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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

A history of jazz

A history of jazz in 50 key moments, as chosen by Guardian and Observer writers

Find the Guardian's full history of modern music

16 June 2011

  • Miles Davis

    What would you include in your version of the history of jazz?

  • The Buddy Bolden Band

    Buddy Bolden 'invents' jazz

  • Ma Rainey and the Georgia Jazz Band

    The first divas of the blues

  • Louis Armstrong with the rest of the 'Waif's Home Colored Brass Band,' New Orleans, Louisiana.

    Louis Armstrong buys a cornet

  • The first jazz recording

  • Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue premieres at New York's Aeolian Hall

  • Django reinhardt's caravan catches fire

  • The first electric guitar

  • Art Tatum stuns his contemporaries in New York

  • Duke Ellington's mother dies

  • Nat King Cole: the reluctant vocalist

  • A teenage Charlie Parker has a cymbal thrown at him

  • Jazz gets a history

  • Billie Holiday ends her set with Strange Fruit

  • Coleman Hawkins records Body and Soul

  • Thelonious Monk buys a hat

  • Mary Lou Williams gets a weekly radio show

  • Gil Evans's informal salon

  • Chano Pozo meets Dizzy Gillespie

  • The Modern Jazz Quartet buy tuxedos

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