes,” John Birks Gillespie once explained, “and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other.” Gillespie was in full command of every note on the trumpet...
Benny Goodman
Born May 30, 1909, in Chicago, IL
Died June 13, 1986, in New York City
“Nothing less than perfection would do,” Benny Goodman once said of his long band-leading career. “I lived that music, and expected everybody else to live it, too.” His exacting standards paid off...
Billie Holiday
Born April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, PA
Died July 17, 1959, in New York City
“Me and my old voice,” Billie Holiday once told an accompanist. “It just goes up a little and comes down a little. It’s not legit...”
Wynton Marsalis
Born October 18, 1961, in New Orleans, LA
“Jazz is an art form,” trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has said, “that gives us a painless way of understanding ourselves.” Few contemporary jazz musicians have stated the case for jazz more articulately than Marsalis, and few have made their art more welcoming to audiences young and old...
Charles Mingus
Born April 22, 1922, in Nogales, AZ
Died January 5, 1979, in Cuernavaca, Mexico
“Music is a language of the emotions,” the bassist and composer Charles Mingus said. No one in jazz expressed a wider range of emotions with more musical power than he did, and no one but Duke Ellington drew upon more musical sources of inspiration...
Thelonious Monk
Born October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, NC
Died February 17, 1982, in Weehawken, NJ
“A genius is one who is most like himself,” said Thelonious Monk. By this standard, Monk’s brilliance was unmatched. Fingers splayed, elbows poised to collide with the keyboard, he neither played nor sounded like anyone else...
Jelly Roll Morton
Born October 20, 1890, in New Orleans, LA
Died July 10, 1941, in Los Angeles, CA
“It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” Jelly Roll Morton once said, “and I, myself, happened to be [its] creator in the year 1902.”...
King Oliver
Born May 11, 1885, in or near New Orleans, LA
Died April 8 or 10, 1938, in Savannah, GA
Cornetist Joe “King” Oliver was a showman in the swaggering street-wise tradition of his mythic Crescent City predecessor, Buddy Bolden. But it was his craft that helped earn him his regal title...
Charlie Parker
Born August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, KS
Died March 12, 1955, in New York City
“The first time I heard Bird play,” John Coltrane remembered, “it hit me right between the eyes.” Coltrane was not alone. Charlie Parker was the most influential improviser in jazz after Louis Armstrong...
Max
Roach
Born January 10, 1924, in New Land, NC
Died August 16, 2007, in New York City
“The American drummer,” Max Roach once said, “is a one-man percussion orchestra.” No one had a better right to make that claim — and no one demonstrated the truth of it so consistently for so long — than Roach...
Sonny
Rollins
Born September 9, 1930, in New York City
“I like to think there is a direct link between early jazz and jazz of our time,” tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins once told an interviewer. “I like to think that jazz can be played in a way you can hear the old as well as the new. At least that’s the way I play.”...
Wayne
Shorter
Born August 25, 1933, in Newark, NJ
Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis remembered, was “the idea person. The conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.” One of the most influential composers in jazz, Shorter gave birth to musical ideas that helped change the landscape of jazz in the 1960s...
Sarah
Vaughan
Born March 27, 1924, in Newark, NJ
Died April 3, 1990, in Los Angeles, CA
“Sassy,” Dizzy Gillespie once said, “can sing notes other people can’t even hear.” Sassy was none other than Sarah Vaughan, who sang out serpentine lines with the agility of a horn player...
