:) 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!

  • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.