By Bob Blumenthal, Globe Correspondent, 11/14/99

John Coltrane gave the avant-garde a voice the mainstream could hear...

he last hundred years is precisely the span required to take stock of jazz history. We are speaking, after all, of an American art form (created primarily, we should always recall, by African-Americans) that rose to worldwide importance during the American Century - a confluence that makes jazz myth quite resistant to cold fact. We want to believe that Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900, even though documentary evidence shows the true date to be August 4, 1901. We are even tempted to proclaim, in Lincolnesque phrases, that four score and 17 years ago Jelly Roll Morton ''created'' jazz in a New Orleans bordello, although Morton's boast is even more preposterous now that we know he was only 12 in 1902.

Taking the evolution of jazz in 20-year ''scores'' does provide a handy window on the progress and consolidation of the music. It also underscores the difficulty in defining this elusive four-letter word, which has been both rejected for decades by those who find its root (a slang term for fornication) an insult and waved like a banner by true believers when questioning the authenticity of some new development.

The spread of the syncopated, collectively improvised music that was already known as jazz (or ''jass'') by 1920 is truly astounding, though the paucity of recorded documentation make these early years something of a prehistoric period. African music's power had been felt in the Western Hemisphere long before 1900, in camp-meeting sermons and the ring shouts that inspired spiritual choirs as well as the more overt rhythmic impulses that permeated the Caribbean. Ragtime, a composed piano music filled with unexpected accents and a momentum that presaged what came to be known as ''swing,'' and the often-autobiographical tunes of itinerant, self-accompanied blues singers were making their impact on marching bands and vaudeville shows by 1900. These source points merged in the cauldron that was turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where the technical proficiency of the Creoles of Color (a designation of the city's segregation code) and the deeper emotions of the black community fused, and quickly affected the approach of white musicians.

Spreading the sound

...but it was Louis Armstrong who first made jazz a soloist's effort.

Even before the military closed the city's infamous Storyville district in 1917, New Orleans musicians of various hues had taken to the road. Morton appeared in Harlem in 1911 and in California by 1915, the same year Brown's Dixieland Band began playing ''jass'' in Chicago. Another white outfit, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, had a truly revolutionary impact with its appearance in New York and subsequent recordings in 1917. The Old World got a taste of the new sounds as well, with Swiss conductor Ernst Ansermet proclaiming that the blues clarinet solos of Sidney Bechet signified ''the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow'' after hearing the New Orleans innovator in a 1919 Paris concert.

Jazz really exploded in the century's second score of years. By 1940, through its transformation of dance orchestras into swinging big bands, it had even become the popular music of the day. The artistry was obvious enough in the creations of a singular genius like Duke Ellington, who began his nearly half-century of preeminence in 1927, or Lester Young, whose oblique tenor-sax poetry began being documented with Count Basie a decade later; yet during both the Jazz Age of the '20s and the Depression years that followed, jazz remained a music meant to entertain a general audience, one that danced or sang along first and sat back to absorb its deeper meanings later if at all. The depth was there, however, and among other matters it spoke to the absurdity of racism - a point that the wildly popular Benny Goodman drove home with his integrated small groups, beginning in 1936, and his historic Carnegie Hall concert of 1938.

Jazz could not have spread as rapidly without the rise of the phonograph record and radio. The music began to be documented with some comprehensiveness in 1923, when Morton and King Oliver began recording, while the ''remotes'' broadcast from ballrooms and nightclubs in the years that followed were critical to the rise of Ellington, Goodman, and others. Yet there was one primary human force behind the jazz explosion, and that force was Louis Armstrong. His merger of technique, imagination, and rhythmic perspective make him the single most influential musician of the century in any idiom. Armstrong's transformation of jazz into a soloist's art with the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are justly celebrated, and the destruction of stiff-backed vocal propriety that he wrought after he began to sing popular tunes had an even greater impact.

The real thing

Yet these innovations were bound to upset the purists, who seem to have been around almost as long as the music. Many denizens of Storyville insisted that Oliver's 1923 records represent a departure from the ''true'' New Orleans style. By 1940, independent labels were forming to preserve the real thing in the face of adulterated, inauthentic big-band music.

Matters would only grow worse for those who proclaim jazz orthodoxy (an oxymoron if ever there was one). As the popularity of big bands declined, the smooth/rough dichotomy of these ensembles simultaneously spawned pop singers and rhythm 'n' blues/rock 'n' roll. Young instrumentalists, in turn, seized on the music's aesthetic potential by embracing the harmonic and rhythmic complexities that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others had refined during after-hours jam sessions in Harlem.

