JAZZ'S GREATEST YEAR-1959

Half a century ago this year, jazz experienced an annus mirabilis.

America's own musical art form—for whatever combination of aesthetic, sociological and commercial reasons—saw a 12-month span that encompassed the recording or release of a remarkable number of epochal long-playing albums, as well as live concert and nightclub dates that would become a part of jazz history.

In February, Thelonious Monk, a pianist-composer best known then for solo and combo work, appeared in concert with a big band at New York's Town Hall, an event preserved on disc by Riverside Records. In March, trumpeter Miles Davis recorded his modal-based "Kind of Blue" LP, now the biggest-selling traditional-jazz album of all time.

Tenor-saxophonist John Coltrane, one of Davis's "Kind of Blue" colleagues, in May made his vigorous "Giant Steps," an LP that helped shape the course of jazz for the next 20 years. And also in May, bassist-composer Charles Mingus delivered "Mingus Ah Um," a gospel-tinged album that many consider a pinnacle of his work.

In June, July and August, pianist-composer Dave Brubeck assembled "Time Out," an inventive exploration of unusual time signatures that also became a formidable best-seller and yielded the hit single "Take Five."

"It's a mystery why it all happened at that time," Mr. Brubeck said recently by telephone from his Connecticut home. "It's hard to know why."

One reason was that as older jazz icons passed away—Lester Young, Sidney Bechet and Billie Holiday all died in 1959—younger players were eager to seek their own compelling paths. For his part, Mr. Brubeck said, "I was just trying to do an album that was experimental . . . I wanted to get away from the usual 4/4 and occasional 3/4, and to find some other ways to play, some other time signatures." "Time Out" would include lines with such offbeat meters as 9/8, 6/4 and 5/4—the rhythm of Mr. Brubeck's alto-player Paul Desmond's "Take Five."

He never imagined his adventurous LP would become the great success that it did, Mr. Brubeck said—and neither did his record company, Columbia: "It took a long time for them to get behind the album. They never did, really. . . . It had to be grass-roots; it grew from the public liking it, and the deejays playing it and getting a lot of calls: 'What was that? Would you play it again?' . . . We didn't even know it was a success, 'cause we were on tour in Europe; people told me, 'Hey Dave, you've got a hit record going in the United States.' Surprise, surprise."

There were many surprises in 1959. Everywhere a listener turned, it seemed, there was jazz: on disc, in clubs, on television and at the movies.

Ornette Coleman, a saxophonist from Texas by way of Southern California, made his controversial New York debut at the Five Spot Café in Greenwich Village that fall, playing a then-discordant-seeming music billed as "the change of the century."

Duke Ellington and his orchestra provided the music for Otto Preminger's hit film "Anatomy of a Murder." The biggest-selling record album of 1959 featured Henry Mancini's themes for TV's "Peter Gunn," with such West Coast players as trumpeter Pete Candoli and drummer Shelly Manne.

Clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw—who stopped playing in 1954 and moved to Europe, then returned to New York for a visit in 1959—said to this writer in early 2004, "I went away for five years and the whole scene had changed." Shaw, speaking at his home in Newbury Park, Calif., 10 months before his death in December 2004, recalled that of the live jazz he'd heard in Manhattan in 1959 he liked Miles Davis's contemplative-sounding "Kind of Blue" combo best. "Isn't it interesting that of the two guys [who were bebop trumpet contemporaries], Miles and Dizzy [Gillespie], Miles has held on. Dizzy could play rings around Miles—which goes to prove the point I keep making: It isn't the trumpet, it's what you do with it. Miles had a very good musical sense; Dizzy had a virtuosic ability—it's not enough. But in the beginning, who would have guessed? Miles was definitely the poet of that music."

Also poetic was Davis's former pianist Bill Evans, who teamed with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian in 1959 to form one of the best-regarded trios of the postbop era.

Poetic lyricism, rhythmic innovation, soul jazz, "free jazz," avant-garde big bands, modal music—the spectrum of jazz sounds on offer in 1959 seems ear-boggling today when, according to a recent survey, jazz is listened to "often" by a mere 12% of Americans. Fifty years ago, jazz was, of all things, commercial—a quality much derided then by its purist fans.

Orrin Keepnews, head of the independent Riverside Records, who'd begun in jazz as just such a purist, described to me by phone from his San Francisco home in 2007 how the audience grew along with the music's accessibility to at last yield decent revenues for his small label in that golden year of 1959: "The first Bill Evans Trio record that we did, the total sales in the first year were 800 copies. . . . We were selling anywhere from 2 to 5,000 copies" of most Riverside releases. But then Mr. Keepnews, in October 1959, recorded an infectious soul-jazz album by a quintet led by another "Kind of Blue" session-man, alto-saxophonist Julian Adderley. "'Cannonball Adderley Live at the Jazz Workshop' . . . was a record that sold about 50,000 copies," Mr. Keepnews said. "That was the first record that I did that sold enough so that I could be accused of 'selling out.' By that time, I didn't give a damn!"