Grooves That Defined Jazz: 10 Albums That Shaped the Genre

Recorded in one session in December 1964, A Love Supreme is Coltrane's spiritual masterwork — a four-part suite dedicated to God, built around one of the most recognisable bass motifs in all of jazz. It is music of devotion that also happens to be technically staggering, and it changed what people believed jazz could express.

Released in 1959, the same year as Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um proved that jazz could be political, theatrical, and historically conscious all at once. Mingus wrote eulogies for Lester Young and Fats Navarro, satirised segregationist governor Orval Faubus, and reinvented the New Orleans tradition in a single album of astonishing range.

Miles Davis's 1970 double album was the moment jazz and rock collided and neither emerged unchanged. With electric keyboards, multiple drummers, and studio editing as a compositional tool, Bitches Brew invented jazz-fusion and pointed every subsequent generation of experimentalists toward the future. It is difficult and rewarding in equal measure.

Released in 1960, Giant Steps introduced Coltrane's chord-substitution system — a harmonic approach so novel that even the best jazz musicians of the era struggled to keep up. The title track cycles through three tonal centres in a way that still sounds audacious, and the album as a whole represents one of the most compressed periods of musical evolution in recorded history.

Recorded in one day in 1956, Saxophone Colossus contains one of the most celebrated improvisations in jazz — the calypso "St. Thomas," where Rollins sounds simultaneously effortless and inexhaustible. The album captures a young tenor player at the peak of his thematic inventiveness, and "Blue Seven" remains a textbook example of motivic development.

Released in 1959, Time Out was the first jazz album to sell a million copies — partly because it was built entirely on unusual time signatures. Five-four, nine-eight, three-four: Brubeck and his quartet made odd meters swing as naturally as straight-ahead four-four, and "Take Five" became the most recognisable jazz recording ever made.

Coltrane's only album for Blue Note, recorded in 1957, is a hard-bop landmark that showcases his tenor at its most muscular. The title track's minor-key urgency and Coltrane's multi-note "sheets of sound" technique — which he was still developing — make this one of the definitive documents of jazz at the cusp of its next revolution.

George Benson's 1968 album for A&M showcases the guitarist at his most exploratory, before his crossover into pop-soul stardom. Rooted in hard bop but reaching toward the psychedelic energy of the era, it captures Benson's extraordinary technique in service of music that felt urgently contemporary and has since aged into a classic.

Smooth jazz guitarist Peter White's 1993 Promenade became a cornerstone of the contemporary jazz format, blending elegant acoustic and electric guitar with lush arrangements. Its gentle sophistication and melodic clarity captured what the genre could achieve at its most refined, and it helped define the sound that millions of listeners came to associate with jazz on the radio.

Recorded in one session in December 1964, A Love Supreme is Coltrane's spiritual masterwork — a four-part suite dedicated to God, built around one of the most recognisable bass motifs in all of jazz. It is music of devotion that also happens to be technically staggering, and it changed what people believed jazz could express.

Released in 1959, the same year as Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um proved that jazz could be political, theatrical, and historically conscious all at once. Mingus wrote eulogies for Lester Young and Fats Navarro, satirised segregationist governor Orval Faubus, and reinvented the New Orleans tradition in a single album of astonishing range.

Miles Davis's 1970 double album was the moment jazz and rock collided and neither emerged unchanged. With electric keyboards, multiple drummers, and studio editing as a compositional tool, Bitches Brew invented jazz-fusion and pointed every subsequent generation of experimentalists toward the future. It is difficult and rewarding in equal measure.

Released in 1960, Giant Steps introduced Coltrane's chord-substitution system — a harmonic approach so novel that even the best jazz musicians of the era struggled to keep up. The title track cycles through three tonal centres in a way that still sounds audacious, and the album as a whole represents one of the most compressed periods of musical evolution in recorded history.

Recorded in one day in 1956, Saxophone Colossus contains one of the most celebrated improvisations in jazz — the calypso "St. Thomas," where Rollins sounds simultaneously effortless and inexhaustible. The album captures a young tenor player at the peak of his thematic inventiveness, and "Blue Seven" remains a textbook example of motivic development.

Released in 1959, Time Out was the first jazz album to sell a million copies — partly because it was built entirely on unusual time signatures. Five-four, nine-eight, three-four: Brubeck and his quartet made odd meters swing as naturally as straight-ahead four-four, and "Take Five" became the most recognisable jazz recording ever made.

Coltrane's only album for Blue Note, recorded in 1957, is a hard-bop landmark that showcases his tenor at its most muscular. The title track's minor-key urgency and Coltrane's multi-note "sheets of sound" technique — which he was still developing — make this one of the definitive documents of jazz at the cusp of its next revolution.

George Benson's 1968 album for A&M showcases the guitarist at his most exploratory, before his crossover into pop-soul stardom. Rooted in hard bop but reaching toward the psychedelic energy of the era, it captures Benson's extraordinary technique in service of music that felt urgently contemporary and has since aged into a classic.

Smooth jazz guitarist Peter White's 1993 Promenade became a cornerstone of the contemporary jazz format, blending elegant acoustic and electric guitar with lush arrangements. Its gentle sophistication and melodic clarity captured what the genre could achieve at its most refined, and it helped define the sound that millions of listeners came to associate with jazz on the radio.