List of post-1950 jazz standards

Miles Davis played in Charlie Parker's band during the bebop era and personally influenced the birth of cool jazz, modal jazz and jazz fusion. Standards composed by him include "Donna Lee" (1947), "Milestones" (1958) and "So What" (1959).

Jazz standards are musical compositions that are widely known, performed and recorded by jazz artists as part of the genre's musical repertoire. This list includes tunes written in or after the 1950s that are considered standards by at least one major fake book publication or reference work.

Modal jazz recordings, such as Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, became popular in the late 1950s. Popular modal standards include Davis's "All Blues" and "So What" (both 1959), John Coltrane's "Impressions" (1963) and Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" (1965). Later, Davis's "second great quintet", which included saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock, recorded a series of highly acclaimed albums in the mid-to-late 1960s. Standards from these sessions include Shorter's "Footprints" (1966) and Eddie Harris's "Freedom Jazz Dance" (1966).

In Brazil, a new style of music called bossa nova evolved in the late 1950s. Based on Brazilian samba as well as jazz, bossa nova was championed by João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. Gilberto and Stan Getz started a bossa nova craze in the United States with their 1963 album Getz/Gilberto. Among the genre's songs that are now considered standards are Bonfá's "Manhã de Carnaval" (1959), Marcos Valle's "Summer Samba" (1966), and numerous Jobim songs, including "Desafinado" (1959), "The Girl from Ipanema" (1962) and "Corcovado" (1962).

The jazz fusion movement fused jazz with other musical styles, most famously funk and rock. Its golden age was from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Top fusion artists, such as Weather Report, Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, achieved cross-over popularity, although public interest in the genre faded at the turn of the 1980s. Fusion's biggest hits, Hancock's "Chameleon" (1973) and Joe Zawinul's "Birdland" (1977), have been covered numerous times thereafter and are sometimes considered modern jazz standards.


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