What is Jazz

[Admin]

What is jazz? What differentiates jazz from other genre of music, misicology speaking. For example, what is the difference between swing jazz and the music of orchestras like Phil Harris or Tommy Dorsey?

[muddylives]

Maybe you should ask Wynton Marsalis.

I think that jazz today doesn't have a single definition. There are lots of musics that are rooted in, or borrow from, traditions related to jazz. Are they jazz? It depends on how we want to define it. Jazz has always been a moving target that frustrates anyone who wants to draw boundaries around a definition once and for all.

Jazz started out as a sort of evolution from Ragtime that incorporated blues and New Orleans rhythms. It began as a collective music. When Louis Armstrong made his Hot Five and Sevens recordings that featured him as a soloist, there were already people who claimed that it wasn't real jazz. When Swing came along, people said that wasn't real jazz. When Bop came along, a lot of people said that wasn't real jazz. Ornette Coleman's innovations were dismissed widely as "not jazz." Free jazz is excluded from many definitions of jazz, let alone fusion and a lot of what came later.

In some ways, the people that argued that each new movement and innovation was not jazz were right. They were not "jazz" as it was understood up until that time, but became accepted as "jazz" when they grew in popularity.