Guardian Music — Guardian and Observer writers are picking their favourite albums – with a view that you might do the same. Here, John Fordham examines the brilliant corners of Thelonious MonkWhen I was discovering jazz as a student, Thelonious Monk seemed to epito... more info

Totally Fuzzy — Rollins (far right) on stage at his 80th-birthday concert in New York City. Also pictured (left to right): Ornette Coleman, Christian McBride, Roy Haynes. What's the 80-year-old saxophone colossus up to now? You'd surely find out at one of ... more info

Guardian Music — Where did the terms retro-nuevo and skronk originate? Or hip-hop? Michaelangelo Matos runs through an exhaustive catalogue of music's phrasemakers and trendsettersMusic comes from everywhere, and so do the names we call it by. There's a longstanding... more info

Totally Fuzzy — In 1987, Alexander Balanescu left the Arditti Quartet to form his own Balanescu Quartet, which has gone on to acquire a reputation as one of the world’s leading contemporary music groups. Collaborators have included Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Or... more info

Guardian Music — Royal Festival Hall, LondonOver his momentous four-decade career – much of it spent in the company of this trio, who have sold out the Royal Festival Hall – Keith Jarrett has done everything he could to make audiences sense the illuminating preca... more info

Guardian Music — Joe Harriott brought a Caribbean flavour to his fiery free-jazz. He also died, broke, at 44. Soweto Kinch on the great British jazzman we neglected for too longI first came across Joe Harriott while I was playing with Jazz Jamaica, a ska and jazz big... more info

Guardian Music — (Archieball) Joachim Kuhn, the great German jazz pianist, has played piano with Ornette Coleman – now he partners another saxophone legend of the 1960s American new wave in this warmly lyrical and distinctive duet with Archie Shepp. Shepp's signatu... more info

Guardian Music — 1959: Number 28 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of dance music1959 saw the release of several key jazz albums, each of which found new ways of developing and challenging the innovations of bebop. Dave Brubeck's Time Out transformed ... more info

Guardian Music — 21 July 1967: Number 36 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of Jazz musicThe send-off given to John Coltrane (1926-67) remains the most iconic in jazz history. The venue was St Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown New York, which, in 1960... more info

Guardian Music — 21 June 2009: Number 49 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of dance musicLong after the last chord, people were still crowding down the aisles of the Royal Festival Hall in London to get close to jazz's greatest surviving revolutionary... more info