‘One Step to Chicago’ Review: A Salute to Jazz Greats

“One Step to Chicago,” which is, so far, one of the best jazz albums of 2022, was actually recorded in 1992 and has roots in events a full 70 years before that.

A hundred years ago, a loose collective of teenage boys in Chicago made a discovery that would change a great many things for a great many people: a new music being played in clubs around the South Side, mostly by recent arrivals from New Orleans. The teenagers became obsessed with what was already being called “jazz” and made it their business to learn it. In 1927, when the average age of the Chicagoans was about 21, they made their first recordings, which over the ensuing decades proved to be almost as influential as those of the Louisiana pioneers.