The dates listed refer to when the music was recorded—that is, not the date of the album’s original release or subsequent rerelease. All recordings will be found under the name of the musician in question, unless another bandleader’s name is given.
WAYNE SHORTER
Introducing Wayne Shorter (1959, Vee Jay, rereleased by Koch). Under the spell of Coltrane, but playing his own phrases. With Lee Morgan on trumpet and the rhythm section of the late-1950s Miles Davis Quintet: the pianist Wynton Kelly, the bassist Paul Chambers, and the drummer Jimmy Cobb.
Juju (1964, Blue Note). The second in Shorter’s remarkable string of records on Blue Note. Here the rhythm section is one of John Coltrane’s: the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Reggie Workman, and the drummer Elvin Jones.
Miles Davis, Nefertiti (1967, Columbia). Toward the end of Shorter’s period with the Miles Davis Quintet, with some of Shorter’s tersest and most brilliant writing: “Nefertiti,” “Fall,” “Pinocchio.”
Native Dancer (1975, Columbia). A turnaround for jazz and for Brazilian music: Shorter’s collaboration with the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento.
Beyond the Sound Barrier (2005, Verve). A live recording of his great latter-day quartet.
PAT METHENY
Bright Size Life (1975, ECM). A language changer for jazz. With only three musicians: Metheny, the bassist Jaco Pastorius, and the drummer Bob Moses.
80/81 (1980, ECM). An inspired group. The bassist Charlie Haden and the saxophonist Dewey Redman come from Ornette Coleman’s world; the saxophonist Michael Brecker was then known as a studio-pop session champion and still underrated as a jazz player; the drummer Jack DeJohnette was a freelancing rhythmic colorist, still yet to join Keith Jarrett’s trio, the job that made him famous.
Rejoicing (1983, ECM). More laboratory experiments with Ornette Coleman’s language, using the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Billy Higgins.
One Quiet Night (2001, Warner Brothers). A curious and beautiful strumming-heavy record for solo baritone guitar, recorded not long after 9/11.
The Way Up (2003–4, Nonesuch). A new challenge for Metheny, in long-form composition, and with an entirely different band.
SONNY ROLLINS
A Night at the Village Vanguard (1957, Blue Note). A fantastic trio, with the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Elvin Jones. Sonny Rollins helped teach a generation of listeners to hear jazz in a new way. Compare his solos here to the best saxophone solos of a decade before—by Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins, say. These form perhaps a more detailed reflection of how the mind works: a record of everything an improviser is thinking, with gestures that might not necessarily lead anywhere but are still worth a try.
The Bridge (1962, RCA Victor). Rollins’s return to music from the first of his long sabbaticals, full of stubborn and quicksilver logic. He sounds more himself than ever, and the contributions of the light-toned and self-effacing guitarist Jim Hall—a strange foil for a saxophone player with such a big sound—make the record deeper.
East Broadway Run Down (1966, Impulse). Trying to find his place anew in a jazz landscape that Coltrane had heavily imprinted, Rollins got together with Coltrane’s bassist and drummer, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. (Freddie Hubbard plays trumpet on one of the three long tracks.) The record is full of hesitations and honest silences; it has a natural confidence, even sometimes the confidence to fail.
ANDREW HILL
Black Fire (1963, Blue Note). His first recording for Blue Note, from 1963, with the saxophonist Joe Henderson, the bassist Richard Davis, and the drummer Roy Haynes.
Point of Departure (1964, Blue Note). The most imposing of Hill’s records, with whispers of jazz’s past and future; with the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, the multireedist Eric Dolphy, the saxophonist Joe Henderson, Richard Davis, and the drummer Tony Williams.
Time Lines (2005, Blue Note). Hill’s last album, his best in decades, with a cross-generational band.
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Complete Live at the Hillcrest Club (1958, Gambit). Once released under the pianist Paul Bley’s name, these are live recordings of Coleman in a quintet with Bley, who understood exactly what Coleman was trying to do. The set is mostly Coleman’s songs, although there is no Coleman on record that sounds closer to Charlie Parker. Knowing your jazz-history narratives, you might want to say they’re at the edge of a great discovery, but in fact they’re already waist-high in it.
The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959, Atlantic). The record that turned Coleman’s fortunes around. Made in Los Angeles a few months before hitting New York, it presents the great early Coleman quartet, with Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. The record contains the uncharacteristically minor-key ballad “Lonely Woman.”
Ornette! (1961, Atlantic). The end of the Atlantic period, still with Cherry but this time with Scott LaFaro on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. The rhythmic connection between Coleman and Blackwell is the desired thing in jazz: flexible, coordinated motion.
