The 1960s took jazz in several directions at once. Hard bop reached a peak of confidence, bossa nova became an international phenomenon, avant-garde players challenged almost every convention the music had, and by the end of the decade Miles Davis had opened the door to electric jazz.
The dates make the point better than any summary. In December 1960 Ornette Coleman put eight musicians in a room and recorded thirty-seven minutes of collective improvisation.
Two months earlier, John Coltrane had recorded a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune from a Broadway musical and turned it into a hit. Both records came out in 1961. By 1964 Stan Getz and João Gilberto had made an album that would win a Grammy for Album of the Year, and Eric Dolphy had recorded Out to Lunch! four months before dying in Berlin at thirty-six.
Five years after that, Miles Davis spent a single February session in 1969 assembling the material that Teo Macero would edit into In a Silent Way.
None of these musicians were working in isolation from one another. Freddie Hubbard plays on Ornette’s Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth, Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage and Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil.
Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison turn up behind Sonny Rollins. Tony Williams is on records by Andrew Hill, Hancock, Miles Davis and Dolphy; he was still only eighteen on Out to Lunch! and not yet twenty-one for most of them.
What follows is 25 albums, listed by release year rather than ranked, chosen to show the spread of the decade rather than to settle it.
Ornette Coleman – Free Jazz (1961)
Recorded on 21 December 1960 with a double quartet: Coleman on alto, Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Scott LaFaro on bass and Billy Higgins on drums in one channel; Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums in the other.
Anyone with a stereo system could separate the two groups by ear. There is almost no written material — a few short ensemble passages to mark transitions, and otherwise thirty-seven minutes of continuous collective improvisation, released as a single unbroken piece.
What made it radical was not the absence of chord changes, which Coleman had already abandoned, but the absence of a hierarchy. Nobody accompanies anybody. Soloists emerge and the other seven respond, argue or ignore them.
The original sleeve had a die-cut window revealing Jackson Pollock’s White Light beneath, which is the only part of the packaging anyone agreed about at the time. The album gave a movement its name, and Coleman spent the rest of his life being asked about a title he had not intended as a manifesto.
John Coltrane – My Favorite Things (1961)
Coltrane had taken up the soprano saxophone in 1960, an instrument almost nobody in modern jazz was playing, and he used it here on a waltz from The Sound of Music.
The performance runs nearly fourteen minutes: the show tune’s melody appears, then dissolves into a modal vamp that alternates between two chords while Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis and Elvin Jones circle it.
The record sold in numbers Atlantic had not expected and the tune became the piece Coltrane was asked for every night for the rest of his career. It works as a bridge in both directions.
Listeners who came for the melody stayed for what he did to it, and musicians heard a demonstration that you could improvise at length over almost nothing without losing an audience.
Oliver Nelson – The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961)
Recorded on 23 February 1961 with a personnel list that reads like a wish: Nelson on alto and tenor, Eric Dolphy on alto and flute, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Roy Haynes on drums and George Barrow on baritone.
“Stolen Moments” opens it and has been played by everyone since, though most people who know the tune could not name the album.
What sets the record apart is the writing. Nelson was building small-group pieces with the harmonic care of an arranger rather than a blowing-session leader, and every track is constructed around a specific compositional idea.
He went on to write extensively for television and film, and you can hear why here: the ensemble passages are as memorable as the solos.
Bill Evans Trio – Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961)
Recorded on 25 June 1961, the last day this trio played together. Scott LaFaro died in a car crash eleven days later, at twenty-five. Evans chose the tracks for this album partly to foreground LaFaro’s playing, which is why it leans on the pieces where the bass is most active.
The trio had spent two years working out something new: a group where the bass and drums were not keeping time behind the piano but conversing with it.
Paul Motian plays with brushes and mallets more than sticks, LaFaro moves in and out of the register Evans is occupying, and the three lines cross constantly. Every piano trio since has been measured against it, and the model was established over roughly two years of work that ended by accident.
John Coltrane – Live at the Village Vanguard (1962)
Recorded across several nights in November 1961 and drawn from a much larger body of tape. The centrepiece is “Chasin’ the Trane”, sixteen minutes of blues with Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman and no piano, on which Coltrane plays as if trying to exhaust the form.
Eric Dolphy joins on bass clarinet for “India” and “Spiritual”, both built on drones rather than changes.
Down Beat had recently published a review describing what Coltrane and Dolphy were doing as anti-jazz, and this is the record that provoked most of that argument.
