Cleared Jazz Samples for Commercial Use
Public domain, CC0 & CC-BY — with a license certificate per download
Jazz is the most-sampled genre in hip-hop history — the warm horns, upright bass, and brushed drums that built whole eras of beats. The catch has always been clearance: the famous records are owned by major labels, and a single uncleared jazz flip can cost five or six figures. But a huge share of early jazz and ragtime — recordings published before 1926 — is in the public domain, free to sample with nothing owed to anyone.
What “cleared” means here
Every jazz sample in the Selekt catalog comes from a named, verified source — public domain, CC0, or CC-BY — not an anonymous “royalty-free” upload. Each download ships with a license certificate naming the source, the exact license, and any attribution required, and samples from less-authoritative sources are fingerprint-screened against 150M+ commercial recordings. So you can chase the same dusty, harmonically rich source material the greats used, from recordings that are genuinely free to build on — with documentation you can keep, not just a label that says “cleared.”
Built to flip, not just to browse
Cleared source is only half of it. Every track is analyzed for BPM, key, and mood, separated into stems (vocals, drums, bass, and more), and ready for the free browser tools — chop it, re-pitch it, build a beat in the Drum Kit, or re-voice a melody in Stem Lab. And modifying melodic loops is good practice anyway — it lowers the odds of an automated Content ID match (more in our guide to avoiding Content ID claims).
Browse cleared jazz samples
Listen, filter by BPM and key, and download with a certificate.
Open the jazz catalog → or explore the full cleared library →
Before you release
A few minutes of due diligence saves headaches later: how to verify a sample is really cleared, royalty-free vs public domain vs CC0, and screen your finished mix against 150M+ commercial recordings for a signed audit log.
