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1915 - 1930 Dixieland Jazz
Dixieland is an umbrella to indicate musical styles of the earliest New Orleans and Chicago jazz musicians, recorded from 1915 to 1930, as well as its developments and revivals, beginning during the late 1930s. It refers to collectively improvised small band music. Its materials are rags, blues, one-steps, two-steps, marches, and pop tunes. Simultaneous counterlines are supplied by trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, accompanied by combinations of piano, guitar, banjo, tuba, bass, and drums. 
 

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1920 - Chicago Jazz
The merger of New Orleans Style Dixieland with ragtime style led to what is now referred to as Chicago Style Dixieland. This style exemplified the Roaring Twenties, or to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the jazz age." Chicago was excited at this time and so was its music. In 1917 with the closing of Storyville in New Orleans, Chicago became the center of jazz activity. Many workers from the south migrated to Chicago and brought with them a continued interest in the type of entertainment they had left behind. The New Orleans instrumentation was augmented to include a saxophone and piano and the influence of ragtime added 2/4 backbeat to the rhythmic feeling. The banjo moved to the guitar and the tuba moved to string bass. The tempos were generally less relaxed than New Orleans Dixieland, and the music seemed more aggressively performed. 

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1903 - 1931 Bix Beiderbecke

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1925 - 1945 Swing
Swing is the jazz style that emerged during the early 1930s and emphasized big bands. It spilled into the late 1940s and then remained popular in recordings, film, and television music long after its main proponents had disbanded. Most swing-style groups had at least 10 musicians and featured at least three or four saxophones, two or three trumpets, two or three trombones, piano, guitar, bass violin, and drums. Guitarists, bassists, and drummers offered repeating rhythms that were sufficiently simple, buoyant, and lilting to inspire social dancers, the style's largest audience. Musicians strove for large, rich tone qualities on their instruments. Solo improvisers did not seek intricacy in their lines so much as lyricism and a hot, confident feeling that was rhythmically compelling. For these reasons, the musical period of the 1930s and 1940s has been called the swing era and big-band era. 

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1917 - 1965 Nat King Cole
1917 - 1996 Ella Fitzgerald 
1925 - 2007 Oscar Peterson 

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1926 - Gipsy Jazz
Gypsy jazz (also known as "Gypsy Swing") is an idiom often said to have been started by guitarist Jean "Django" Reinhardt in the 1930s. Because its origins are largely in France it is often called by the French name, "Jazz manouche," or alternatively, "manouche jazz," even in English language sources. Django was foremost among a group of Gypsy guitarists working in and around Paris in the 1930s through the 1950s, a group which also included the brothers Baro, Sarane, and Matelo Ferret and Reinhardt's brother Joseph "Nin-Nin" Reinhardt Many of the musicians in this style worked in Paris in various popular Musette ensembles. The Musette style waltz remains an important component in the Gypsy jazz repertoire. Reinhardt was noted for combining a dark, chromatic Gypsy flavor with the swing articulation of the period. This combination is critical to this style of jazz. In addition to this, his approach continues to form the basis for contemporary Gypsy jazz guitar. Reinhardt's most famous group, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, also brought fame to jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

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1910 - 1953 Jean „Django“ Reinhardt
1908 – 1997 Stéphane Grappelli

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1940 - 1950 Be Bop
Although the swing style may have launched the art status of jazz by placing it in the ears and the minds of the world, it was its successor, bop, which claimed mainstream status. Bop became the first jazz style that was not used for dancing. Consequently, there were great changes in the repertoire. There was also a shift away from the popularity that swing enjoyed to a more elite listening audience. The elitism also expanded to the players. If you were an accomplished swing player, there was no guarantee that you would be able to survive the expectations of the bop musical world. The music complexity required players to extend their former playing knowledge. A theoretical underpinning began to emerge as players stretched the harmonic boundaries of early jazz styles. Players had to have a greater and more immediate sense of chord recognition, as well as their extensions and possible substitutions. The music was generally fast, demanding execution on individual instruments seldom required by previous styles. It is interesting that bop is today considered the mainstream of jazz style, yet it was not enthusiastically accepted by the jazz community at the time of its emergence. 
 
1961 – Wynton Marsalis
1920 - 1955 Charlie Parker 

1950 - 1960 Hard Bop
Hard bop is a sub-genre of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz which incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in saxophone and piano playing.