The Complete Science Fiction Sessions (1971, Columbia). The tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman became a spur for Coleman, and he’s part of what makes this early 1970s music special—that, and the realization of Coleman’s songlike tunes as actual songs, with the singer Asha Puthli.
Sound Grammar (2005, Sound Grammar). A live recording by Coleman’s recent band, in which his tendency to play high and speedily, floating his melodies (mostly new, except for “Turnaround” and “Song X”), is grounded by the low-end mass of two acoustic basses, bowed and plucked.
MARIA SCHNEIDER
Allegresse (2000, Enja). Schneider’s big moment: when she lost interest in proving herself as a jazz composer with a system and a pedigree, and gained interest in writing what she liked most.
Sky Blue (2007, ArtistShare). When they start growing and changing after the first expositions of the melody, these pieces become extraordinary. This isn’t small-band jazz with dressing; it is integrated and orchestral, a twenty-piece ensemble including accordion, cajón, and sometimes the singer Luciana Souza’s wordless vocals.
BOB BROOKMEYER
Traditionalism Revisited (1957, Blue Note). A fresh look at the Dixieland repertory, sonically compact and emotionally rich.
Jimmy Giuffre Trio with Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer, Western Suite (1958, WEA International). A lovely and radical record, airy and loose-sounding but largely through-composed, with folkish, cowboyish themes.
Stan Getz–Bob Brookmeyer, Recorded Fall 1961 (1961, Verve). A casually virtuosic reunion of two improvisers who played together a great deal in the mid-1950s, in a quintet including Roy Haynes.
Gerry Mulligan, The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions (1960–62, Mosaic). A brilliant big-band project of the early 1960s, celebrated at the time but overshadowed in history by the contemporaneous free-jazz movement. Brookmeyer was cofounder, principal arranger, and, next to Mulligan, the prime soloist. (The album can only be ordered from mosaic.com.)
Clark Terry–Bob Brookmeyer Quintet, Complete Studio Recordings (1964–66, Lonehill). A warm, terrifically smart band from the mid-1960s, with Hank Jones and the drummer Osie Johnson in the rhythm section.
Spirit Music (2006, Artist Direct). The New Art Orchestra—Brookmeyer’s largely European eighteen-piece band, with the American drummer John Hollenbeck—in a program of new music. It is his latest step in the evolution of modern, large-ensemble jazz writing that wound through Count Basie’s 1950s music and the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra of the 1960s.
DIANNE REEVES
In the Moment: Live in Concert (2000, Blue Note). Leading her audience through its paces, with many of her own songs, including the self-empowerment pieces “Testify” and “The First Five Chapters.”
Good Night, and Good Luck (2005, Concord). Reeves in front of a small acoustic jazz band, singing old songs without losing herself to them.
BEBO VALDÉS
Mucho Sabor (late 1950s, Palladium). From the height of the 1950s mambo era in Cuba, Bebo Valdés and his band Orquesta Sabor de Cuba back up a number of the day’s popular singers, including Pío Leyva and Orlando “Cascarita” Guerra.
Bebo and Cigala, Lágrimas Negras (2002, Calle 54). The collaboration that made him famous again: Valdés and the flamenco singer Diego El Cigala on a collection of old boleros.
Bebo de Cuba (2002, Calle 54). Recent music for a modern Latin-jazz big band, recorded with a wrecking crew of New York–based musicians including the saxophonists Paquito D’Rivera and Mario Rivera, the trombonist Papo Vázquez, the bassist John Benitez, and the drummer Dafnis Prieto.
Bebo (2004, Calle 54). A historically broad solo-piano recording, focusing on nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Cuban music, danzas, and popular songs. Some of this music is little known and seldom played; Valdés performs it with elegance and feeling.
JOSHUA REDMAN
Spirit of the Moment: Live at the Village Vanguard (1995, Warner Brothers). The music sounds a bit old now, but this record is the summary of Redman’s early working band, with Brian Blade on drums. Showy stuff, but it signaled a newly energetic kind of straightforward, acoustic jazz mainstream. You can tell why Redman became the next young jazz musician known to the Average Person. With a version of “St. Thomas.”
Kurt Rosenwinkel, Deep Song (2005, Verve). Ten years later, and Redman’s sound is still as clean and logical, but he’s in Rosenwinkel’s band, playing hard through oblique or more self-consciously naive music, alongside his old colleague Brad Mehldau.
Back East (2006, Nonesuch). The tenor-saxophone-trio format, for which Redman has the requisite flow. He’s all grown up, engaging but never cloying, and his rhythm section cuts through the music with clever arrangements. If the beginning of the record points toward Sonny Rollins, his musical father, the end refers to (and includes) his actual father, the saxophonist Dewey Redman.
