Features
Long-form features and in-depth profiles on the artists, recordings, and ideas that define jazz.
Wayne Shorter: Jazz's Most Elusive Composer
He wrote melodies that sounded simple and harmonies that weren't. The combination was his signature and his puzzle.
Joel Ross and the Sound of the Black Church
Joel Ross grew up in Chicago's Black church. On Gospel Music, he stops translating that experience into jazz and lets the two become the same thing.
Joel Ross: Faith, Service, and the Black Church in Jazz
Joel Ross structured Gospel Music around the biblical narrative — creation, fall, salvation. On Blue Note, that takes nerve.
Julian Lage: Writing Twenty-Minute Songs and Building a Band
Julian Lage was identified as a prodigy at eight. Three decades later, he built a quartet where the guitar is not the hero.
Julian Lage and the Case for Writing Fast
Julian Lage composed Scenes from Above in twenty-minute sprints. The method sounds reckless. The results sound inevitable. That tension is the point.
Thelonious Monk and the Logic of Wrong Notes
Monk's wrong notes were structurally correct. Understanding how requires listening to what his left hand was doing while everyone was distracted by his right.
Shabaka Hutchings: After the Saxophone
Shabaka Hutchings dissolved three bands, gave away his saxophone, and restarted with a Japanese flute he could barely play. What followed is extraordinary.
Robin D.G. Kelley and the Labor History of Jazz
Robin D.G. Kelley wrote the definitive Monk biography. His approach — follow the labor, the politics, the money — changes how jazz history reads.
New York Jazz in 2025: The Rooms That Still Matter
The Village Vanguard still exists. So does a Brooklyn scene that did not exist twenty years ago, and a generation of musicians who grew up in both.
Sun Ra and the Arkestra: Music from Another Planet
Sun Ra built a myth, a band, and a philosophy. The myth was absurd. The band was serious. The philosophy is one of the most original produced by American music.
The Second Great Quintet: Miles Davis 1964–1968
Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams: four musicians who had never quite fit together. With Miles Davis, they changed jazz.
Matana Roberts and the Twelve-Chapter History of Everything
Matana Roberts has spent over a decade on Coin Coin — twelve chapters tracing Black American history through family and free jazz.
Miles Davis and the Musicians He Made
Miles Davis's bands were finishing schools. Coltrane, Hancock, Shorter, Chick Corea — every one left with something they could not have learned elsewhere.
How Jazz Is Taught Now — And What That Means for the Music
The conservatories teach jazz as a discipline now. The question is whether what they teach produces musicians, or produces people who can pass the exam.
Jazz at Lincoln Center: What Wynton Marsalis Built
Wynton Marsalis spent thirty-five years building the largest jazz institution in the world. The debates it sparked define how we argue about jazz.
Free Jazz in 2025: Who Is Still Playing and Why
The reports of free jazz's death were exaggerated in 1965 and remain exaggerated now. The question is who is making it and where to find them.
Francis Wolff: The Man Who Photographed Hard Bop
Francis Wolff photographed almost every Blue Note session from 1938 to 1971. He never considered himself a photographer. He was wrong.
Miles Ahead: The Restless Genius Who Remade Jazz Five Times Over
No figure in jazz occupies quite the same gravitational position as Miles Davis. He didn't just play music—he warped the field around him.
Don Was and the Art of Running Blue Note Records
Don Was came to Blue Note by accident. Fourteen years later, he has turned the label's founding philosophy into a modern operation.
Esperanza Spalding and the Refusal to Be Categorized
Esperanza Spalding has won four Grammys, taught at Harvard, and built a career that refuses to sit still. What she does next is always the question.
Cécile McLorin Salvant and the Art of Not-Knowing
Cécile McLorin Salvant has won four Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album. What makes her remarkable is how suspicious she remains of her own fluency.
The Blue Note 1500 Series: Forty Records That Defined an Era
The Blue Note 1500 series ran from 1955 to 1958. It produced forty records. Almost all of them are essential. No label has matched that ratio before or since.
The Berkshires Summer School That Changed Jazz History
Before Newport, before Lincoln Center, there was Lenox, Massachusetts — where Ornette Coleman found the audience that would send him to New York.
Ambrose Akinmusire: The Trumpet That Will Not Stand Still
Ambrose Akinmusire won the Monk Competition in 2007 and has spent the years since proving that discipline and restlessness are the same thing.
Reid Miles: The Designer Who Defined Jazz Cool
Reid Miles designed almost 500 Blue Note covers between 1956 and 1967. He was paid fifty dollars each. He reportedly preferred classical music.
The First Great Quintet: Miles Davis 1955–1959
The rhythm section was almost an afterthought. The two horn players were the tension. And the tension was the whole point.
Mary Halvorson: Reinventing the Guitar
Mary Halvorson's guitar is immediately identifiable from the first note. No other guitarist in contemporary jazz sounds anything like her.
Makaya McCraven and the Collage Method
Makaya McCraven records live improvisation and edits it into something nobody in the room played. The result is called jazz. It is also something else.
Kamasi Washington and the Return of the Epic
Kamasi Washington's 2015 debut ran for three hours. Nobody asked him to shorten it. That fact tells you almost everything about what he was trying to do.
Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts
Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts represent a late-career pivot toward music explicitly intended for spiritual use — his most important work.
Alice Coltrane: The Spiritual Journey
Alice Coltrane lost her husband in 1967. Instead of stepping back, she stepped deeper into the music he was reaching for.
Albert Ayler and the Scream
Albert Ayler's saxophone was the most extreme thing jazz had heard. It was also rooted in gospel and folk melody. Both came from the same place.
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