Here’s where jazz really became something we’d still call jazz today, with the hard bops of Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. This stuff is exhilarating, and maddening - I can’t imagine how listeners of the 40s took it. These guys were competing for complexity, tying themselves into deeper and deeper musical knots, just for the challenge of untying them. Dive in with the appropriately dizzying “Dizzy’s Blues,” and hold on tight.