1957 was the best year for jazz

it's true

List of key discs, plz.

(Seriously, I don't mean a comprehensive list. I just don't know how to search for jazz titles by year.)

http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=1957&genre_include=1&genres=jazz&include_child_genres=t&include=both&include_live=t&origin_countries=&limit=none&countries=

Meh. I'm partial to 1970.

It was hard bop city in 1957.

yea i'm feeling the hard bop a lot right now

fuck all that free & fusion shit imo

lol j/k

but seriously i really love all the blue note hard bop stuff from this period

i guess i don't disagree w/ this thread's premise, though i'm probably only familiar w/ ~15% of what's on that rateyourmusic list. '58 was no slouch either (Ornette)

Psh. No. '61, '63, '65… Nearly anybody who put out an album in '57 put out a better one just a couple years later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/books/18cohen.html?_r=2&hpw

Review of Fred Kaplan book “1959: The Year Everything Changed.” that focusses on jazz and politics and science and more--

excerpt from Patricia Cohen review that talks about 1957 and 1959

Yes, 1959 can justifiably boast that it hosted Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba, Motown’s creation, the sale of the first practical business computer and the premiere of John Cassavetes’s independent film “Shadows.” Let’s even throw in the microchip: although that invention came in 1958, Texas Instruments didn’t announce it until 1959.

But critiques of conformity and materialism from David Riesman, William H. Whyte and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as emblems of the generation gap, like “Rebel Without a Cause,” appeared earlier. Why choose Lunik as signifying the start of the space race and not Sputnik I’s trip around the globe in 1957, which led to the creation of NASA? Why pick Kahn’s lectures over the events of 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile and a presidential commission in the United States urged the adoption of a strategy to fight and win a nuclear war?

The development of the birth-control pill took years, so why choose the request for approval from the Food and Drug Administration and not the successful clinical trials in 1956, or its actual approval and sale in 1960? What’s the argument for singling out a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University over his recitation of “Howl” in San Francisco in 1955 or the publication in 1957 of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Mailer’s essay “The White Negro”? And does anyone really believe that the first report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights says more about the coming racial unrest and civil rights laws than the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 or the federal troops who had to protect the nine black students trying to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957?

In these cases and several others, the answer seems to be merely because it happened during the chosen year. That is unfortunate, because the irritating neon flash of 1959 distracts from the more insightful discussion of how musicians, writers, painters, comedians and others shared the same preoccupations.

Mr. Kaplan astutely focuses on jazz rather than on the much more familiar terrain of rock ’n’ roll, and he writes about it with particular feeling and fluency, tracing the impulse behind the music to other arenas. Ginsberg called the rhythm in his poem “Howl” “a spontaneous bop prosody.” Mr. Russell discerned links between the laws of music and those of the universe. Ornette Coleman described his compositions as “something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.”

Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note), made in November 1957

Speaking of those two, just bought an album with Wilbur Ware as leader from 1957. Hopefully it will be up to the standard of the annus mirabilis of its origin.

Although it probably won't, according to this http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2006/01/wilbur_ware.html