The perfect introduction to jazz?

Jazz is a genre that a lot of people have preconceived ideas about. It's a genre that a lot of people are put off from trying. I am a huge fan of jazz and I wanted to talk a little bit about it. Honestly though, the world doesn't need another lecture about jazz. Instead I decided to share one of my favourite jazz songs and briefly describe why I think it's such a good introduction to jazz.

First we need a little bit of background. Jazz as a genre has been around for a little over 100 years. There's no definitive first jazz song and the start of the genre can be roughly placed as between 1890 and 1910. THe lack of surviving recordings from this time make it impossible to pin down exactly and I have no intention of going through the history of music in that time period here to try and provide a more definitive date, it's not needed for this post. All we do need for this post is a very rough timeline.

1890-1910 Musicians merge ragtime and blues together to form jazz.

Early 1930's Swing jazz develops

1943-45 Bebop jazz develops.

1948-49 Cool jazz, a 'softer' development from bebop develops, mainly on the west coast of the US.

Mid-1950's Hard bop develops in NYC.

That's pretty much as far as we need to go. Rather than describe hard bop to much I'll just say it's a more driven development of bebop than cool jazz. I think the best hard bop album, I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on it, is Blue Train by John Coltrane, who I rank as the greatest musician I've ever heard. I think the song that is the perfect introduction to hard bop is Lazy Bird from Blue Train. The band is:

John Coltrane — tenor saxophone
Lee Morgan — trumpet
Curtis Fuller — trombone
Kenny Drew — piano
Paul Chambers — bass
Philly Joe Jones — drums

The reason I think it's the perfect introduction, not just to hard bop but to jazz as a whole, is the way it's structured. Jazz can seem to be overwhelming at times with too much going on. Lazy Bird is far from sparse but it is never overwhelming. The solos are beautiful and contained within the song, they never wander from the rest of the band. The song starts with the full band playing and soon moves into a solo from John Coltrane. Then come Lee Morgan, (only 19 when this was recorded), on trumpet followed by Curtis Fuller on trombone. Coltrane plays another solo before Kenny Drew's piano solo progress into Paul Chambers bass playing. Chambers plays his solo with a bow but plucks the strings in the rest of the song. Philly Joe Jones, one of the great names in jazz, has a short drum solo before Coltrane leads the band to the end of the song with another sax solo. Six incredibly talented musicians playing as a cohesive band. It really is a fantastic piece of music. So that's why I think it's the perfect introduction to jazz. As to why I think you should listen to it? I think listening to jazz is an incredibly rewarding way to spend your time, it'll give you experience of music that you would never otherwise hear. It's a beautiful and expensive pool of music just waiting for you to start listening to it.