The Best Jazz Albums of the '50s

Two 1959 dates at Columbia's 30th Street Studio produced what is routinely certified the best-selling jazz album ever, with Bill Evans helping sketch modal frameworks the sextet read nearly cold. So What opens on Paul Chambers's bass posing the question and the horns shrugging the two-note answer back. A plain five-track edition survives on Spotify — take it over the Legacy Edition the artist page pushes first.

Grief and protest share one Columbia LP: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat mourns Lester Young with tenors voiced like a congregation, while Fables of Faubus jabs at the Arkansas governor — Columbia refused the lyrics, so it runs here as an instrumental. The linked press keeps the original nine-track sequence; watch Spotify's odd renderings, including 'Better Get Hit In Your Soul' for the opener.

Nobody at Columbia expected the odd-meter experiment to sell; by most industry accounts it became the first jazz LP to move a million copies. Take Five is Paul Desmond's tune in 5/4, and the reason it works is Joe Morello, who solos over the piano vamp without once losing the limp. Blue Rondo à la Turk splits 9/8 into 2+2+2+3 like it's the most natural thing in dance music.

One June 1956 afternoon at Van Gelder's Hackensack studio, cut for Prestige. St. Thomas turns a Virgin Islands melody Rollins learned from his mother into the most joyous three minutes in hard bop, and Blue 7 earned Gunther Schuller's famous essay on thematic improvising. Sources split on the release date — Mojo says autumn 1956, Billboard logged it in 1957 — so the earlier year stands here, flagged.

Coltrane's only session as a leader for Blue Note, recorded September 15, 1957, with Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller filling out a three-horn front line. The title blues is the anthem, but Moment's Notice is the tell: chords sliding in from a half-step away, the harmonic restlessness that ends in Giant Steps — which, released January 1960, belongs to the next decade's list, not this one.

The title tune defeated its own band — Riverside producer Orrin Keepnews spliced the issued master of Brilliant Corners together from incomplete takes, which tells you what the writing demanded. The theme runs once at a crawl and again at double speed, Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry hanging on. Monk's hardest studio statement of the decade, and the record that ended the novelty-act talk.

No piano anywhere: Coleman's plastic alto, Don Cherry's pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, recorded for Atlantic in Hollywood in May 1959. Lonely Woman sets a sobbing, out-of-tempo theme over Haden's drone while Higgins keeps double time on the ride cymbal, and that tune became the movement's flag. Half the jazz world called it fraud; the other half reorganized around it.

Blue Note issued it self-titled as BLP 4003; everyone kept asking for the Bobby Timmons opener, so Moanin' became the name. That tune's amen call-and-response made the gospel groove a hard bop first language, and Benny Golson's Blues March supplies the other half of the sermon. The linked plain-titled press is the 1987 Blue Note CD, which slips one alternate take in at track two.

Miles Davis took a sideman chair on somebody else's Blue Note date — March 1958, with Hank Jones, Sam Jones and Art Blakey — and quietly ran the room. Autumn Leaves gets a hushed minor vamp and a harmon-muted statement so poised it colonized every jazz-ballad cliché that followed. Only the Rudy Van Gelder Edition is Blue Note's own copy on Spotify; the plain-titled uploads are grey-market.

Ray Ellis's forty-piece string orchestra was Holiday's own request to Columbia, and the 1958 sessions caught a voice worn to threads a year and a half before her death. I'm a Fool to Want You is almost unbearable — pitch cracking against glassy orchestration, phrasing still landing exactly where it should. The streaming copy appends alternates and, absurdly, a track titled Pause Track; the original LP ran twelve songs.

Sextet Miles, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley both aboard: Milestones floats its theme over two scales instead of a chord ladder, the first modal writing he put on record and the direct rehearsal for what 1959 delivered. Red Garland walked out mid-session, so Miles himself comps on Sid's Ahead. The current Spotify press tacks three alternate takes onto the original six titles.

Hard bop's first great working band, cut for EmArcy in 1955 with Harold Land on tenor. Cherokee goes by at a murderous clip and Brown's articulation stays conversational the whole way, every eighth note round and placed, while Max Roach plays actual melody on the kit. Spotify credits the album to Clifford Brown alone despite the co-led billing. He died in a car crash in June 1956, twenty-five years old.

Norman Granz built Verve partly to make this record: thirty-two Porter songs across a 1956 double LP, Buddy Bregman arranging, the first of the Song Book series. Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye gets the definitive reading — hear her hit 'change from major to minor' precisely as the harmony does it. The complete set on Spotify is the Expanded Edition; the plain-titled listing carries only half the program.

EmArcy's self-titled 1955 set is the vocal-jazz LP every instrumental shelf still needs: Vaughan with Clifford Brown in the horn chair and Herbie Mann on flute, small-group charts, no syrup anywhere. Lullaby of Birdland opens it with her scatted choruses treating Brown as an equal instrument rather than an accompanist. Spotify lists the album as Sarah Vaughan With Clifford Brown, and its ten-track press adds one alternate take.

Pacific Jazz first issued it in 1954 as a ten-inch; the linked copy is the fourteen-track 1956 twelve-inch expansion, the only form Spotify carries. My Funny Valentine is the argument the record keeps having with itself — a trumpet player singing without vibrato, barely above a whisper, and West Coast cool suddenly had a face. Russ Freeman's piano supplies the adult supervision throughout.

Neal Hefti wrote every chart on the 1958 Roulette date behind the mushroom-cloud sleeve, and the New Testament band plays them like a drag racer idling. Lil' Darlin' is the masterstroke, taken at a crawl that would expose any lesser section, dynamics held to a murmur until the brass finally blooms. Spotify renders the title as The Atomic Mr Basie, period missing.

A 3 a.m. session for Contemporary in March 1957, booked for the only hour Ray Brown and Shelly Manne were both free, with no piano in the room. I'm an Old Cowhand rides Manne's woodblock clip-clop while Rollins supplies the missing harmony himself — the saxophone-trio format arriving fully formed. Spotify carries it only as the OJC Remaster, with three alternate takes appended to the six-song LP.

Recorded for Blue Note in 1959 with the Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook quintet, and Sister Sadie is where the soul-jazz sixties collect their marching orders: gospel backbeat, riffing horns, everything built to shout. The plain-titled Spotify listing is quietly a remaster — its tracks carry 1999 Rudy Van Gelder tags — but no earlier digital edition exists, so it stands.