Music family
Jazz & Blues Music Genres
Explore jazz and blues traditions through improvisation, song form, regional scenes, and the artists who carried their influence across genres.
67 genre guides
1890Blues
A foundational African American genre with deep roots in the rural South, blues remains both intimate and far-reaching: a small ensemble language that can sound bruised, defiant, or quietly luminous. Its recorded history begins in the early twentieth century, but its cultural memory reaches farther back.
View guide1894Ragtime
A bright, syncopated American piano style that rose in published form in the 1890s, ragtime moved from Black musical communities into the national mainstream and helped shape the language of early jazz. Scott Joplin sits at its center, but the style’s history is wider, rooted in sheet-music culture, itinerant pianists, and a distinctly off-center sense of swing.
1897Acoustic Blues
A broad umbrella for unplugged blues traditions, acoustic blues links the oldest commercial blues sides to the field hollers, work songs, and rural guitar styles that shaped the genre’s early sound.
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1900Cape Jazz
A Cape Town-rooted jazz tradition with deep local memory: church music, township rhythm, and improvisation braided into a sound that feels both intimate and outward-looking.
1900Delta Blues
A stark, intimate branch of blues rooted in the Mississippi Delta, where solo guitar and voice can sound both lean and haunted.
1900Detroit Blues
A regional blues label rooted in Detroit’s postwar Black club culture, best documented through John Lee Hooker’s early recordings and the city’s smaller, less-publicized blues archive.
1900Dixieland
A lively early-jazz tag for the New Orleans sound that became nationally visible through landmark 1917 recordings, even as the name itself remained contested among musicians and historians.
1900Early Jazz
Early jazz carries the sound of crowded rooms, parade streets, and brass bands turning around one another in real time. The music often moves with a buoyant pulse, and the famous New Orleans-style frontline of cornet or trumpet, clarinet, and trombone can feel both tightly woven and delightfully loose, with collective improvisation doing much of the expressive work. The label is broader than any single substyle, though writers and listeners often use it alongside or instead of New Orleans jazz or Dixieland.
1900Harmonica Blues
A harmonica-forward blues tag that grew out of early country and urban blues and later found a defining voice in amplified Chicago playing.
1900Indo jazz
A compact but important fusion label with a clear documented 1960s origin in London. The sound grew from a genuine collaboration rather than a vague stylistic borrowing, which is why the Harriott-Mayer recordings still function as the genre’s anchor point.
1900Jazz Blues
A historically loose but useful umbrella for recordings where jazz phrasing, harmony, and improvisation meet blues form and feeling.
1900Texas Blues
A Texas-born blues tradition that moved from acoustic country blues into a more supple electric language, with Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker forming two of its clearest historical anchors.
1900Traditional jazz
A concise revival-era umbrella term for early New Orleans jazz and its later rediscovery, with a strong emphasis on collective improvisation and front-line horn interplay.
1900Vocal Jazz
A concise, listener-friendly overview of vocal jazz centered on American jazz history, swing-era vocalists, and the voice-as-instrument tradition.
1914St. Louis Blues
A historically rooted but somewhat slippery style label, St. Louis Blues points most directly to W.C. Handy’s 1914 classic and the urbane, band-friendly blues world that grew around it.
View guide1915Standards
A repertoire tag for songs that became durable fixtures of jazz and popular music, especially through Broadway and the Great American Songbook.
1917British dance band
A polished interwar British dance-hall style that sits at the meeting point of jazz, pop, and ballroom entertainment. The best-documented story centers on the 1920s and 1930s, when bands led by Hylton, Noble, and Ambrose brought a locally tuned swing to radio, hotels, and packed dance floors.
1920Christian & Gospel
Christian & Gospel music is characterized by its focus on themes of worship, praise, and devotion, often featuring lyrics that reflect Christian beliefs and teachings. The sound can range from traditional hymns and choral arrangements to contemporary pop, rock, and even hip-hop influences.
View guide1920Classic Blues
A historically grounded name for the first great commercial blues wave, centered on women singers and the records that carried their voices far beyond the South.
1920Classic Female Blues
Classic Female Blues names the moment when women’s blues singing moved from stage life into the recording age, leaving behind a small but towering body of sides that still feel intimate and alive.
