The 1970s is the decade jazz history has never quite known what to do with.
The 1950s have hard bop, the 1960s have Coltrane and the avant-garde, and the 1980s have the neoclassical revival. The 1970s has everything at once, pulling in opposite directions: electric fusion selling in numbers jazz had never seen, spiritual jazz reaching for something entirely outside the marketplace, ECM forging a European sound that owed – at least on the surface – almost nothing to the blues, the New York loft scene rebuilding free jazz from the ground up, and — quietly, unfashionably — some of the finest acoustic small-group playing anyone has ever recorded.
As many readers will remember, it split the discussion too. A Weather Report fan and an Art Ensemble of Chicago fan in 1976 were often not listening to the same music in any meaningful sense.
What follows is 25 jazz albums, listed chronologically rather than ranked, chosen to represent that spread rather than to settle it.
1970
1. Miles Davis — Bitches Brew (Columbia)
The obvious choice, and unavoidable for a reason: nothing else reordered the field so completely. Recorded over three days in August 1969 with a shifting cast that ran to thirteen musicians, it works less like a set of compositions than a set of weather systems, with Teo Macero cutting the tape afterwards into something none of the players had quite performed. Jazz purists treated it as a defection. Rock audiences bought it in quantities almost unheard of for a jazz record. Almost every musician on it — Shorter, Zawinul, Corea, McLaughlin, DeJohnette, Holland — went off to lead something significant, which makes the album the decade’s central junction as much as its opening statement.
2. Freddie Hubbard — Red Clay (CTI)
The counter-argument to Bitches Brew, released the same year. Hubbard took a Rhodes, a rhythm section of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Lenny White, Joe Henderson on tenor, and made electric jazz that never abandons the melodic clarity of hard bop. The title track is one of the great jazz vamps, the sort of piece that sounds simple until you try to play it well. It’s the sound of a trumpet player at the absolute height of his powers, and a reminder that CTI, for all the criticism of its production gloss, was making serious records at the start of the decade.
3. Charlie Haden — Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!)
Haden recorded this in 1969 with Carla Bley arranging, and it arrived in 1970 as one of the few genuinely successful attempts to fuse jazz with explicit political content. The material draws on songs from the Spanish Civil War, restaged for a large ensemble that includes Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Dewey Redman and Paul Motian. Bley’s writing is the achievement here — she keeps the collective sections on the edge of collapse without ever letting them fall, and the ensemble sounds like a crowd rather than a band. Haden reconvened the project three more times over the following decades.
4. Ahmad Jamal — The Awakening (Impulse!)
Recorded over two days in February 1970 with Jamil Nasser and Frank Gant, this is the album that most directly challenged the lingering “cocktail pianist” criticism that had trailed Jamal since his commercial breakthrough in the 1950s. The playing is spacious, rhythmically deceptive and harmonically far more advanced than the trio format suggests, and the title track has been sampled so extensively in hip-hop that it’s arguably the most-heard piece of music on this list. Miles Davis spent his career telling anyone who’d listen that Jamal’s use of space was the thing to study. This is the best evidence.
1971
5. Alice Coltrane — Journey in Satchidananda (Impulse!)
Four years after her husband’s death, Alice Coltrane made the defining spiritual jazz album — harp and Wurlitzer over Pharoah Sanders’ soprano, Cecil McBee’s bass ostinatos and the drone of a tanpura. Its reputation has grown enormously in the last two decades, and it now functions as the entry point to a whole tradition. What’s easy to miss is how disciplined it is: this is not drift. The modal frameworks are tight, the ensemble is tautly controlled, and the sense of ascent through the record is entirely composed rather than accidental.
6. Mahavishnu Orchestra — The Inner Mounting Flame (Columbia)
John McLaughlin assembled Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman and Rick Laird, and produced the loudest, fastest and most technically aggressive music jazz had yet made. It’s fusion at maximum velocity, built on odd meters, unison lines played at implausible tempos and a volume level borrowed wholesale from rock. Nothing else sounded like it in 1971. Its influence on guitarists is immeasurable, and its influence on fusion’s later reputation is complicated — the virtuosity here is in service of the music, which cannot be said of everything that copied it.
1972
7. Charles Mingus — Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia)
Mingus called this the best album he’d ever made, and the argument is stronger than it sounds. Working with a large orchestra and arranger Sy Johnson, he finally got his compositional ambitions onto tape at full scale — dense, cinematic, moving between Ellingtonian grandeur and near-chaos within a single piece. “The Chill of Death”, a poem he’d written decades earlier, sits at its centre. It’s Mingus refusing to be filed as a bassist, and it stands as the last great statement of his career.