It was this ''modern'' style of jazz, identified initially as ''bebop,'' that came to dominate the '40s and '50s, even as traditional players mounted a revival and swing-era veterans fought to survive as the newly defined ''mainstream.'' Jazz was now a many-headed beast. George Wein's Newport Festival, beginning in 1954, showed that the term could be used for big-tent presentations incorporating numerous styles, to the point where many ''jazz festivals'' have become musical shopping malls, where one-time essences such as swing or the blues are welcome yet by no means required of the participants.

Technology was once again at work, on various levels. While television was overshadowing radio and social dancing (and hence the big bands), the long-playing record arrived as the ideal forum for ambitious jazz artists. The music was now identified with intellectualism and rebellion, and the 12-inch LP that arrived in 1955 became the means for bringing the new sounds into one's home. Coinciding with the emergence of masters such as Monk, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and especially Miles Davis, 33 1/3 rpm microgroove captured a period of musical brilliance that - in terms of preserved documentation - remains unmatched.

The true messiah

Davis, like Frank Sinatra on the pop side, was the true messiah of the LP era, the musician who taught us how to listen to jazz performances at length; and his unquenchable musical curiosity, which had already led to cool, hard, and modal sea changes by 1960, implied that jazz was a miraculous engine of perpetual reinvention. The tumultuous decade that followed seemed to bear this out, as first the ''free jazz'' innovations of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and others and then the rock-oriented ''fusion'' of Gary Burton and Davis's electric bands and their sidemen pushed the aesthete/populist tension in the music to further extremes. With Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and other veterans reigning as international icons, others like Earl Hines being rediscovered, and Stan Getz and Ramsey Lewis even producing hit singles, the '60s may have been jazz's most prolific decade.

The taint of second-class status was still abroad, however, signified by the Pulitzer committee's refusal to honor Ellington in 1966, and other forces impeded further innovation. Coltrane's death in 1967 left the avant-garde without a voice that could speak to a larger audience. Innovators like the members of Chicago's AACM collective found a more sympathetic reception in Europe, where homegrown improvisers were taking freedom further from its blues/swing base. Labels such as Germany's ECM and Italy's Black Saint/Soul Note became essential chroniclers of jazz, as American independents were acquired for their catalogs by major imprints indifferent to any new sounds that would not sell in quantity. Fusion lost its edge as it merged with pop, and the domestic designer label CTI paved the way for what would become smooth jazz.

Armstrong, Ellington, and other fountainheads passed on, while their younger survivors (now part of the expanding mainstream) found it harder to be heard. There were inklings during the 1970s that acoustic jazz ''in the tradition'' still had an audience, including the popularity of reissues and the buzz that ensued when Dexter Gordon returned from Europe, but by 1980 the prognosis was grim.

The last 20 years have taught us that, if the pace of change has slowed, jazz's death has been greatly exaggerated. Another technical innovation, the compact disc, encouraged the growing appreciation of the music's history, but what really changed is the way that society has acknowledged jazz as a mark of American pride and achievement, something that any educated musician should know how to play and any educated person should appreciate. Signs of the change are everywhere, from the sound of jazz in Madison Avenue ad campaigns to the images of jazz legends on postage stamps, but the focal point remains Wynton Marsalis. Which is not to say that Marsalis has created the best music - his magnum opus, ''Blood on the Fields,'' suffers in comparison to the late John Carter's virtually unknown five-suite cycle on similar themes. Yet Marsalis's preference for acoustic, swing-oriented verities and elegant presentation, not to mention his crossover ability as a classical trumpeter, were what the zeitgeist demanded; and it was Marsalis rather than Carter who won the first jazz Pulitzer.

The last two decades have seen jazz attain a level of cultural respect equivalent to other ''art'' musics, which is a mixed blessing in an era of dumbing down and the tyranny of the bottom line. So much of our millennial celebrating has been about what sells that we may as well have redesignated the current calendar year 1999.95. In this atmosphere, jazz in all its incarnations can appear as little more than a spent force. Yet it still holds incredible power for those who hear it, whether in New York nightclubs or the far corners of the earth. Even if we are not entering another American century, jazz still has the capacity to reveal itself as the first, and perhaps the only true, world music.

This story ran on page L04 of the Boston Globe on 11/14/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.