Jazz
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
98 free Jazz trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 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 98 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 retaught himself during months of recuperation to solo using mainly his index and middle fingers, keeping the injured fingers for chord work.
Q 02Who was known as the 'King of Swing'?
Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman was crowned the 'King of Swing' after his band's 21 August 1935 opening at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, the night usually taken as the start of the swing era.
Q 03Which iconic jazz singer was known by the nickname 'Lady Day'?
Billie Holiday
Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues was published in 1956 and inspired the 1972 film of the same name.
Q 04John Coltrane started on alto, but which instrument made his name?
Tenor sax
Coltrane started out on alto and switched to tenor in 1947 when he joined King Kolax's band.
Q 05Miles Davis's landmark 1959 modal album opens with which track?
So What
Kind of Blue opens with 'So What', a 32-bar modal tune built on just two scales, D Dorian and E-flat Dorian, recorded 2 March 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio.
Q 06Which 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 1938 inside the Cecil Hotel on West 118th Street, hosted the after-hours sessions where house drummer Kenny Clarke and the young beboppers reshaped jazz rhythm and harmony.
Q 07Which jazz pianist, nearly blind from infancy, hated having it pointed out on stage?
Art Tatum
Tatum disliked attention being drawn to his blindness and planned his own unaided walk to the keyboard in clubs whenever he could.
Q 08Which big band leader went missing in December 1944 when his flight over the English Channel never reached France?
Glenn Miller
Miller was serving as an officer in the US Army Air Forces; his remains were never recovered and the loss is thought to have been accidental.
Q 09Which Harlem stride pioneer composed 'The Charleston', the unofficial anthem of the Roaring Twenties?
James P. Johnson
James P. Johnson wrote 'The Charleston' for the 1923 Broadway revue Runnin' Wild; the stride pianist also composed 'Carolina Shout', the test piece every Harlem pianist had to master.
Q 10Which band was founded by Chick Corea in 1972, with bassist Stanley Clarke its only constant member?
Return to Forever
Return to Forever's first line-up in 1972 leaned on Brazilian sounds with singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto Moreira before Chick Corea took the band electric in 1973 with guitarist Bill Connors.
Q 11Bandleader Lionel Hampton, who joined a famous clarinetist's quartet in 1936, was a virtuoso on what?
Vibraphone
Lionel Hampton made the vibraphone a jazz lead voice; after Benny Goodman heard him in Los Angeles in 1936 he joined the Goodman Quartet with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa, one of the first integrated jazz groups.
Q 12What 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 13Which saxophonist's album 'Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation' pioneered the movement?
Ornette Coleman
Q 21Which New Orleans cornetist, key to the birth of jazz, left no recordings and spent his last decades in an asylum?
Buddy Bolden
Bolden's band was at its peak from around 1900 to 1907, when an episode of alcoholic psychosis ended his career at age 30.
Q 22Which bebop trumpeter's horn had a bell bent upward at 45 degrees, after an accident at a 1953 party?
Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet was bent when dancers fell on it at a 6 January 1953 party for his wife Lorraine; he liked the sound so much he had horns custom-built with the upturned bell.
Q 23Which arranger's orchestral scores frame Miles Davis on Miles Ahead (1957) and Sketches of Spain (1960)?
Gil Evans
Ornette Coleman was a pivotal figure in the free jazz movement, and his 1961 album 'Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation' gave the genre its name.
Q 14'Summertime', later a jazz standard, was written as an aria for which 1935 opera?
Porgy and Bess
'Summertime' opens the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess; the lyrics are by DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925 novel Porgy on which the opera was based.
Q 15Which Harlem bandleader became known as the 'Hi-de-ho' man for his 1931 hit 'Minnie the Moocher'?
Cab Calloway
Cab Calloway performed 'Minnie the Moocher' in a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon, and the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Q 16The Dave Brubeck Quartet's iconic album featuring 'Take Five' is titled what?
Time Out
'Time Out' reached number two on the Billboard albums chart and became the first jazz album to sell one million copies.
Q 17What jazz-tinged Brazilian style was popularized by Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto?
Bossa Nova
Bossa Nova, a style of Brazilian music derived from samba but with more jazz influences, gained international popularity through artists like Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto.
Q 18The bandleader crowned the 'King of Swing' was a virtuoso on which woodwind instrument?
Clarinet
Benny Goodman, the 'King of Swing', was a clarinet virtuoso; as a boy in Chicago he took two years of lessons from Franz Schoepp, a classically trained clarinettist who also taught Jimmie Noone and Buster Bailey.
Q 19The '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 20Which Greenwich Village jazz club did Max Gordon open in a basement in 1935?
Village Vanguard
Max Gordon opened the Village Vanguard in 1935 in a wedge-shaped basement on Seventh Avenue South; the room switched to an all-jazz policy in 1957, and John Coltrane's November 1961 residency there yielded the album Live at the Village Vanguard.
Gil Evans arranged the 19-piece orchestra on Miles Ahead (1957) and scored Sketches of Spain (1960), which reworks Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for Davis's trumpet and flugelhorn.
Q 24Which vocalist, called the 'First Lady of Song', was renowned for horn-like scat singing?
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald, the 'First Lady of Song', turned scat into horn-like improvisation on recordings such as 'Flying Home' (1945) and 'How High the Moon' (1947).
Q 25Coltrane's 1961 album 'My Favorite Things' showcased him on which newly adopted instrument?
Soprano sax
Coltrane took up the straight soprano sax in 1960; its keening, Eastern-tinged sound on the title track of My Favorite Things became a signature of his classic quartet.
Q 26Which jazz musician was known by the nickname 'Satchmo'?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong was affectionately known by the nickname 'Satchmo,' which is short for 'Satchelmouth,' often referencing his large mouth and cheerful demeanor.
Q 27The composition 'Take the 'A' Train' is famously associated with which big band leader?
Duke Ellington
'Take the 'A' Train' by Billy Strayhorn became the signature tune of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Q 28Which influential jazz pianist and composer was known for his angular style and distinctive hats?
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk, composer of 'Round Midnight' and 'Straight, No Chaser', played jagged, dissonant lines, was rarely seen without a hat, and made the cover of Time magazine in February 1964.
Q 29Which alto saxophonist, nicknamed 'Bird', led the development of bebop?
Charlie Parker
Parker's fast tempos, virtuosic technique and advanced harmonies defined bebop and reset how jazz musicians improvise.
Q 30Which schoolteacher wrote the anti-lynching song 'Strange Fruit' under the pseudonym Lewis Allan?
Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol first published the words as the poem 'Bitter Fruit' in a New York teachers' union magazine in January 1937, before Billie Holiday recorded the song in 1939.