8. Miles Davis — On the Corner (Columbia)
Named by one journalist as “the most hated jazz album of the decade”, it’s also the one whose stock has risen furthest since. It was built on James Brown rhythms, Indian percussion, tabla, sitar and Macero’s editing, with no solo credits on the sleeve and a cartoon cover. Dismissed on release by nearly every jazz critic in America, it failed to reach the younger Black audience Miles hoped it would find. Producers rediscovered it in the 1990s and found something close to a blueprint for drum and bass and instrumental hip-hop. It remains difficult, deliberately unglamorous and about twenty years early.
9. McCoy Tyner — Sahara (Milestone)
After leaving John Coltrane’s quartet, McCoy Tyner spent years struggling for work. Sahara is the album where he re-emerged with total authority — a quartet record that uses koto, flute and percussion alongside his own enormous piano sound. The title track runs to nearly twenty minutes without a slack moment. Tyner’s left hand on this record is a force of nature, and the album established the template for everything he did through the rest of the 1970s, a period in which he was arguably the most powerful acoustic pianist alive.
1973
10. Herbie Hancock — Head Hunters (Columbia)
Hancock dissolved his Mwandishi sextet, hired Paul Jackson and Harvey Mason, put the Fender Rhodes and clavinet at the centre, and made the best-selling jazz album to that point. “Chameleon” became a standard for a generation of players who arrived through funk rather than bebop. What keeps it from being mere crossover is perhaps the harmonic sophistication running underneath the grooves — listen to what happens to “Watermelon Man”, rebuilt around a hindewhu breath pattern from Central African pygmy music, and the ambition becomes obvious.
11. Dave Holland — Conference of the Birds (ECM)
Dave Holland, Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul made one of the few records of the 1970s that genuinely reconciles free improvisation with written composition. The title track is beautiful in an entirely straightforward way; elsewhere the quartet dismantles things with real ferocity. It’s become the reference point for anyone arguing that avant-garde jazz can be melodic without compromise, and it’s often the record that converts sceptical listeners to Braxton. That the four of them never made another album together is one of the decade’s frustrations.
12. Sun Ra — Space Is the Place (Blue Thumb)
Sun Ra recorded relentlessly across the decade, and this is the most concentrated argument for the Arkestra as a serious ensemble rather than a spectacle. The twenty-one-minute title piece moves from free collective playing to vocal chant to something approaching big band swing without ever seeming to change its mind. June Tyson’s voice is central. The mythology around Sun Ra can obscure how disciplined the band was — this album is where the two halves, the cosmology and the craft, line up most convincingly.
13. Return to Forever — Light as a Feather (Polydor)
Before Return to Forever became a fusion powerhouse with guitars, it was this: Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, Joe Farrell and Flora Purim making acoustic-leaning Brazilian-inflected jazz of enormous charm. “Spain” arrives here and never leaves the repertoire. Purim’s wordless vocals give the record a lightness that fusion generally lost soon afterwards, and the album is the strongest evidence that the genre’s early phase had a delicacy people forget when they remember the volume.
1974
14. Keith Jarrett — Belonging (ECM)
Jarrett’s European quartet — with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen — recorded this in Oslo in a single day. It’s the record where the ECM aesthetic fully arrives: melodic, folk-inflected, harmonically open, unmistakably northern. “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” is the tune the Steely Dan lawsuit was later about. What makes it endure is Garbarek’s tone against Jarrett’s writing, two very different sensibilities that turn out to fit exactly.
15. Weather Report — Mysterious Traveller (Columbia)
We could call this ‘the Weather Report album for people who find Heavy Weather too tidy’. Zawinul had begun using the studio itself as an instrument, layering synthesisers and tape manipulation in ways nobody in jazz was attempting, and Shorter’s playing is at its most oblique. “Nubian Sundance” is a crowd-noise-drenched sprawl that shouldn’t work and does. The band was still genuinely experimental at this point, and this is the peak of that phase.
1975
16. Keith Jarrett — The Köln Concert (ECM)
The best-selling solo piano album ever recorded was made on the wrong piano. A smaller Bösendorfer had been brought out in error, with mechanical problems and a thin, unreliable upper register, and Jarrett almost refused to play it. He was also exhausted and in pain by the time he took the stage.
Jarrett worked around the instrument’s weaknesses by concentrating on the middle of the keyboard and leaning heavily on ostinato figures in the bass, limitations that helped shape the improvisation itself. Musicians have argued about the result ever since — too pretty, too repetitive, too much ostinato. Millions of people who own no other jazz record own this one, and that is itself a fact worth taking seriously.
17. Wayne Shorter — Native Dancer (Columbia)
Shorter’s collaboration with Milton Nascimento is the finest meeting of Brazilian music and jazz on record, and the least condescending. Nascimento sings on most of it, Herbie Hancock plays throughout, and Shorter — who spent the decade largely subordinating himself to Zawinul in Weather Report — plays soprano with a lyricism he rarely allowed himself elsewhere. Much of the credit belongs to Nascimento’s writing, which is why the album still sounds unlike anything else in Shorter’s catalogue.