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1928 - 1975 Cannonball Adderley

1950 - 1970 Soul Jazz
Soul Jazz came partly from the funky subcategory of hard bop. Its earthy, bluesy melodic concept and the repetitive, dance-like rhythmic aspects stood as higher priorities than the invention of complex harmonies and intricate solo improvisations jazz swing feeling was foremost. Considerably simplified-often only a hint of bebop harmony or rhythmic complexity remained--soul-jazz became the form of hard bop known to the largest audience, particularly in the music of Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, Jack McDuff, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Jimmy McGriff, Ramsey Lewis, Les McCann, Hank Crawford, Stanley Turrentine and Houston Person. Soul Jazz combined the urban, electrified Chicago harp style with that of California swing bands and added a touch of Philadelphia tenor sax jazz from the 1960s. Artists such as Nina Simon and Lou Rawls added to the vocal expressions of this jazz form, which gave newer audiences an appreciation for jazz. 

1931 - 2000 Nat Adderley

1950 - Mainstream Jazz
Mainstream jazz is a genre of jazz music that was first used in reference to the playing styles around the 1950s of musicians like Buck Clayton among others; performers who once heralded from the era of big band swing music who did not abandon swing for bebop, instead performing the music in smaller ensembles. The medium once lay dormant during the 1960s, but regained popularity in the 70s.

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1962 - 1999 Michel Petrucciani

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1955 - 1960 Cool Jazz
Cool jazz followed bop but was entirely different in mood, in its approach to arranging, and even in its choices of instruments. World War II was over-the country was relaxed and jazz relaxed. In this era, which began in 1947, many instruments were used in jazz for the first time. Softer-sounding instruments, unamplified, created a different mood from that expressed earlier. The G.I. Bill made schooling possible for many jazz players, which encouraged experimentation in jazz that had been previously ignored: new meters, longer forms, and explorations in orchestration. Longer forms were also made possible by the introduction of long-playing records. Although Lester Young came primarily out of the swing style and Miles Davis out of the bop style, they are two of the players associated with the development of the cool style. Young's contribution was the relaxed sound and style of his playing. Davis’s work with Gil Evans that led to the recording of the "Birth of the Cool" signaled the beginning of that period. The cool sound was exemplified by players like Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, and George Shearing on piano.  

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1926 - 1991 Miles Davis 
1926 - 1967 John  Coltrane

1960 - Modal
Modal Music is not so much a style of jazz as it is a structure. Before the advent of modal music in the '50s, solo improvisations were based around the specific key of a piece -- that is, its tonal center, the starting point to which its melodies and chord progressions would return for a feeling of resolution or completeness. Modal improvisations, on the other hand, were based on modes, or scales -- but not just the typical major and minor scales familiar to nearly all musicians. Because the feeling of the music came from those modes, chord progressions in modal music were usually kept very simple, since too much motion would have allowed little time to fully explore the mode(s) that had been selected. The results often had a meditative, cerebral feel, Modal music had a subtle tension produced by the fact that the solo lines, while melodic, didn't always progress or resolve exactly as the listener was accustomed to hearing; plus, every time a new mode was introduced, the tonal center shifted, keeping the listener just off-balance with a subtle unpredictability. Miles Davis was the first jazz musician to improvise and compose according to modal structure; his Kind of Blue is the definitive modal jazz album, and two of his sidemen on the record -- John Coltrane and Bill Evans -- later went on to become modal innovators in their own right.

 

 

1960 - Free Jazz
Free jazz is one name for the music of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and their colleagues and disciples. The free designation derives from Coleman's decision to offer performances that were not always organized according to preset melody, tempo, or progression of accompaniment chords. Freedom from these guidelines allows improvisers a greater degree of spontaneity than was available in previous jazz styles. Though nonmusicians find much of Coleman's music indistinguishable from bebop, musicians make distinctions according to the methods used (lack of preset chords) and the melodic vocabulary (original not bebop-derived). Much of Cecil Taylor's music is extremely active.  It is densely packed with rapidly shifting layers of complex harmonies and rhythms. And some recordings of Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Ornette Coleman include loud screeches and shrieks from trumpets and saxophones, combined with nonrepetitive, highly complex sounds from basses and drums. Some of John Coltrane's music of the middle 1960s is often classified with "free" jazz, probably because of its collectively improvised turbulence, despite its using preset arrangements of the harmonies guiding the improvisers. 

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1961 – Wynton Marsalis
1922 - 1979 Charles Mingus

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1960 - Pop Jazz
The styles of Pop-Jazz are quite varied, but the edges are always brushed clean. The sound is soft, smooth, and radio-ready. Pop-Jazz artists take the popular sounds from their period and infuse them with jazz styling and instrumentation, from Herb Alpert's Swing-come-Cocktail brass ensembles to saxophonist Kenny G.'s Adult Contemporary-derived bedroom instrumentals. Many styles of Pop-Jazz approach popular music from a jazz direction. Saxophonist Stanley Turrentine irons the rough edges from Hard Bop melodies, and guitarist Pat Metheny incorporates elements of rock and Latin Jazz. Other artists, such as the British pop group Black and the sultry singer Sade, take as much influence from the Jazz-Rock fusion of groups such as Steely Dan as they do from the classic traditions of American Vocal Pop. Pop-Jazz's claim to fame is its ability to make the often-obscure genre of jazz into a mass- marketable commodity, always selling more units than the rest of jazz combined.

