Ragtime, Dixieland and swing. Big band, bebop and hard bop. Latin jazz, cool jazz and free jazz.

The jazz universe holds many planets and an unlimited number of vital recordings.

Still, with help from experts, we narrowed the field to 20 essential performances that everyone should be familiar with. We looked for those that helped set a new course or epitomized a type of jazz; are performed skillfully by leaders in the field; and, most important, are a joy to hear. To avoid diluting the instrumentalists, we stayed away from jazz vocalists; they'll have to wait for another list.

It was easier to arrive at a consensus about performers than performances.

Some musicians included in every jazz lover's pantheon -- Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie -- had careers so long, varied and influential that picking one representative song became a daunting task. So we didn't even try.

Don't look for the latest and greatest here. This list starts in 1926 and includes only one song after 1969, when Davis' Bitches Brew album signaled the splintering of the jazz "community" into dozens of factions.

Helping us compile the list were Ted Gioia, the author of the excellent one-volume The History of Jazz (1997); and Vaughn Wiester, a Columbus jazz trombonist who has played in several bands and taught jazz at Capital University in Bexley.

The 20:

• East St. Louis Toodle-Oo , Duke Ellington (1926): This is early Ellington, but the trademarks are already in place: the moody, almost-eerie melody; the striking solos; and, primarily, the lush soundscapes that no other ensemble ever quite duplicated.

• Potato Head Blues , Louis Armstrong (1927): Armstrong had been playing professionally for a decade by the time he made his celebrated recordings with his "Hot Five" and "Hot Seven" groups, from which this cut is taken. Satchmo took a standard blues and, leading with his impeccable solos, turned it into what we think of as jazz. If it sounds familiar, it's because Armstrong made it so.

• Sing, Sing Sing (With a Swing ), Benny Goodman (1937): One of the pure zestful joys of jazz. Echoes of this performance by the Benny Goodman Sextet can be heard down to the "swing revival" of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and similar bands of the 1990s.

• Body and Soul , Coleman Hawkins (1939): Hawkins did more than anyone else to push the saxophone to the front stage of jazz. The full range of his talents, from smooth balladeer to forceful honker, can be found here, in one of the biggest hits of jazz.

• Lester Leaps In , Count Basie (1939): Basie's small orchestra from the 1930s embodied swing; this song captures it at a high point. "Lester" refers to Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist whose solo pops out of the groove.

• Black, Brown & Beige , Duke Ellington (1943): The piece, lasting 48 minutes, remains one of the genre's most ambitious works. Though less accessible than much of Ellington's other works, it took jazz to a place it had rarely been: the concert hall.

• Salt Peanuts , Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker (1945): Gillespie, Parker and others revolutionized jazz with bebop, the rapid-fire, rhythmically dynamic small-group slugfests. Rarely was it played with such sheer exuberance as it is here.

• KoKo , Charlie Parker (1945): A bebop landmark that showcases why Parker is so famous: the flurry of notes punctuated by unconventional breaks that turn a melody into a pretzel.

• Four Brothers , Woody Herman(1947): One of the best big bands to survive World War II was Herman's, which updated the lyricism of earlier big bands with bebop rhythms and tones. This is Herman's "Second Herd," featuring tenor saxophonists Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Herbie Steward.

• Manteca , Dizzy Gillespie (1947): This may not have been the first effort to blend Afro-Cuban rhythms with American jazz, but it was one of the first to popularize the sound -- and certainly one of the first to do it with such fun. It foreshadowed the cross-pollination of so much of jazz in the 1960s on.

• Straight No Chaser , Thelonious Monk (1951): Monk is known as a bop pianist, but his highly individualized compositions and piano playing don't conform easily to any genre. One of his more accessible and bouncy tunes still displays his idiosyncratic moodiness.

• Doodlin' , Horace Silver (1954): Silver was a hard-bop pioneer as well as a gifted composer of accessible numbers that pioneered the "groove-funk-soul-jazz" movement of the 1950s and '60s. This is Silver at his boppin' best, helped along by a top-notch Blue Note band, including Art Blakey on drums and Hank Mobley on sax.

• St. Thomas , Sonny Rollins (1957): Rollins' muscular, innovative improvisation is displayed on so many great recordings from the 1950s that it's hard to pick a bad one. But this cut from the Saxophone Colossus album illustrates why some consider him the best tenor saxophonist of the past 50 years.

• Moanin , Art Blakey (1958): When jazz lovers talk about the "Blue Note" or "hard bop" sound that shaped so much of modern jazz, this is what they mean. Propulsive, melodic, bluesy and eminently listenable.

• So What? Miles Davis(1959): Davis helped usher in so many styles that singling out any tune seems absurd. But this beautifully bouncing opening cut from Kind of Blue is as good a start as any. The album, with its all-star lineup, is famous for basing improvisation on scales instead of chords. But listeners don't care; they're just swept along by the gentle swing and lyricism of Davis' playing.

• Giant Steps , John Coltrane (1959): His beautiful ballads? His honking free-form work? His hard-bop tunes? His deep spirituals? So much music in so brief a time. This outing captures his technical and compositional skills in abundance and hints of the intense individualism of his later work.

• Lonely Woman , Ornette Coleman(1959): Love it or hate it, there's no denying that free jazz has been a force in the jazz world. This opening cut from his landmark album The Shape of Things To Come paved the way, as Coleman abandons harmony in favor of a wailing free-for-all.

• Take Five , Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959): Brubeck's most famous record, and for good reason. It epitomizes his quartet's unconventional rhythms and flair for melody. Brubeck's piano propels the tune, but it's Paul Desmond's soaring alto saxophone that really makes this one stick.

• Spanish Key , Miles Davis (1969): Crashing drums, strumming guitar, funky bass -- welcome to fusion, courtesy of Davis. This is the "single" (that's right) from Davis' legendarily controversial Bitches Brew album, which blended rock and jazz into a freewheeling stew and helped launch the careers of about every major leader of 1970s jazz-rock.

• J Mood , Wynton Marsalis(1985): Marsalis received plenty of criticism for leading the "back-to-basics" jazz movement, but, as this recording demonstrates, his talent couldn't be challenged.