Listening now, the striking thing is how quickly the group is moving. Material that sounds settled on My Favorite Things a year earlier is already being taken apart here in real time.
Jackie McLean – Let Freedom Ring (1962)
Recorded on 19 March 1962 with Walter Davis Jr., Herbie Lewis and Billy Higgins. McLean had been a bebop alto player since his teens, when he was around Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, and by 1962 he had heard Ornette Coleman and decided the harmonic rules were negotiable. He did not abandon them. He stretched them, playing sharp against the changes and letting the forms run long.
The title points at the civil rights movement and the opening track, “Melody for Melonae”, is named for his daughter. It is one of the clearest documents of hard bop starting to come apart at the edges from the inside, made by someone who was not trying to break with the tradition so much as find out how far it would bend.
Jimmy Smith – Back at the Chicken Shack (1963)
Recorded on 25 April 1960 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, in the same session that produced Midnight Special, and held back by Blue Note until 1963. Smith on Hammond organ, Stanley Turrentine on tenor, Kenny Burrell on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums.
There is nothing on it that requires explanation. Four long tracks, mostly blues, played by four people entirely comfortable with each other and in no hurry.
Smith had made the Hammond B-3 a jazz instrument almost single-handedly in the mid-fifties, working out how to play bass lines with his feet and left hand while soloing with his right, and this is the most relaxed demonstration of it. Any list of the decade that runs only through its arguments and innovations is missing what a great many people were actually listening to.
Thelonious Monk – Monk’s Dream (1963)
Monk’s first album for Columbia after years on Riverside, recorded with the quartet he had settled into: Charlie Rouse on tenor, John Ore on bass, Frankie Dunlop on drums. It became the best-selling record of his lifetime, and the following February he appeared on the cover of Time, which had put only a handful of musicians there before him.
For a first introduction to Monk this is still the place to start. The compositions are his best known — “Bright Mississippi”, “Bye-Ya”, “Body and Soul” solo — and the quartet plays them with a directness that the earlier records sometimes lack. Rouse had by then spent enough time in the band to phrase like Monk rather than around him.
Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)
Eleven musicians, one session on 20 January 1963, and then several weeks of work that had almost no precedent in jazz. Mingus treated the tape as raw material rather than a finished performance, cutting between takes, layering parts and having Charlie Mariano come back in to overdub alto lines onto music that had already been played. Producers were doing this in pop studios. Almost nobody was doing it to a jazz record in 1963.
The music itself is a suite in four movements, conceived as dance. Mingus wrote for the ensemble the way Duke Ellington had taught him to — voicing for the specific players in front of him rather than for instruments in the abstract — and then pushed it somewhere Ellington never went.
Jay Berliner plays flamenco-style classical guitar. Jaki Byard drops into stride piano mid-passage as though the previous forty years of jazz history were available to be picked up and put down. Tempos accelerate, collapse and restart. Themes return altered rather than repeated, so the piece keeps circling back on material you half recognise.
Mingus described its orchestral style as “ethnic folk-dance music”, and the movements are named for dancers rather than given conventional tune titles.
The sleeve carried an essay by Edmund Pollock, the psychologist he was seeing at the time, discussing Mingus’s personality rather than the music. It remains the most ambitious single album any jazz musician made in the 1960s, and one of very few records of the era that still sounds like it was constructed rather than captured.
Stan Getz & João Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto (1964)
Recorded in New York in March 1963 and held for a year. The billing does the record a disservice. João Gilberto’s guitar and voice are the foundation of everything on it — the rhythmic displacement he had developed in Brazil is what makes bossa nova work, and Getz is a guest on it rather than the reverse. Antônio Carlos Jobim plays piano and wrote most of the material.
The English vocal on “The Girl from Ipanema” was sung by Astrud Gilberto, who was not a professional singer and was at the session because she was married to João. The single edit cut the Portuguese verse entirely.
The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1965, the first jazz record to take it, and it made bossa nova a permanent part of the standard repertoire.
Eric Dolphy – Out to Lunch! (1964)
Recorded on 25 February 1964 with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, Richard Davis on bass and an eighteen-year-old Tony Williams. Dolphy died in Berlin four months later, at thirty-six, after collapsing on tour.
The record has a reputation for difficulty that does not survive listening to it. The themes are angular but they are themes, clearly stated and returned to; Hutcherson’s vibraphone gives the harmony a transparency that a piano would not; and Williams plays with a lightness that keeps everything moving.
