Since its inception, jazz has been celebrated as a platform for personal creativity and expression. For musicians and listeners alike, this is chiefly apparent in the music’s focus on improvisation – the opportunity for artists to develop their own melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions in real time is what draws many to jazz in the first place. Sometimes overlooked, jazz also has a rich history of compositional practice which has been central to the music’s development.

Like any form of musical composition, jazz composition considers instrumentation, orchestration, style, and form, and always to serve a certain purpose. Early jazz works were designed around catchy melodies with simple chord structures, easy to recall for musicians who could not read music. Even early improvisors would treat improvisation more like a compositional act, reiterating and refining a particular solo over several performances until they had ultimately developed a “composed” solo that they would repeat at subsequent performances (not unlike a Classical cadenza from a Mozart concerto).

As ensembles grew in the Swing era, more strict composition and arranging was necessary just to organize that many instruments. Thus, original composition became a central focus of jazz music of the period and composers like Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Don Redman became icons of the music.

While bebop rejected many swing sensibilities—and indeed de-emphasized the practice of composition in some respects—composition remained important to convey elements of the style. Rapid, angular, and chromatic lines characterized the bebop sound and showcased the virtuosic talents of the beboppers, so existing tunes would often be recast with complex melodies to highlight the new sound.

Composition became a central focus again with hard bop and cool jazz. Pioneering hard-bopper Horace Silver was expressly interested in developing a new and unique canon of carefully orchestrated music that would appeal to both listeners’ appetite for funky blues and gospel, and musicians’ desire to further develop more complicated bebop ideas. Later composers like Thad Jones and Bill Holman would combine all these elements to further develop the artistic possibilities of the big band.

In all cases, something unique to jazz composition is that composers are not only tasked with writing music that is beautiful and exciting in its orchestration, but also seek to create an interesting vehicle for improvisation. Sometimes, the challenges are complex, navigating a minefield of fast-moving chords or functionally unrelated harmony, like the music of Charlie Parker or Robert Glasper; other times, composed structures are open, creating vast spaces to create infinitely with limited harmonic tools, like the modal jazz of Kind of Blue or the soaring works of Maria Schneider.

We are all moved by the moody expression of Billie Holiday and thrilled by Clifford Brown’s burning bebop lines. But next time you’re tuned into Jazz 93.5, take a moment to consider the composition itself, the incredible architecture and architect behind each song. Just as with pianists, vocalists, saxophonists, etc., jazz also claims a rich lineage of composers.