1927Hokum Blues
A compact, commercial blues fad from the late 1920s and early 1930s, hokum lives on through its playful recordings rather than a rigid scene or canon. The style’s best-documented center is Chicago, where Tampa Red and Georgia Tom made the formula click for a national audience.
1927Kansas City Blues
A city-rooted blues label with a real historical core, but one that overlaps heavily with Kansas City jazz and swing. The evidence points to a relaxed, rhythm-forward club style more than a sharply bounded standalone genre.
1930Big Band
Big Band music is characterized by its large ensemble of musicians, typically featuring sections of brass, woodwind, and rhythm instruments. It often includes swing rhythms, intricate arrangements, and a lively, upbeat sound.
View guide1930Gypsy Jazz
A Paris-born acoustic jazz style from the 1930s, built around Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, and the quicksilver rhythm-guitar feel that still defines the idiom.
1930Swing
A concise, historically grounded entry for the jazz-derived big-band style that dominated American popular music in the 1930s and early 1940s.
1930Swing
A warm, dance-forward jazz style that emerged in the early 1930s U.S. big-band scene and reached its classic form in the swing era.
View guide1930Western Swing
A fiddle-forward country dance style that absorbed jazz phrasing and swing-band energy, Western Swing feels loose, bright, and built for movement. The best-documented early centers are Texas and Oklahoma, with Bob Wills as its most famous champion.
1940Bebop
A historically grounded bebop entry that centers the Harlem/New York origins, names the core architects, and anchors the page with verified artist and recording links.
1940Bebop
A concise record for bebop that keeps the focus on the New York 1940s scene, the players who shaped it, and a few clearly documented recordings and artist pages.
1940Chicago Blues
A compact, evidence-based update that keeps Chicago blues anchored in the postwar migration story and in the electric club sound associated with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and their peers.
1940Christmas
A warm, evergreen holiday listening lane built from mid-century standards, choir-backed carols, and polished vocal recordings that became December staples.
1940Traditional Pop
A classic American pop format built on the song, the singer, and elegant orchestration. Traditional pop sits just before rock & roll’s takeover, and its afterlife lives on in standards, songbook albums, and modern crooners.
1944New Orleans blues
A city-born blues style where the piano leads, the horns chime in, and the groove keeps a little parade step under everything.
1947Cool Jazz
A concise, readable profile of a post-bebop jazz style shaped by Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions and later linked to West Coast jazz.
1947West Coast Blues
A polished California blues style that turns Southern roots into something smoother, more urban, and often a little jazzy.
1947West Coast Jazz
A cool, arrangement-minded strand of jazz that became closely tied to California in the early 1950s, West Coast jazz still feels less like a rigid school than a mood: clear lines, careful balance, and a relaxed surface that can hide a lot of craft.
1950Christmas Jazz
A seasonal jazz tag for holiday recordings that reframe carols and standards with swing, improvisation, and jazz arranging. The category is best understood as a practice inside jazz rather than a tightly bounded subgenre.
1950Exotica
A midcentury mood genre that turns travel into texture: not documentary realism, but a glamorous, imagined itinerary of percussion, vibraphone, and distant-sounding shimmer. The label is sometimes used loosely as “travel music,” but the documented historical genre is exotica.
1950Louisiana Blues
A regional blues tag rooted in postwar Louisiana, especially the Baton Rouge and southwest Louisiana orbit. The style is documented most clearly through swamp-blues figures such as Slim Harpo and Lightnin' Slim.
1950Rock & Roll
Rock & Roll is characterized by a strong beat, simple melodies, and a focus on electric guitar. It often features a 4/4 time signature and a verse-chorus form, with energetic vocals and a driving rhythm section.
View guide1954Hard bop
A concise hard bop profile centered on the mid-1950s Blue Note era, with source-backed links to Horace Silver and Art Blakey as core reference points.
1954Mainstream Jazz
A historically grounded label for swing-rooted jazz that stayed melodic and session-friendly in the bebop era and after.
1957Avant-Garde Jazz
A historically grounded overview of the jazz avant-garde that keeps the genre’s overlap with free jazz in view and anchors the entry in documented recordings from the late 1950s and 1960s.
