Losing the words on purpose
In 1926 Louis Armstrong was recording a song called 'Heebie Jeebies' when, according to the story, the sheet with the lyrics slipped to the floor. Rather than stop the take, he sang nonsense syllables in time with the band until the words came back round. The record sold in enormous numbers, and SCAT singing — using the voice as if it were a TRUMPET — became part of jazz.
Armstrong told the story differently at different times, and singers had messed about with syllables before him, so it is probably tidier than the truth. The singing on the record, though, is very real.
Nobody plays it the same way twice
Most music asks players to perform written notes. Jazz asks them to invent. A band agrees on a tune — a STANDARD that every jazz musician already knows — plays it through once, then takes turns making up new melodies over the same chords while the others accompany. The written music might be a single page; the performance can last twenty minutes.
That makes listening half the job. A drummer answers a phrase from the SAXOPHONE, the DOUBLE BASS walks a line underneath everything, and each soloist picks up an idea the last one left lying around. A JAM session is this done by musicians who may never have met, and it works because they all know the same tunes.
Ragtime, swing, bebop
Jazz has reinvented itself roughly every fifteen years. RAGTIME came first, written down and played on the PIANO. New Orleans bands added the CORNET, CLARINET and TROMBONE, all improvising at once. The 1930s belonged to SWING, played by big bands for dancers in enormous halls. Then in the 1940s, musicians including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie built BEBOP: fast, complicated music played by a small QUARTET or quintet and meant for sitting and listening rather than dancing. Some older fans were outraged, which is usually a sign that something new is working.
Duke Ellington kept a big band going through all of it, writing well over a thousand pieces. His band's signature tune, 'Take the A Train', came from his writing partner Billy Strayhorn, who turned the subway directions Ellington had given him for getting to his house into a song title.
The first jazz record, made in 1917, sold around a million copies — and it was made by a white group, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, while the Black musicians in New Orleans who had built the music went unrecorded. It is a pattern that repeats through the history of American popular music, and it's worth knowing when you see who ended up famous.
The best-selling jazz album was barely written
Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, is the best-selling jazz album ever made. The musicians turned up to find only sketches waiting for them — a few scales and outlines instead of finished parts — so most of what they played was invented in the room, and nearly all of it was captured on first takes. For a record that sells to this day, remarkably little of it was decided in advance.