Jazz
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145 free Jazz trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
70 free Jazz trivia questions with answers. Jazz has a hundred years of stories, and this quiz runs through 70 of the best of them. It starts in New Orleans and Kansas City, moves through the swing bands, and settles for a good stretch in the bebop era, when Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell turned a dance music into something you had to sit down and listen to. From there it covers cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz and fusion: Miles Davis and Kind of Blue, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck's odd time signatures, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and the record labels and clubs that made the music. Some questions are warm-ups any listener will get; a fair number are for people who know why Birdland is called Birdland. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so it works for a music-night quiz, a classroom or settling an argument about who really invented bebop.
30 of 145 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which guitarist, who lost two fingers' use in a 1928 fire, co-founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France?
Django Reinhardt
Django Reinhardt rebuilt his left-hand technique around the fingers the caravan fire had spared, and is counted among the very few European jazz musicians of true originality.
Q 02Which pop star recorded two albums of jazz standards with Tony Bennett, 'Cheek to Cheek' and 'Love for Sale'?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett took 'Cheek to Cheek' to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2014; he was 95 and living with Alzheimer's disease when their Cole Porter tribute 'Love for Sale' followed in 2021.
Q 03Which iconic jazz singer was known by the nickname 'Lady Day'?
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday borrowed her first name from film star Billie Dove; 'Lady Day' came from her closest musical partner, a saxophonist she in turn crowned 'the Prez'.
Q 04Which 1959 Miles Davis album, improvised on scales rather than chord changes, is often called the most celebrated in jazz?
Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue swapped bebop's dense chord changes for a few scales to improvise on, and saxophonist John Coltrane, who played on it, built much of his 1960s music on the same idea.
Q 05Which Harlem club's after-hours jam sessions in the early 1940s are regarded as the birthplace of bebop?
Minton's Playhouse
Minton's Playhouse, opened by saxophonist Henry Minton in Harlem's Hotel Cecil, built its house band around drummer Kenny Clarke; the players who dropped in to jam with it worked out the language of bebop.
Q 06Which pianist, visually impaired from childhood, is counted among the greatest technical virtuosos jazz has produced?
Art Tatum
Art Tatum could slip whole new chord progressions into a bar or two, sometimes a fresh chord on every beat; his reharmonising of pop tunes became standard practice for the jazz players who followed.
Q 07Which big band leader went missing in December 1944 when his flight over the English Channel never reached France?
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller stunned the music business in 1942 by disbanding America's best-selling band to enlist; two years later his small plane vanished on the way from England to Paris.
Q 08Which band did keyboardist Chick Corea launch in the early 1970s with bassist Stanley Clarke?
Return to Forever
Return to Forever started out samba-flavoured, with Brazilians Flora Purim singing and Airto Moreira on drums; within about a year it had turned into a loud, high-energy electric band.
Q 09Lionel Hampton, hired for Benny Goodman's quartet in 1936, made which mallet instrument a jazz lead voice?
Vibraphone
Lionel Hampton was working as a drummer when he recorded a vibraphone solo on 'Memories of You' in 1930, one of the first in jazz; six years later he joined one of the first racially mixed groups to play in public.
Q 10What early New Orleans jazz style features collective improvisation and upbeat tempos?
Dixieland
Dixieland, also called traditional or hot jazz, grew out of New Orleans in the 1910s and features collective polyphonic improvisation by a trumpet, clarinet and trombone front line.
Q 11Which saxophonist's album 'Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation' pioneered the movement?
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman recorded Free Jazz with two quartets improvising at the same time, one in each stereo channel, in a single continuous take that fills both sides of the LP.
Q 12'Summertime', later a jazz standard, was written as an aria for which 1935 opera?
Porgy and Bess
Porgy and Bess opens with 'Summertime' sung as a lullaby to a baby; its composer spent the summer of 1934 on an island off South Carolina, soaking up the local music while he worked on the score.
Q 13Which Harlem bandleader became known as the 'Hi-de-ho' man for his 1931 hit 'Minnie the Moocher'?
Cab Calloway
Q 21Which arranger's orchestral scores frame Miles Davis on Miles Ahead (1957) and Sketches of Spain (1960)?
Gil Evans
Gil Evans, Canadian-born and self-taught, learned in a 1940s dance band to blend French horns and tuba into the ensemble; he wrapped the same soft colours around Davis's trumpet on these albums.
