Mainstream jazz

Mainstream jazz is a genre of jazz music that was first used in reference to the playing styles around the 1950s of musicians like Buck Clayton among others; performers who once heralded from the era of big band swing music who did not abandon swing for bebop, instead performing the music in smaller ensembles. The medium once lay dormant during the 1960s, but regained popularity in the 1970s.

The term was coined by Stanley Dance in the 1950s. The precise definition is slippery, and other writers have used different definitions, such as a broader sense of soloistic jazz improvised on chord sequences, in the style of Louis Armstrong in the late 1920s, or including jazz-rock fusion.