:) I don’t hope to provoke any major argumentation or hard feelings :)
Personally I feel that jazz is such a broad description, it can mean so many different things to so many different people!
When I meet new people and it comes to musical tastes I will say I love jazz, and often they’ll scrunch their noses “oh I hate jazz”
It always reminds me of something my father said many years ago “I don’t like curry”. Which of course was kinda insane, because he loved curry, he just didn’t know it was called curry or had curry elements!
I talk about the above personal experience because I want to set the tone for the discussion here, as not having to decide what is and isn’t jazz, but in the context that it means something different to everybody. And wanting to discuss as a community what it means to each of us without that being “right” or “wrong”
I think for me, the first thing that made me connect to jazz, was it’s absolute defiance. So that’s what jazz is to me: defiance. It doesn’t mean it’s not other things too!
I really believe what made me fall in love with jazz was a song from The Flying Lutenbachers called Fist Through Glass. I could not stop listening to it… It was the first time I heard anything that just said fuck you. Like really just fuck you. And also that underlying the apparent dischordance and chaos, was a meticulously crafted statement. I didn’t know I was listening to jazz though!
What a nice inspiring topic. Thanks for the discussion!
For me, jazz is variation. You take a straight melody, you play it in swing. After some time, you get bored with swing, so you surprise with a few measures of straight notes. One hundredish years ago, people heard popular music and got kind of bored with it, so they played a million variations on it. When Brad Mehldau does it with Radiohead, with melodies his audience already knows, it’s exactly the same thing.
In Belgium, we have this crazy drummer called Lander Gyselinck. He had a ‘classical’ jazz training, but wanted to do something less ‘classical jazz’, so he took hip hop beats, rock elements, crazy synths coming from a digital saxophone and created weird, crazy and wonderful music. This, for me, was the most jazzy thing to do. It’s all about variation. The band is called STUFF. by the way. You won’t regret listening to it.
I have to admit that I got in a theoretical swamp lately. On a certain moment, everything I heard and liked, became jazz in my head. And isn’t variation always the essence of interesting music? Bach and Beethoven did nothing else.
And then, you hear a nice version of ‘Round midnight with it’s syncopated rhythms and changes full of tritone substitions and you think: this really is jazz. So there is a style element that cannot be ignored.
to me ity lookin for something new. allways advance to new sounds.
One of my professors asked this same question on day one of our jazz combo class. He asked everyone to write down their answers and pass them up to him.
He then read them aloud, and one by one, crumpled them up and tossed them away. Many were about the technical side, swing and syncopation etc., I’m pretty sure mine was one of those (this was almost 20 years ago so I don’t remember my exact answer), all crumpled up and tossed casually over his shoulder. He got to one answer, chuckled, then put that one at the back of the stack, then resumed the reading, crumpling, and tossing of all of our freshman best guesses.
When he finally got back to that last page, he read it to us: “Jazz is weird.” He left it at that and we pulled out our Real Books, but it stuck with me. Jazz is just weird, it doesn’t need any other labels.
Jazz is a very big tent!
I could describe it as: Not a specific melody or style of melody, but a particular approach to melody. Not a specific rhythm but a particular approach to rhythm. Not a specific harmony but a particular approach to harmony. All of these “approaches” should have at least an acknowledgement of the tradition of jazz that has come before, even if the extent of that acknowledgement is “but I’m doing it my way.” And all of these are optional. You can mix and match and still call it jazz.
(I may have accidentally described M-Base instead of jazz, which isn’t what I was going for. Oh well.)
Possibly the only way to say for sure that something jazz is to find two people who agree that it is jazz, and then it’s jazz.
I had a music teacher in college. We were talking about kind of just mixing up rhythm of the main melodies on pop songs and she mentioned how that was kind of what jazz was at its core.
It just struck me as interesting because maybe at its inception, what she said is very true. But I look at jazz through the opposite lens. My introduction was with modern prog rock and jazz fusion, and working my way backwards in jazz and music history.
I feel like we are at a very different place in the genre, now.
Edit: Alternative answer - its kinda like porn vs art. It can be hard to describe where the line is, but you know it when you see/hear it.
I’m glad you said you like prog, would you like to check out an album that is dear to my heart?
There are very few albums I will ever listen to more than five times, this one is on regular play for me!
Way too difficult to define. Jazz is straight, swung, 4/4, 6/8, 3/4, etc., often syncopated, usually trading solos, sometimes loosely structured, sometimes fused with rock or even metal, expressed with a huge variety of instruments, etc. Perhaps the only universal truth in jazz is that it came about through the fusion of African and European traditions, a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade. One can find common claves in New Orleans jazz and Brazilian jazz and traditional West African music.
Miles Davis is jazz to me. There’s a lot more I could say, but Miles is my kind of jazz.
Found it!