Dolphy’s alto, flute and bass clarinet lines go outside the changes constantly and always land. It is free thinking inside firm structures, and the structures are what make it accessible.
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965)
Recorded on 9 December 1964 in a single session at Van Gelder’s studio, by the quartet of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. Four parts, thirty-three minutes, and a poem printed in the sleeve.
It is usually described as an act of thanks, and Coltrane’s own note frames it that way, referring back to the change in his life in 1957. But treating it purely as a religious statement misses what he actually built. The four-note motif that gives “Acknowledgement” its name is transposed through all twelve keys, one after another, so the phrase arrives everywhere before the voices enter.
In the closing “Psalm” Coltrane plays the printed poem on tenor, line by line, following the text’s phrasing rather than a melody. The devotional content and the compositional method are the same thing, which is why the record works on people with no interest in the theology.
Andrew Hill – Point of Departure (1965)
Recorded on 21 March 1964 with Kenny Dorham, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, Richard Davis and Tony Williams — a front line spanning hard bop, post-bop and free playing, which is roughly what the music does too.
Hill wrote pieces that keep moving sideways: forms that do not resolve where you expect, harmony that hangs between tonal and not.
Hill spent years letting people believe he had been born in Port-au-Prince, a story that followed him through the sixties. He was born in Chicago. The music is genuinely hard to place, and that is the reason it has never had the audience of the Blue Note records around it and the reason musicians keep returning to it.
Herbie Hancock – Maiden Voyage (1965)
Recorded on 17 March 1965 with Freddie Hubbard, George Coleman, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — the Miles Davis rhythm section of the period plus two horns. Hancock built the album around the sea, but the concept sits lightly enough that you can ignore it entirely.
What makes it last is the harmony. The title track moves through suspended chords that never quite resolve, which gives the whole thing its drift, and “Dolphin Dance” is one of the most-played compositions to come out of the decade. Hancock had already had a hit with “Watermelon Man” and could have kept making funky records. This is the one that established him as a writer.
Albert Ayler – Spiritual Unity (1965)
Recorded on 10 July 1964 with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, it was the first album recorded for ESP-Disk. It runs about half an hour and there is nothing else quite like it.
Ayler had played in army bands in France, and the melodies he wrote sound like hymns, marches and folk tunes — simple, singable, almost naive. What he does to them is not simple. The tone is enormous, the vibrato is wide enough to be a separate event, and he plays largely outside any fixed pitch centre while Murray abandons pulse and Peacock moves freely underneath.
“Ghosts” appears in two versions. For anyone approaching Ayler for the first time, its brevity and the clarity of the trio make it the way in.
Wayne Shorter – Speak No Evil (1966)
Recorded on 24 December 1964, three months after Shorter joined Miles Davis’s quintet, and released by Blue Note in 1966. Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones play it, which puts members of two of the era’s most important rhythm sections in the same room.
Shorter said he was thinking about misty landscapes and folk tales while writing it, and the pieces have that quality: melodies that behave like narratives, harmony that shifts under them without announcing itself.
“Infant Eyes”, written for his daughter Miyako, is built on an unusual phrase length that nobody notices until they try to play it. This is where the Blue Note language of the mid-sixties comes into focus, and Shorter was writing much of it.
Cecil Taylor – Unit Structures (1966)
Recorded on 19 May 1966 with Jimmy Lyons on alto, Ken McIntyre on alto and oboe, Eddie Gale on trumpet, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva both on bass, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. Taylor wrote his own liner notes, which are as dense as the music.
He had studied at the New England Conservatory and spent much of the decade unable to get regular work, washing dishes between engagements while producing some of the most demanding music anyone was making.
The playing is percussive and unrelenting, but it is not formless: Taylor worked from written cells that the group develops and recombines, which is what the title refers to. The intensity is organised, and hearing that organisation is what turns the record from an ordeal into an entry point.
Sonny Rollins – East Broadway Run Down (1966)
Recorded on 9 May 1966 with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones from Coltrane’s quartet, and Freddie Hubbard on one track. The title piece runs twenty minutes and Rollins spends much of it working a single motif to the point of obsession, which is what he had always done, now with a rhythm section built for open playing rather than changes.
It is a useful corrective to the idea that Rollins spent the sixties in retreat. He had returned in 1962 after his first sabbatical and was pushing harder than most of his contemporaries, absorbing what Coltrane and Coleman were doing without abandoning the thematic development that made him distinctive. He withdrew again at the end of the decade.
