Azizi,

You are right that there were leaders of different types of Jazz.

The simplest way I have heard it explained is as follows.

The history of Jazz can be viewed as a succession of peaks, with different significant proponents at the top of each peak.

Each successive peak represented a new stage in the evolution of Jazz.

The genres of Jazz that you refer to above represent those stages.

So Jazz is a Genre in the same way as Classical.

The overarching umbrella of wht most people refer to as Classical music, includes a line of progression from Medieval, renaissance, and baroque, through classical, romantic, modern and postmodern composition.

Each of those stages is best exemplified by specific composers who did the best job of distilling and developing new compositional ideas that were emerging. So You have Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Reich, Part etc emerging in a line from the compositinal primordial ooze, each successor being a little more advanced than his predecessor, but only as a result of his predecessors discoveries.

The same is true in Jazz, roughly beginning with Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, (Swing) Going through Bix Beiderbeck, Duke Ellington, Fletcher henderson, Don Redmond (Birth of Big Bands), Coleman Hawkins (improvising on harmony instead of melody), Benny Goodman, Lester young, count Basie, Freddie Green (Lighter Rhythmic feel), Art Tatum , Nat King Cole (Inspirations for Bebop), Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, (Masters of Bebop), Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Gil Evans, (era of cool Jazz) Lenny Tristano, Jerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Miles Davis, (Rebirth of Modal Harmony) Miles' Children: John McLaughlin, Keith Jarret, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Bill evans (reintroduction of inversions and Red Garlands use of rootless voicings), Clifford Brown, and Max Roach (Hard Bop/Post Bop), McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane (free Jazz).


The important thing is the accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of the artform, not the ethnicity of those who have worked so hard to develop it.

It is of course important to note that Jazz musicians were not only influenced by theri predecessores in Jazz but also by their predecessors in "classical" composition and indeed their contemporaries in that genre.

Jazz has a similar history