In the early days of the 20th Century, a radical transformation took place: the marching rhythms of ragtime merged with the blues and a new musical form was born under the fingers of the early fathers of jazz. In this first class of the series, we’ll look at the ,major innovators of jazz piano including Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Earl Hines and Duke Ellington. From classic stride video to live stride performances, we’ll see first hand why ragtime and stride piano are some of the most challenging, virtuosic, and entertaining styles to come out of the history of jazz.

While jazz piano is primarily associated with the big jazz cities – Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Kansas City – in jazz’s early years, musicians from the deep South were creating their own brand of dance music. Blending the sounds of the rural blues with a jumping left hand bass line, boogie woogie captivated the rural honky tonks until making its own move to the big city in the ‘30s, where Southern boogie woogie pianists became a hit with New York’s famed Café Society. In the second Discover Jazz class, we’ll take an entertaining side trip to the often-overlooked world of the country and blues pianists – pianists that helped pave the way to the swing era.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, jazz took two major jumps forward: Pianists Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson brought jazz music to the American and European masses, as they toured their famous big bands across the nation and overseas; and jazz mavericks like Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, along with their horn playing counterparts, took jazz to the small club, creating a whole new vocabulary, dress, music and culture. In the third class of the series, we’ll see how the piano was the major driver in bringing jazz to the packed dance halls around the nation, and back down to the small jazz clubs in Greenwich Village.

Historians often place musicians in a particular stylistic box, yet some innovators seem to inherently resist this simple classification. Blind pianist Art Tatum’s blazing style and perfect technique seemed to have no predecessor. And while Thelonious Monk was at the forefront of the bebop movement, he was only there for a brief time, as he forged a distinct style that is deeply influential to musicians up to today. In the fourth class, we’ll reveal the unclassifiable genius of pianists like Monk and Tatum through video, audio and live performance from jazz educator/pianist Mark Levine.

The call of early jazz innovators prompted a myriad of responses in the ’50s and ’60s, as pianists of all backgrounds and styles defined the sounds that we now call modern jazz. To round out the Discover Jazz series, we’ll hear the piano move past the ‘40s and into the modern era, listening to artists change bebop vocabulary into the distinct and new musical sounds associated with modern jazz. Artists like Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett each forged new styles that spanned decades and continue to evolve and change to this day.