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1979 - Norah Jones
 

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1970 - Jazz  Fusion
As jazz developed its cannon and rock and roll filled its role as American popular music, a new crossover began between the two musical styles. This musical crossover eventually became known as fusion in the jazz community beginning around 1965. Jazz began to import rock instruments, volume, and stylistic delivery. Like bop, fusion did not occur without controversy. As jazz was establishing its legitimacy, it was taking a risk by fusing with rock. Rock also represented a generational division in the American profile. It was the first associated exclusively with the young generation and worked as a banner distinction. Its further association with the social and political polarity of the 1960s tended to reinforce the generation lines. The earliest notable fusion experiments happened again under the guidance of Miles Davis in his albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. This later album included players who later form the most popular fusion groups. The most prominent later fusion groups belonged to former Davis players, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and Wayne Shorter. At the time, this style offered a new virtuosity which, like earlier technical approaches, has become a part of common practice. 

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1934 - Dave Grusin
1943 - George Benson 
1954 - Earl Klugh
1951 - John Scofield
1991 - Fourplay - Bob James,  Lee Ritenour, Larry Carlton, etc

1970 - Punk Jazz
Punk jazz describes the amalgamation of elements of the jazz tradition (usually free jazz and jazz fusion of the 1960s and 1970s) with the instrumentation or conceptual heritage of punk rock (typically the more experimental and dissonant strains, such as no wave and hardcore). John Zorn's band Naked City, James Chance and the Contortions, Lounge Lizards, Universal Congress Of, Laughing Clowns, and Zymosis are notable examples of punk jazz artists.

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1978–1998 The Lounge Lizards
1988 - 1993 Naked City - John Zorn

1979 - Post Bop
Post-bop is a term for a form of small-combo jazz music that evolved in the early-to-mid sixties. The genre's origins lie in seminal work by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Generally, the term post-bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-sixties onward that assimilates influence from hard bop, modal jazz, the avant-garde, and free jazz, without necessarily being immediately identifiable as any of the above. The term is a fairly recent coinage and was not in common use while the genre was active. Much "post-bop" was recorded on Blue Note Records. 

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1941 - Chick Corea
1940 - Herbie Hancock

1980 - Acid Jazz
The phrase acid jazz was the first jazz term to be coined by a disc jockey rather than by a musician. It is much more a marketing phenomenon than a coherent musical style, even more so than tradition and as with traditional. Acid jazz is very much the commercialization of a revival movement. Just like earlier revivals, it was inspired initially by listening to records rather than to live musicians. In this case, the original style is that of the late-1960s and early 1970s jazz-funk. The sort of music that wasn't heavy enough to be free jazz or early fusion but was more jazz-oriented than the average soul record. At the time, this found a ready response among black listeners and a few white aficionados. After the usual twenty-year gap, a new generation of fans succeeded in promoting the music to a much wider crossover audience. Most of the creative musicians who have flirted with the acid-jazz market have found it too restricting and have moved on, exactly as with other revivals. and they have taken some of their listeners with them. 

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1981 - Incognito 

 

1980 - Nu Jazz
Nu jazz ranges from combining live instrumentation with beats of jazz house to more band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements. It typically ventures further into the electronic territory than does its close cousin, acid jazz (or groove jazz), which is generally closer to earthier funk, soul, and rhythm and blues.Nu jazz can be very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept. The sound, unlike its cousin Acid Jazz, departs from its blues roots and instead explores electronic sounds and ethereal jazz sensualities. Nu Jazz “is the music itself and not the individual dexterity of the musicians.” Often, Nu Jazz blends elements of traditional Jazz texture with that of modern electronic music and free improvisation, thus, the music can truly evolve into a multitude of sounds and can vary greatly from artist to artist. The style can include broken rhythms, atonal harmonies, and improvised melody.  

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1975 - Michael Buble

1980 - Smooth Jazz
Smooth jazz is a sub-genre of jazz which is heavily influenced by R&B, funk, rock, and pop music styles. Beginning in the early-1970s, jazz fusion was a movement by some jazz musicians to merge the instrumental virtuosity and improvisation of traditional jazz, with a modern, electronic sensibility. The instrument that has become the most widely-associated with this genre is the soprano saxophone, plus, a gentle, legato electric guitar. "Smooth jazz" has been successful as a radio format; however, in 2007, the popularity of the format began to slide. However, smooth jazz concerts and record sales continue to show strong fan support for the genre.

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1956 - Kenny G