For the first time, jazz began to fragment into distinctly different styles, or "schools." Aside from established schools, like New Orleans and Swing, schools included Bop and Hard Bop (and also the Soft Bop, or Nerf School, which was years ahead of its time); Dixieland (which sometimes included a banjo, against its better judgment); Cool (always a comfy 72 degrees); Latin (which required excessive conjugation); and Free (which, despite the name, actually cost a then-considerable $.89 a pound). Though composed of various members of the same community of musicians, these individual schools sometimes took on adversarial relationships with one another. In 1952, younger members of the emerging Bop school were able to best seasoned veterans of the Swing school 21-20 on the strength of a late field goal by Charlie Parker. Bop would later get its comeuppance when it would lose the 1958 All Jazz championship to the Free school 27-21, thanks in large part to the inexplicable runs of Cecil "Crazy Knuckles" Taylor.

Moving into the 1960's, the Avant-Garde was fully at the vanguard (that's three) of jazz. Musicians such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman dispensed with traditional concepts of jazz and took the music into unexplored territories. Trane believed that overlying melodies need not bear a direct relationship, even in a tonic sense, with the chords beneath them; while Coleman believed that absolute freedom in each instrument beyond the established motive was essential to the creation of truly new and vital music. This relentless sense of exploration changed the face of jazz forever. As the Avant-Garde movement tore down every wall of the old establishment, only one rule that had stood from the very inception of jazz remained: no accordions.

The sixties are a difficult time to explain in any sense. America was in the middle of a social and cultural upheaval, the likes of which it had never seen. Traditions, standards, and social mores were being thrown out the window like the contents of chamber pots in Elizabethan England. Except that instead of contributing to the Bubonic plague, this just contributed to some of the most godawful clothes and silliest haircuts in history.

Jazz was not immune to the effects of the cultural free-for-all. Jazz in the late sixties and early seventies was dedicated to experimentation on a Frankensteinian scale (and if that word passes into common usage, I get credit). A movement called Fusion, spearheaded by that great iconoclast Miles Davis, sought to meld the instrumentation of rock with the free-form spirit of jazz. This effort was in line with Davis' earlier efforts to meld the nutty goodness of peanut butter with the great taste of rich, creamy chocolate (which reminds me, attention Hershey's: corporate sponsorship for this article is still available. Say the word, and those Ovaltine™ references from earlier are gone with a stroke of the delete key. AAJ accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and plain brown bags full of cash).

As a jazz purist, it would be easy for me to dismiss Fusion out of hand and move on to the neo-hard bop revival of the early eighties. But that would detract from some musicians who are worthy of mention, like Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, and one-time Miles Davis sideman Herbie Hancock. Groups like Weather Report, Spyro Gyra, and Air carried the jazz torch through the Seventies, which was exceedingly difficult to do what with those platform shoes and the inherent fire risk of all that polyester.

Which brings us to the eighties, and the dawn of the Marsalis Age, when a brash young trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis burst onto the scene. A graduate of both Julliard and Art Blakey's jazz boot camp, the Jazz Messengers, and steeped in the New Orleans tradition, Marsalis brought about a return both to acoustic jazz and the zeitgeist (10 pretentiousness points, collect 'em and trade 'em for valuable prizes) of the Golden Age. Equal parts explorer and archivist, Marsalis inspired as much talk about the music as he did the music itself. And regardless of your personal opinion of the man or his work, even his most ardent detractors are forced to admit that he has one of the roundest heads of any individual on the planet.

As for the nineties, well, they are like a just-finished meal. We've almost forgotten the taste already, and are just waiting for them to digest so we can see whether or not they'll agree with us. In the end, we'll purge what we don't need of them, and use the rest with which to build. Please remember to tip the wait staff.

And here we are, at the present day, when the history of jazz winds a serpentine path through the epic maze of Ken Burns' much-discussed documentary and lands in the lap of a functionally insane humorist from Virginia who has somehow managed to pass himself off as some sort of Genius and get himself a gig on a prestigious website called allaboutjazz.com. What will happen next? That's for next month's column.

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