Barely a month goes by without magazines, newspapers or TV programmes
pushing yet another poll of the 100 greatest whatever. Jazz, of course,
rarely gets a look-in. So, we thought that to celebrate the hundredth
issue of your favourite magazine we’d take that perilous step to
announce what we think are the 100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World. Not
just another “greatest jazz albums” list of favourite recordings and
biggest sellers but a fully annotated look at the albums that actually
changed jazz, changed lives and brought the music kicking and screaming
into the new millennium. Just to give you some idea of how we drew up the criteria for this
list: long-playing vinyl records began to appear in the US at the tail
end of the 1940s, first in a 10” format, then by the mid-1950s in what
became the standard 12” format that still persists today alongside CDs,
which first appeared in the mid-1980s. Albums became an increasingly
important way for musicians to communicate with the wider world beyond
the smoke and limitations of the night club circuit. With an active
critical fraternity already analysing the music’s every move, by the
time records such as Saxophone Colossus turned up in 1956, the ability of a record to influence the entire direction of the music came centre stage.
By the 1960s and 70s, things had only intensified on this front, with
albums by leading players and breakthrough artists becoming major
events, not only for the media feasting on them but for the fans, many
who had come to the music from a flourishing progressive rock scene that
thrived on such things. After jazz and marketing embraced one another
in the 1980s and 90s, this became even more pivotal and inter-related.
New waves of scorchingly impressive musicians arrived at the gates to
deliver their own challenges as the music moved inexorably beyond its
American roots to go truly global.
The 100 jazz albums that shook the world was conceived and compiled by Jon Newey and Keith Shadwick with contributions from Stuart Nicholson, Brian Priestley, Duncan Heining, Kevin Le Gendre, Charles Alexander, and Tom Barlow.
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