Q 22Which vocalist, called the 'First Lady of Song', was renowned for horn-like scat singing?
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald turned a slip into a triumph: on a live Berlin recording she forgot the words to 'Mack the Knife', made up new ones on the spot, and won a Grammy for the performance.
Q 23John Coltrane's album 'My Favorite Things' showcased him on which newly adopted instrument?
Soprano sax
Cab Calloway's call-and-response hit sold more than a million copies, and almost fifty years later he belted it out again, as energetically as ever, in the film The Blues Brothers.
Q 14Which 1959 Dave Brubeck Quartet album, an experiment in odd time signatures, sold more than a million copies?
Time Out
Time Out grew from a 1958 State Department tour, where Brubeck heard Turkish street musicians playing nine beats to the bar and built the album's opening track on their rhythm.
Q 15What jazz-tinged Brazilian style was popularized by Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto?
Bossa Nova
Bossa nova means 'new trend' in Portuguese: a hushed, slowed-down samba with jazz harmonies that travelled from Rio to the world when 'The Girl from Ipanema' became a hit in 1964.
Q 16Benny Goodman, crowned the 'King of Swing', was a virtuoso on which woodwind instrument?
Clarinet
Benny Goodman was handed a clarinet at ten in free music classes at a Chicago synagogue; two years with a classical teacher then gave him the tone and discipline to play concert works as well as swing.
Q 17The 'First Lady of Song', born in 1917, was a native of which state?
Virginia
The 'First Lady of Song' was born in Newport News, Virginia, on 25 April 1917 and raised in Yonkers, New York; she was discovered after winning an Apollo Theater amateur night in November 1934.
Q 18Which New York jazz club did Max Gordon open in a basement in 1935?
Village Vanguard
Village Vanguard began as a triangular basement room for poets and folk singers and went over to jazz only in the late 1950s; no jazz club in New York has stayed open longer.
Q 19Which New Orleans cornetist, key to the birth of jazz, left no recordings and spent his last decades in an asylum?
Buddy Bolden
Buddy Bolden is credited with bringing the blues to the cornet in the 1890s and with starting the New Orleans habit of group improvisation; a mental collapse ended his career in 1907, when he was about 30.
Q 20Which bebop trumpeter was famous for his ballooning cheeks and a horn with its bell bent upward?
Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie's beret, horn-rimmed glasses and goatee became the unofficial uniform of bebop, copied by his fans and later by the beatniks.
Soprano sax was an unusual choice, a horn linked with the early days of jazz; Coltrane used it to stretch a Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune into a long modal improvisation, and an edited version became a radio hit.
Q 24Which jazz musician was known by the nickname 'Satchmo'?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong's nickname is a clipped 'Satchel Mouth'; how he came by it is uncertain, but he liked it enough to call his 1954 memoir 'Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans'.
Q 25'Take the "A" Train' was the signature tune of which big band leader?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington's famous theme was not his own tune: Billy Strayhorn, his composing and arranging partner for nearly three decades, wrote it, and the band first recorded it in 1941.
Q 26Which pianist-composer, known for his sparse, angular playing, wrote the standards "'Round Midnight" and "Straight, No Chaser"?
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk was the house pianist at the early-1940s Harlem jam sessions where bebop took shape, and he went on to become one of the most prolific composers in jazz.
Q 27Which alto saxophonist, nicknamed 'Bird', led the development of bebop?
Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker picked up 'Yardbird' on the road with Jay McShann's band, in most tellings because of his appetite for chicken; shortened to Bird, it later gave the New York club Birdland its name.
Q 28Which 1939 protest song about lynching began as a poem by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meeropol?
Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit first appeared as the poem 'Bitter Fruit' in a teachers' union magazine in 1937; the singer who made it famous had to record it for a small independent label after her own refused.
Q 29The Newport Jazz Festival, launched in 1954, takes its name from a resort city in which U.S. state?
Rhode Island
Rhode Island's Newport hosted the festival from 1954, lost it to New York City for most of the 1970s and won it back in 1981; it is now staged at Fort Adams, a harbour fort.
Q 30Scott Joplin, composer of 'The Entertainer', was the king of which jazz-precursor genre?
Ragtime
Ragtime made Scott Joplin's name with 'Maple Leaf Rag' in 1899, but 'The Entertainer' became a pop hit only in the 1970s, when the film The Sting revived his music.