JAZZ ~ An American History (1913-2022)

Many people say that "Livery Stable Blues" was the first jazz music put on record. That was in 1917, by a group of white musicians who called themselves the Original Dixieland Jass Band. However, Wilbur Sweatman, a successful African-American composer and musician, made a few jazz recordings several months earlier, near the end of 1916. 

Wilbur Sweatman (1882-1961)

You can hear one of Sweatman's 1916 recordings ("Down Home Blues") as well as Dixieland's 1917 recording of "Livery Stable Blues" near the top of my Spotify playlist, "JAZZ ~ An American History (1913-2022)."  It contains over 1,700 songs, ordered chronologically, covering every year from 1913 to 2022. The whole thing is over 170 hours long. 

Here is a spreadsheet with detailed info. Scroll down for an embedded preview of the playlist.

The list started off as a way for me to expand my own experience of music, and to fill in gaps in my knowledge of jazz history. My aim was ultimately to improve my own creative abilities. Perhaps it can do something similar for others.

If you take a look, you'll see that Sweatman isn't first on my playlist. Neither is the Original Dixieland Jass Band. Instead, it starts with some earlier recordings of James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra. In these recordings from 1913 and 1914, Jim Europe combined ragtime with other influences, including various strands of folk music as well as spirituals. I wouldn't insist that it's jazz, but it might be.

Jazz has always involved mixing and blending influences, and its branches blend into other genres, like the blues, rock, R&B, soul, funk and avant-garde experimentalism. The lines between genres can be blurry. It's easy to embrace the fuzziness with words like "fusion" and phrases that indicate a mixing of genres, like "soul jazz" or "jazz funk." Those labels can be helpful, but they don't answer all the questions. Of course, this usually doesn't bother the musicians much, and I'm not letting it bother me much, either. I did not begin with an explicit definition of "jazz," and I didn't end with one, either. I've tried to respect the musicians as much as possible. I've also tried to include enough variety to indicate the expansive, fluid and evolving nature of jazz as part of the American experience.

Jazz has become a global phenomenon, but my focus is on American music. I am only including recording sessions led by American musicians; non-Americans only appear as side-musicians and, in one case, as a co-leader. As for who qualifies as an American musician, it is not where you were born, but where you grew up and came to musical fruition. 

To keep the list as short and tidy as possible, I have stuck to one rule: no more than one song per recording session. The order is not based on when the music was published, but on when it was recorded. Multiple songs can appear from the same album, but only if the recordings can be traced to different sessions.