Jazz from 1957 to 1967 was the most definitive.

IMHO, the one group of jazz supermen that could seemingly do anything and take the music anywhere, who played with such telepathy and total command of the idiom, that will always be copied but never quite duplicated, is Miles' Second Great Quintet. This group ran from roughly 1964 to 1968. When you fully understand Miles Smiles, you "get" jazz.

I think creativity in Jazz and its relevance to the masses peaked in that general time frame with the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and various other cohorts. THings kind of hit a plateau then in terms of creativity and diversity. Also, more competition from other genres being taken more seriously. Not to say there is not a lot of great jazz before and after, just fewer "giants" to lead the way yet perhaps many more talented musicians doing various things below the radar screen of most perhaps after and into today. Plus the lines between Jazz as a distinct form and other genres is more blurred than ever these days. Bad for "jazz" per se but probably good for music as a whole.

Certainly some of my favorite recordings are from this period, but by excluding the peak artistic/production years of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday those years by definition cannot be considered the most definitive jazz years. That's assuming any time period can be classified in that manner.

It's ironic that during this time period you had the rise of "youth culture" and the demise of jazz as America's popular music. At one point jazz was pop music. Swing bands fronted by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, etc. were the stars of their generation. As bop and later hard bop distanced itself from danceability and stopped being an easy listening experience, jazz became a niche musical product. While I and others may love what jazz became, Chuck Berry was right.

"As bop and later hard bop distanced itself from danceability and stopped being an easy listening experience, jazz became a niche musical product."

That's very true! The most popular music forms almost always lend themselves to dancing. I don't see that changing much in the foreseeable future. A tough fact for those more attuned to the art, content and sound quality to accept!

Onhwy61 speaks many truths!

Elizabeth, a decade in music is fuzzy; one of my favorite "jams" is "Senior Blues" which was on "Six pieces of Silver", by Horace Silver, recorded in 1956.
This decade also included "West coast jazz", it came and it went. While I recall some of the musicians; Gerry Muligan, Shelly Mann, Bob Brookmeyer and others, I do not have the best examples of this genera in my collection.
I am defining this music by a certain sound. While I can not communicate this sound in words, we jazz lovers know it when we hear it.