:) 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!
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!
https://youtu.be/l-JO0GiElhk