:) 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!
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.