The app ships a family tree of jazz piano: thirty-six pianists, arranged from ragtime to the present, with arrows drawn between them. It looks like a record of what happened.
It is not. It is a set of claims, and so is every other one you will ever see.
What an arrow actually asserts
An arrow from one pianist to another says: this person’s playing shaped that person’s playing. Occasionally that is documented — a musician says it in an interview, or a teacher-and-student relationship is a matter of record. Far more often it is inferred from the sound by whoever built the diagram, which is a judgement, and a defensible one, and still a judgement.
This matters more than it sounds, because the arrows are not evenly distributed. The further back you go the fewer names there are, so early figures accumulate enormous fan-outs simply by being early. Read carelessly, a tree like this says a handful of people caused everything. Read properly, it says a handful of people are where the person drawing it decided to stop.
That is why the lineage page on this site is worded the way it is. It says “in the app’s tree” rather than stating the influence as a fact about jazz, and the phrasing is not modesty. It is the difference between a true sentence and a false one.
Where this tree stops asking
Two of the thirty-six pianists have no ancestors in the diagram at all: Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. Nothing points at them.
Nobody believes those two invented themselves, and their upstreams are not even the same. Joplin came out of Texarkana and Sedalia, out of march form, out of African American musical traditions and out of formal European training. Morton came out of New Orleans, which was its own musical world with its own mixture. What the empty space above them records is the edge of the diagram, not the edge of the music, and it does not record that they arrived by the same road.
Every family tree has that edge. The honest thing is to say where you put it.
The ten who are cited and not drawn
Here is the part worth the price of admission.
Ten names appear in this tree as influences on somebody in it, and have no place of their own. Nine are pianists and one, as you will see, is not. They are named, they are pointed at, and there is no branch for any of them:
- Duke Ellington, cited by both Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor.
- Nat King Cole, cited by Oscar Peterson, Red Garland and Ahmad Jamal.
- Barry Harris and Jimmy Rowles, both cited by Emmet Cohen.
- Lennie Tristano, cited by Bill Evans.
- Tommy Flanagan, cited by Kenny Barron.
- Paul Bley, cited by Keith Jarrett.
- Muhal Richard Abrams, cited by Jason Moran.
- Dave Brubeck, cited by Cecil Taylor.
- J Dilla, cited by Robert Glasper.
The site prints every one of them, unlinked, rather than quietly dropping the edge. That is deliberate: hiding an influence because the diagram has no page for that person would rewrite each pianist’s ancestry into whatever subset happened to get drawn, which is a claim nobody made.
Look at what is in that list. Ellington, whom Monk and Cecil Taylor both point at from opposite ends of the music. Nat King Cole, named by three separate players — a pianist whose own singing career eventually swallowed the trio that made his name. Barry Harris, who taught a great many working musicians. And a hip-hop producer.
The J Dilla arrow
That last one is the most informative single edge in the diagram, and it is worth saying why rather than treating it as a curiosity.
J Dilla was a producer rather than a working jazz pianist, and what he is famous for is what his rhythms do against a grid — some elements placed square, others pushed or dragged, so the whole thing leans and pulls in a way a metronome cannot account for. It is a good deal subtler than “he turned the quantise off”, which is the version that gets repeated, and people who have studied his sessions in detail say so.
The tree does not tell us what the edge means. It is an untyped arrow: Glasper’s entry names Dilla and stops. Rhythm is the obvious reading and probably the right one, but it is a reading — the debt could as easily be about the material Dilla chose to sample, or about how a record is assembled, and the diagram has no way to say which.
That is the real limitation. Any lineage of a living art form eventually points at somebody its categories were not built to hold, and at that moment the diagram stops being able to explain itself.
The Brubeck arrow, and how to read a surprising one
The other edge worth stopping on is Cecil Taylor pointing at Dave Brubeck.
Taken as a pair of reputations it looks absurd. Brubeck led the most famous and commercially successful jazz combo of the nineteen-fifties and sixties and became, unfairly, a byword for the polite end of the music; Taylor spent a career dismantling the assumptions that audience came in with. Nothing about the two names suggests a line between them.
Taken as a claim about what a pianist actually does, it is much less strange. Both of them play densely, both use the full width of the instrument rather than the comfortable middle of it, and both are interested in metres that do not resolve into an easy four. Whether or not the young Taylor was thinking about Brubeck, the edge is pointing at something real about the sound.
That is the right way to handle any arrow that surprises you. Do not ask whether the two musicians would have liked each other, or whether the pairing flatters one of them. Ask what a listener would have to hear in the earlier player to make the later one make sense — and then go and check whether it is there. Sometimes it is not, and you have found an arrow worth deleting. More often it is there and you have learnt something about a pianist you thought you had already placed.
What the shape says
Read as geometry rather than as history, the tree is narrow at the bottom and very wide at the top: two names in ragtime, a handful through stride and swing and bebop, and then a crowd at the contemporary end. That is not a claim that jazz piano got more crowded. It is what happens when you are closer to one end of a period than the other, and it will look exactly the same in fifty years with a different set of names bunched at the top.
The names everything points back to are the ones you would expect — Ahmad Jamal’s generation and the one before it do most of the load-bearing — and that is worth noticing precisely because it is unsurprising. A tree that produced a shocking answer would more likely be telling you about its author than about the music.
How to use it
Not as a genealogy. As a route.
Take one pianist whose playing you already love, find a single arrow leading backwards from them, and go and live with whoever is at the other end of it for a week. Then come back and listen to the first one again, and decide for yourself whether you can hear what the arrow is claiming. Sometimes you will, plainly. Sometimes you will not, and the arrow was somebody’s guess. Either way you have tested a claim instead of memorising it, which is a completely different kind of knowledge — the same difference as looking at how a musician actually practised rather than being told they worked hard.
Do that four or five times and you will have built your own version of the diagram, with your own arrows, some of which will disagree with these ones. That is the correct outcome. A family tree of an art form is not a thing to memorise. It is a thing to argue with.
Questions people actually ask
- Is there an official jazz piano family tree?
- No, and there could not be. Some influence is documented — a musician says so, a teacher and a student are a matter of record, two people spent a year in the same band, somebody who was there wrote it down. The rest is inferred from the music by whoever is drawing, and no diagram tells you which of its arrows is which. Any lineage is a set of claims by its author. That is not a criticism; it is what makes comparing two of them worthwhile.
- Why does the tree stop at Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton?
- Because that is where it decided to stop asking, not because those two appeared from nowhere. Joplin was formed around Texarkana and Sedalia, out of African American musical traditions, march form and formal European training; Morton was formed in New Orleans, out of a different mixture again. Every family tree has a bottom edge, and the bottom edge is always a decision about scope rather than a discovery about history.
- How should I actually use a diagram like this?
- As a listening route rather than a genealogy. Take one pianist you already like, follow a single arrow backwards, and spend a week with whoever is at the other end of it. The value is in the pairs: deciding for yourself whether you can hear what the arrow claims is a completely different exercise from accepting that it is true, and you will sometimes conclude that it is not.