18. Miles Davis — Agharta (Columbia)
Recorded in Osaka on 1 February 1975 at an afternoon concert — the evening set became Pangaea — this is the last thing Miles did before illness and exhaustion drove him into a five-year retirement. Pete Cosey’s guitar is the dominant voice, the rhythms are dense and unrelenting, and Davis himself, in poor health, plays organ nearly as much as trumpet. It is genuinely hard listening and completely uncompromised, the furthest point electric Miles reached. Its reputation in Japan preceded its reputation everywhere else by years.
1976
19. Jaco Pastorius — Jaco Pastorius (Epic)
A debut album that permanently changed an instrument. Pastorius arrived fully formed — fretless tone, harmonics, a rhythmic conception drawn from R&B session work in Florida — and surrounded himself with Hancock, Shorter, Don Alias and the Brecker brothers. “Portrait of Tracy” is a solo bass piece built almost entirely from harmonics that bassists still work at decades later. The record is also a genuine composer’s album, which is the part that gets lost behind the technique.
20. Pat Metheny — Bright Size Life (ECM)
Metheny was 21, playing in a trio with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses, and the album he made is quieter and more thoughtful than either the fusion or the ECM context would suggest. The guitar tone alone was new: warm, clean, without the distortion that had become fusion’s default. It closes with an Ornette Coleman piece, which tells you where Metheny’s head was. Almost fifty years on, this is still the record his admirers point to first.
1977
21. Weather Report — Heavy Weather (Columbia)
The commercial peak, and no worse for it. “Birdland” became the decade’s most recognisable jazz instrumental — an arrangement so precisely constructed it works as a big band chart, a fusion piece and a pop single simultaneously. Underneath the hits, Shorter’s “Harlequin” and Pastorius’ “Teen Town” show a band operating with total confidence. If Weather Report were more adventurous elsewhere, they were never better at making difficult music sound inevitable.
22. Dexter Gordon — Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard (Columbia)
Gordon had spent fourteen years living in Europe. In December 1976 he came back to New York, played the Village Vanguard with Woody Shaw, Ronnie Mathews, Stafford James and Louis Hayes, and the recording captured something rare — an audience that knew exactly what it was witnessing. The tenor playing is huge, unhurried and completely at ease. It’s usually credited with kick-starting the acoustic jazz revival that dominated the following decade, which makes it one of the most consequential live albums in the music’s history.
23. Ornette Coleman — Dancing in Your Head (Horizon)
Prime Time’s arrival: two guitars, two basses, drums, and Coleman’s harmolodic theory applied to something that grooves relentlessly. Most of the album is a single theme worked over for twenty-six minutes, insistent to the point of hypnosis. It also includes a recording made in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, years before that kind of encounter became commonplace. Free jazz’s most important figure found a way to make free music dance, and almost nobody has followed him successfully since.
1978–79
24. Woody Shaw — Rosewood (Columbia)
Shaw is the great underrated trumpeter of the era, and Rosewood is his best-argued case — a large-ensemble record that uses intervallic, pentatonic melodic writing to build something that is neither retro hard bop nor fusion. It won critical polls on release and then, like most of Shaw’s work, gradually slipped out of the conversation. The writing rewards close attention, and his own solos on it are as harmonically sophisticated as anything played on the instrument in the 1970s.
25. Arthur Blythe — Lenox Avenue Breakdown (Columbia)
The decade’s closing statement, and one of the strangest major-label jazz albums ever released. Blythe’s alto sits on top of an instrumentation nobody would have predicted — James Newton’s flute, Bob Stewart’s tuba, James Blood Ulmer’s guitar, Jack DeJohnette on drums — and the result is loft jazz with a groove, avant-garde playing that is also physically enjoyable. It pointed at the direction New York jazz would take in the 1980s, and it remains a thrilling listen with no obvious precedent.
What didn’t make the cut
Any list of 25 from this decade is mostly an exercise in omission.
Left out, painfully, amongst others: Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi and Black Unity, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, Mahavishnu’s Birds of Fire, Return to Forever’s Romantic Warrior, Miles’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D., Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976, Cecil Taylor’s Silent Tongues, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Nice Guys, Bill Evans’ late trios, Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan’s Pablo sessions, Stanley Clarke’s School Days, Donald Byrd’s Black Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, Eberhard Weber’s The Colours of Chloë, Air’s Air Lore, and Joe Henderson’s entire Milestone run.
Which is really the point about the 1970s. No other decade in jazz forces this many genuinely great records off a list of 25 — and no other decade produces a list where half the entries would have been unrecognisable as jazz to the musicians who made the other half.
What do you think? The comments section is open!