The Talented Touch (1958, Okra-Tone). Jones was ubiquitous in the 1950s in a backline-for-hire with the guitarist Barry Galbraith, the bassist Milt Hinton, and the drummer Osie Johnson. (One of their records had the satisfying-harrumph title The New York Rhythm Section, at a time when there were many very good ones, though possibly none so widely recorded.) The Talented Touch rearranges standards like “My One and Only Love” and “It’s Easy to Remember”; it is sturdy and clever, a handsome product of postwar American culture.
Steal Away (1995, Verve). Jones prides himself on taking instrumental challenges, so the gospel repertory wouldn’t be an obvious way for him to go. But this record of duets with the bassist Charlie Haden was perhaps the first time in forty years that a Hank Jones record had been part of a contemporary current: an ongoing investigation by jazz musicians, including the singer Cassandra Wilson, the cornetist Olu Dara, and the pianists Eric Reed and Jason Moran, of gospel and blues and folk sources.
Joe Lovano, I’m All for You (2003, Blue Note). A ballad record, with Jones as a member of Joe Lovano’s quartet. A balance is achieved, not just between the sensibilities of different generations—Lovano was born in 1952, Jones in 1918—but between Jones, with his high-1950s style of accompaniment and linear soloing in bop harmony, and Paul Motian, with his stark, shifting patterns in perfect time.
ROY HAYNES
Sarah Vaughan, Swingin’ Easy (1954, Emarcy). Haynes up against Vaughan’s swing and improvisational power in excelsis, from 1954, including the extraslow “Lover Man.”
Roy Haynes–Phineas Newborn–Paul Chambers, We Three (1958, OJC/Fantasy). Rugged but finely detailed straight-ahead jazz from 1958, including “Reflection,” with Haynes’s Latin-influenced high-hat rhythm.
Chick Corea, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968, Blue Note). Corea’s first album as leader. An uncanonized record in the wider world, yet most younger jazz musicians know it backward and forward.
Pat Metheny, Question and Answer (1989, Geffen). One of Metheny’s few straightforward jazz records, rhythmically strong, with a trio including Roy Haynes and Dave Holland on bass.
The Roy Haynes Trio (1999, Verve). A self-portrait of Haynes’s sound and history with an unfortunately short-lived band, including the pianist Danilo Pérez and the bassist John Patitucci.
PAUL MOTIAN
Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961, Fantasy). The live sessions that helped rearrange small-group playing in jazz. The single CD may be all you need; it’s also available as three unabridged CDs, with five different sets from the afternoon and evening of one day, called The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961.
Keith Jarrett Quartet, Fort Yawuh (1973, Impulse). From Jarrett’s often-overlooked mid-1970s American quartet, with the saxophonist Dewey Redman and the bassist Charlie Haden, a band that set one of the great examples of freedom within structure.
Marilyn Crispell and Gary Peacock, Nothing Ever Was, Anyway (1997, ECM). The slowly unfolding, songful music of Annette Peacock, arranged for a quiet and powerful trio.
Paul Motian Trio, On Broadway, vol. 3 (1991, Winter & Winter). His longstanding trio with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, playing American-popular-songbook repertory live with the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz.
Paul Motian Band, Garden of Eden (2004, ECM). His three-guitar, two-saxophone band of young musicians, roaming around a few Charles Mingus tunes and a lot of originals.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1991, Columbia). Mostly a pianoless-trio record, and an accomplished one—if not as wild as what the trio would later play—with the bassist Robert Hurst and the drummer Jeff Watts. Wynton Marsalis comes in for a memorable tangle with the trio on one track, “Cain and Abel.”
Requiem (1998, Columbia). The last recording of the old quartet, with the pianist Kenny Kirkland, who had been an important part of Marsalis’s circle since the early 1980s. At the time it seemed almost the apotheosis of the jazz mainstream, sure-footed in its shifts of dynamics and tempo.
Eternal (2003, Marsalis Music). Here Marsalis evokes Ben Webster as much as Coltrane and performs a serious, sensual exploration of ballad tempos, many slower than normally heard in jazz.
Braggtown (2006, Marsalis Music). A quartet with an unmistakable new elasticity and cohesion, and an extreme range of expression, from serene (“O Solitude”) to nearly violent (“Black Elk Speaks”).
GUILLERMO KLEIN
Los Guachos II (1999, Sunnyside). Recorded before Klein left New York, this album is the American band at its best, with the singers Luciana Souza and Claudia Acuña, and two of Klein’s near masterpieces, “Diario de Alina Reyes” and “Se Me Va La Voz.”
Una Nave (2002, Sunnyside). Made in Buenos Aires, with a well-practiced Argentine band. Moments of something like rock, to Indian and Cuban rhythms and the Argentine milonga, powerful contrapuntal writing for brass, and a few of Klein’s own original vocal performances.