Jazz is one of the oldest American art forms and the one with some of the deepest roots in our cultural landscape. It’s also an art form with fervent adherents that can endlessly debate subgenres, artists, labels, eras, and nearly anything else within the medium. What better way to talk about the history of jazz and its cultural impact than with America’s other old art form with an equally devout audience, comic books. And it’s in Deep Cuts by Kyle Higgins, Joe Clark, Igor Monti, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Danilo Beyruth, Helena Masellis, Diego Greco, Ramón K. Peréz, Juni Ba, and Toby Cypress do we see this intersection take shape.

Deep Cuts is a kind of fictional history of jazz. None of the players we see in these pages are real, but their stories are close enough that we can’t help but feel like we’re witnessing an actual history. It’s the stories and legends told throughout that feel the most real—the trumpet player who threw everyone under the bus for his dream, the woman who has to write the next great jazz piece in a day, the man who gave up his jazz career for his family, the legendary player who only cut one record before passing, the evolution of an artist as the genre morphs, and the artist staring down the maw of the recording industry. While never exact re-tellings of any particular story, they make up an inter-connected collage of jazz throughout sixty years of American history and how it came to be.

So much of Deep Cuts is the history of the genre as well as culture in America. We see the progenitors of jazz and everything that had to happen around them to turn it into this musical force that maintained massive cultural importance and appeal for decades before the artists that allowed for that creative explosion began to die or grow disillusioned. But then that’s the story of so many other mediums and genres—from creation to stagnation in the public eye. For the creative team here, though, there’s always this profound love of jazz and what it represents for the people who play it that, even through their dissatisfaction, they always find this kernel of love for the music tucked away. And this is seen even more through the different artists in each issue that bring out the exact mood and tone of the subgenres and musicians that inhabit the stories.

Deep Cuts is the kind of history that plays best in a visual medium despite being all about the sounds we can’t hear—if this music isn’t real, then we’re not missing out on anything. But then we can see the inspiration and know that the feeling of these records and songs are out in there in some aspect, tucked away in a flea market milk crate. Because so much of jazz is a story told in connections to the past and the musicians that came before, it’s hard to not go crate-diving for something lost that would feel essential in the future. 

Get excited. Get bopping.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.