Jazz, Blues & Folk Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which pianist and keyboardist, a member of Miles Davis's mid-1960s quintet, wrote the standards Watermelon Man and Cantaloupe Island, then went funk with the 1973 album Head Hunters and scored an unlikely 1983 hit with the scratch-driven single Rockit?

Question 2

Which drummer, a thunderous player known for a rolling press roll and a hard backbeat, led a band called the Jazz Messengers for 35 years, using it as a finishing school through which a long succession of young stars passed on their way to leading their own groups?

Question 3

Which Mississippi Delta musician left only about 29 recordings, made in 1936 and 1937, among them Cross Road Blues and Hellhound on My Trail, and died at 27 in 1938, reportedly poisoned by a jealous husband?

Question 4

Which controversy followed a jazz trumpeter's decision, around 1969 and 1970, to record with electric instruments, rock rhythms and studio editing, producing a double album that sold in huge numbers but was denounced by purists as a sell-out?

Question 5

Which trio, assembled by a manager in Greenwich Village, became the smooth, harmonised commercial face of the folk revival, with hits including Puff the Magic Dragon, If I Had a Hammer and a version of Blowin' in the Wind that charted before Bob Dylan's own?

Question 6

Which singer with a clear, vibrato-rich soprano made her name at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, recorded traditional ballads and protest songs, brought the unknown Bob Dylan onto her stage, and much later wrote the memoir song Diamonds and Rust about him?

Question 7

What is the name for the group of instruments in a jazz band, typically piano or guitar plus double bass and drums, whose job is to keep the time and lay down the harmony while the horns take the melody and the solos?

Question 8

Which singer, billed as the Empress of the Blues, was the highest-paid Black entertainer of the 1920s, recording Downhearted Blues and Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out backed by jazz players including the young Louis Armstrong?

Question 9

What is the name for the earliest recorded regional blues style, from the plantation country of northwest Mississippi, typically a lone singer accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, often with a bottleneck slide, in a raw and rhythmically free manner?

Question 10

Which bassist, composer and bandleader, famous for a volcanic temper, wrote the churning suite The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, the ballad Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and the protest piece Fables of Faubus, and drove his musicians hard toward collective, gospel-charged improvisation?

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About Jazz, Blues & Folk

Jazz, blues and folk are the three great streams of American vernacular music, tangled together at the root and feeding almost everything that came after, and this quiz covers them in eighty questions. Each describes a player, a bandleader, a singer, a style, an instrument's role, a famous song, a term or an event, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains what it is along with a record, a story or a dispute attached to it.

The first pack is the bedrock: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane; Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald; swing and bebop; the blues itself and Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and B. B. King; Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the folk revival and Joan Baez; and the ideas of improvisation and ragtime.

The second pack widens the field. More jazz names, from Monk, Brubeck, Mingus and Ornette Coleman through Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis to Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz, Chet Baker and Louis Jordan. The blues of Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf, the Delta and Chicago styles, the twelve-bar form, boogie-woogie and the harmonica. The folk of the Lomax family, the Weavers, Peter Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, the Child Ballads, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and skiffle. And the shared furniture: the Great American Songbook, the jazz standard, scat, Blue Note Records, the rhythm section and the Newport Jazz Festival.

The third pack is history and legend: Buddy Bolden; the crossroads bargain; Strange Fruit; the closing of Storyville; the first jazz record by the Original Dixieland Jass Band; the 1942 recording ban; the disputed story of Bessie Smith's death; The House of the Rising Sun; Ellington's 1956 Newport comeback; free jazz and the Bitches Brew backlash; the Lomax recordings; Tom Dooley and the folk boom; Ken Burns's documentary; the 1960s blues rediscovery tours; We Shall Overcome; the Village Vanguard; Jelly Roll Morton; smooth jazz and Kenny G; and the Cotton Club.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a player beside players, a style beside styles, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Where a picture appears it is a plain instrument or a page of music, never a portrait or an album cover, and each has been checked against its own four options. Facts and dates have been checked, and several myths, from the segregated-hospital story to Storyville single-handedly moving jazz north, are set in context.