1957Blue Note Records
A label entry, not a true genre entry. Blue Note matters because its catalog helped define the sound and look of modern jazz, especially hard bop and related styles.
1957Bossa nova
A classic Brazilian style from late-1950s Rio, bossa nova pairs samba’s rhythmic lift with jazz harmony and an unusually intimate vocal style. The genre’s early recordings by João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim became the blueprint for its global reputation.
1957Lounge
A gently elastic genre tag for cocktail-era easy listening and its later revivals, especially where exotica, space age pop, and polished background allure overlap.
1957Swamp Blues
A Louisiana blues style rooted in Baton Rouge and Crowley, swamp blues blends lean electric grooves with harmonica and a humid, unpolished studio feel. The documentation is strongest around Slim Harpo and Lightnin' Slim, whose recordings helped define the style.
1957Third Stream
A historically grounded cross-genre label coined by Gunther Schuller in 1957, Third Stream names music that tries to hold jazz improvisation and classical craft together in one frame.
1960American Trad Rock
A roots-heavy rock label with a clear editorial footprint at AllMusic, though it’s better understood as a style cluster than a rigid genre box.
1960Free Jazz
A concise, source-grounded overview centered on Ornette Coleman’s role in naming and defining the style, with John Coltrane included as a major related artist rather than a sole originator.
1960Straight-ahead jazz
A concise editorial update that treats straight-ahead jazz as a post-1960s critical label for acoustic, tradition-leaning jazz with older roots in swing, bebop, and hard bop.
1964Post-Bop
A flexible modern-jazz label rooted in the mid-1960s: still connected to bop, but more adventurous in harmony, rhythm, and improvisation.
1967Jazz Rock
A concise jazz-rock entry centered on the late-1960s fusion moment, with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew as a key landmark and Chicago, Santana, and Blood, Sweat & Tears as documented examples of the style’s rock-side reach.
1967Progressive Rock
A British-born rock style that pushed albums toward suites, concept pieces, and richer instrumentation, while keeping a strong pulse underneath the ambition.
1967Southern Rock
A rootsy rock style that grew out of the American South in the early 1970s, Southern rock paired blues-based guitar work with country phrasing, long jams, and a strong regional identity.
1977Punk Jazz
A compact, evidence-based entry for a loosely documented label that grew out of New York’s no wave and downtown jazz worlds.
1980M-Base
A historically grounded update that treats M-Base as a movement/circle rather than a rigid genre, with safer evidence-constrained language and verified links only for the example record and background reading.
1980Neo-bop jazz
A concise, evidence-based update that treats neo-bop as an early-1980s jazz revival rather than a sharply bounded school. The entry keeps the style grounded in documented straight-ahead lineage and uses verified artist and recording pages for examples.
1984Sophisti-pop
A polished British 1980s pop style with jazz and soul shading, now mainly used as a retrospective tag for records by Sade, Prefab Sprout, The Style Council, and Swing Out Sister.
1987Neo-Swing
A 1990s U.S. swing-revival tag for bands that treated big-band brass like a loud, stylish time machine, often folding in rockabilly and alternative-rock energy.
View guide1990Jam Bands
A live-first American rock umbrella built around improvisation, stylistic drifting, and a concert culture where no two nights are quite the same.
Continental Jazz
A historically specific European swing-era label rather than a broad, living genre name; useful for describing interwar continental dance jazz and the Reinhardt orbit.
Dark Blues
A shaky but usable tag for blues music with a shadowed, intimate feel. Because the name is not strongly established in genre histories, the record should be presented as a descriptive umbrella rather than a settled subgenre.
Jazz
A foundational American genre born in New Orleans, jazz remains a broad, living tradition built around improvisation, swing, and restless group conversation.
Kansas City Jazz
A late-night, blues-soaked branch of jazz shaped by Kansas City’s 18th & Vine district, where riff-driven bands and extended improvisation helped define a looser swing feel.
New York Blues
A loose but historically grounded tag for urban, jazz-tinged blues associated with New York’s postwar R&B and jump-blues scene.
Orchestral Jazz
A broad, somewhat elastic jazz label for music that wants the color and scale of an orchestra without giving up the pulse and spontaneity of jazz.