Jazz can look like a daunting business from the outside. There are saxophonists who have made dozens of albums, trumpeters who appear on other people’s records, mysterious phrases like hard-bop, post-bop and in-the-pocket, and what are jazz musicians even doing in a woodshed, anyway? But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy jazz. You just need somewhere to begin.

Enter Blue Note Essentials, a group of landmark Blue Note albums intended as an introduction to the icons of jazz, a swinging bridge to a jazz wonderland of elite chops, rogue imagination and absolute swagger. High-quality pressings, these, tailored for the curious first timer – and anyone else with sizeable holes in their record collection. Need a little more help? Here are five records that show just how broad – and how insanely fabulous – the Blue Note sound could be.

John Coltrane – Blue Train 

Recorded in 1957, “Blue Train” was John Coltrane’s only album as a leader for Blue Note, and only his second as a solo bandleader, and this five-track masterpiece captures the tenor saxophonist, then aged 30, at a thrilling point in his development.

He was already an extraordinary player, a valued sideman for the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, even if his career-defining opus “A Love Supreme” was still several years ahead of him. With its bluesy, driving title track and such satisfyingly tidy compositions as ‘Moment’s Notice’ and ‘Locomotion’ – oh, and with a vibing six-piece band featuring rising star trumpeter Lee Morgan – this is Coltrane before he became that Coltrane. Tell your friends – and feel your cred rise.

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers – Moanin’

Think of hard bop as flashy, fast-moving bebop taking a breath and letting the blues in. Then drop the needle on “Moanin'”, widely regarded as the hard bop album to beat. Recorded in 1958 by drummer Art Blakey and his band Jazz Messengers, it’s a gospel-inflected and gloriously visceral work celebrated as much for its memorable opening track – penned by the collective’s pianist, Bobby Timmons – and future standards ‘Along Came Betty’ and ‘Blues March’ as for its line-up. Tenor saxophonist Benny Golson is here, and Lee Morgan again. Top tip: the Jazz Messengers were more than just a band. They were an incubator for generations of jazz royalty.

Lee Morgan – The Sidewinder

Lee Morgan was still only 25 when “The Sidewinder” was released in 1964, but – as evident from the mentions above – he was already an established Blue Note star. Having first appeared on the label as a teenager, the prodigious trumpeter had gone quiet for a while, weathering personal problems before bouncing back with this, the biggest commercial success of his career. It’s not simply that the title track is crazy infectious, what with its irresistible groove and R&B and Latin touches – the sort of tune you might play to a mate who says they don’t like jazz. Or that ‘Totem Pole’ finds tenor sax great Bobby Henderson soloing with inventive verve. “The Sidewinder” demonstrates that jazz can be stylish and playful, off-the-cuff and on-the-fly, often all at once.

Wayne Shorter – Speak No Evil

1964 was a big year for tenor player Wayne Shorter, already one of jazz’s great musical thinkers. He had been musical director of the Jazz Messengers for five years from 1959, expanding hard bop harmony with a clutch of progressive compositions. He’d made two remarkable albums for Blue Note and joined Miles Davis’s celebrated quintet. But when he took his dream team of Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums) into Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, magic happened. “Speak No Evil” – six compositions, all Shorter’s – is a post-bop jazz masterpiece that finds gold in the intersection of worlds. You can hear the hard bop tradition Shorter came from, but also the more open, harmonically adventurous language that became increasingly important in jazz during the 1960s. Do your ears a favour…

Herbie Hancock – Maiden Voyage

1965’s “Maiden Voyage” was the fifth and arguably best album by Herbie Hancock, a pianist and experimentalist for whom sound is a force to be sculpted and shaped. Built around the idea of an ocean, and within a low-key environment high on listening, Hancock and familiar 1960s personnel including Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard create a beautifully subdued atmosphere of coiled grace, of tempos that tilt and shift. Small, subtle musical gestures pique responses – Hancock learned much about the power of space from Miles Davis, whose quintet he joined in ’63 – and keep the ensemble playing organically. The gently brilliant ‘Dolphin Dance’, one of Hancock’s most enduring compositions, is here, as is the intimate ‘Little One’ and, intense by comparison, ‘The Eye of the Hurricane.’ A sophisticated album that shows how far jazz can quietly travel.

So, there you have it: five Blue Note Essentials to get you started, and enough jazz vocabulary to hold your own in a room full of jazz obsessives. From here, the catalogue is yours to explore.

_{Header Image: John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock Photo: Francis Wolff Collection ©Blue Note Records}

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Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.

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