Joe Henderson – Mode for Joe (1966)
Recorded on 27 January 1966 with a sextet: Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Bobby Hutcherson, Cedar Walton, Ron Carter and Joe Chambers. It was Henderson’s last album as a leader for Blue Note before he moved to Milestone.
The larger group is the point. With trombone and vibraphone added to trumpet and tenor, the writing has real weight to it, and Henderson uses it — the arrangements are worked out rather than heads followed by solos.
Set against Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, it shows how much room there still was inside conventional post-bop, and how good the players working in it were. Henderson then spent much of the seventies badly underrecorded.
McCoy Tyner – The Real McCoy (1967)
Recorded on 21 April 1967 with Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones. Tyner had left Coltrane’s group at the end of 1965, when the volume and density of the late quartet had made his playing inaudible to him, and this is the first record where he sounds like his own bandleader rather than a former sideman.
The sound is unmistakable: fourths stacked in the left hand, pentatonic runs, a percussive attack that treats the piano as something to be struck. “Passion Dance” opens it and has been a jam-session staple ever since. Tyner had a difficult few years afterwards, taking work outside music at points before the Milestone contract turned things around.
Miles Davis – Miles Smiles (1967)
Recorded in October 1966 by the second great quintet: Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams. This is the album where the group’s approach fully arrives. Hancock frequently plays no chords at all, on Davis’s instruction, which leaves the harmony implied rather than stated and gives the soloists nothing to lean on.
Almost everything is a first or second take. Shorter’s “Footprints” is here in the version everybody knows, and “Circle” is the only ballad. The interplay is the reason the record still sounds current — Williams pushing and dragging the pulse, Carter following the harmonic implication rather than the written changes, and five people making structural decisions simultaneously without any of it falling over.
Nina Simone – Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967)
Her first album for RCA after leaving Philips, and the most direct record she made. Simone had trained as a classical pianist and spent the early sixties moving between jazz clubs, folk material and protest songs; here she committed to blues and soul with a small band and left the arrangements sparse.
“Backlash Blues” sets a Langston Hughes lyric, one of the last things he wrote before his death in May 1967. “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” and “Do I Move You” are as explicit as anything released that year. Any account of the decade that leaves out the singers is incomplete, and this is the one where the voice, the piano playing and the politics are inseparable.
Miles Davis – Nefertiti (1968)
Recorded in June and July 1967, and the last entirely acoustic studio album Davis made. The title track, written by Shorter, does something no jazz record had done: the horns play the melody over and over for the whole piece, more than twenty times, without a single solo, while Hancock, Carter and Williams improvise underneath them.
That inversion is the album in miniature. Across the record the rhythm section is increasingly the thing shaping the music while the horns hold position, and the compositions become frames rather than vehicles. Two years later Davis was making In a Silent Way, and the logic of the move is audible here first.
Pharoah Sanders – Karma (1969)
Recorded on 14 February 1969 and dominated by “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, which runs thirty-two minutes. Leon Thomas sings and yodels the theme; the band includes James Spaulding, Lonnie Liston Smith, Reggie Workman, Richard Davis and Billy Hart.
Sanders had played in Coltrane’s last group and carried that intensity forward, but Karma is built differently from the late Coltrane records: a simple, repeating melodic figure holds the centre while the music around it moves from serenity to violence and back. It became the defining spiritual jazz album and one of the few records of its kind to find a large audience, then a second one decades later through DJs and reissue labels.
Miles Davis – In a Silent Way (1969)
Recorded in a single session on 18 February 1969 with Shorter, Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin — who had been in the United States a matter of days — Dave Holland and Tony Williams. Three keyboards, electric guitar, acoustic bass.
What arrived on the record is not what was played in the room. Teo Macero took several hours of tape and edited it into two side-long pieces, looping material and repeating the opening of the second side at its end, which is closer to how records are made now than to how jazz was made then.
Zawinul wrote the title piece; Davis stripped his harmony out and told McLaughlin to play it as though he did not know how to play the guitar. The result closes the decade with electric instruments, studio construction and a quality of atmosphere that jazz had not previously aimed at.
What the decade adds up to
There is no single 1960s jazz sound, and every attempt to name one leaves out most of the music. The records above were made by people testing what a small group could be, what a composition needed to specify, how long a groove could hold, how much an audience would follow, and eventually whether the album itself was a document of a performance or something assembled afterwards.
Almost every question jazz has argued about since was opened somewhere in this decade.
