What Is Jazz?

I was recently posed the question “what is jazz, blues and swing and how do they relate to each other (since they sometimes seem difficult to tell apart)”. This also leads to the question “what is jazz”. Here is my own humble answer.

As far as I have been able to discover from reading about the histories of these types of music, the earliest form was the blues, which originated in the US from African work songs and religious songs. These songs were characterized by certain rhythms and musical patterns. They were also characterized by a melody where the accents did not fall exactly in line with what the drums were doing, but sort of “danced around” the drum accents (this is technically known as “syncopation”). The lyrics are usually characterized by describing the hard conditions of life experienced by the singers at the time (hence, the “blues”).

At the beginning of the 20th century in New Orleans, this music was merged with other African American styles that had developed and also some European influences (mainly French). This resulted in what some consider the first form of jazz, known as “New Orleans Jazz” and also as “Dixieland”. Here, the music was played by a brass marching-band style group, and it exuded the other end of the emotional spectrum of exuberant happiness. Here, one instrument usually plays the melody and other “melody instruments” improvise around it, resulting in a rather “busy” sound. There is also still a sense of the melody instruments dancing around the rhythm instruments (drums).

Later, during the Big Band era (also known as the Swing Era, with its peak in the 1930s), even bigger bands known as big bands would play a similar style of music that was more suitable for people to dance to. The music had been made less “busy” than Dixieland jazz, by having one instrument play a distinct melody line while the other instruments played pre-arranged parts that “back up” the main melody of the soloist. Tempo was usually medium to fast – suitable for dancing. The main feature of swing in my mind is that it “swings”, which is what makes it good dance music. So swing music is a form of jazz that swings. Also, when lyrics are involved, they could now be on a variety of topics, whether about suffering as in the blues, exhilaration as in Dixieland jazz, or anywhere in between.
After the decline of the big bands, smaller groups of jazz musicians still recorded music with a “swinging” style, for example the majority of songs recorded by Ella Fitzgerald have a swinging quality – this style of music is also thought of by many people as swing.

After the Big Band Era, smaller groups of musicians started to experiment again with increased improvisation, whereby musicians would take turns in performing solos. They often liked to play very fast and show off their technical skills on the instrument, while still trying staying within the framework of what the group as a whole was doing. This music was not made for dancing, but rather for sitting down and listening to. This style of jazz is known as “bebop” and was very popular in the 50’s and 60’s. Well-known musicians of this style are Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
At the same time, another type of music was going on that was the opposite of this style. Instead of focusing on improvisation and technical skills, it focused on melody and sounded less “busy”. This was known as “cool jazz” (for example Dave Brubeck’s hit “Take Five”).

Even later, around the 70’s, some jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis, began to mix jazz with other sounds and instruments that were popular at the time. This style of jazz is usually known as “fusion”.

Towards the 80’s, the saxophone, playing “jazzy” sort of bits, became a popular instrument in “regular” pop music, such as in the song “Baker Street” and in Sting’s “Englishman in New York”.

Basically, since the 70s, jazz has increasingly diversified and mixed with other styles, so that the lines between genres and styles have continued to blur, sometimes to a degree that it is almost impossible to place a song in one category or another. The blending can be done in many ways, for example by playing a “jazzy” melody accompanied by non-traditional jazz instruments, also by playing a “non-jazz” melody accompanied by instruments usually regarded as jazz instruments, like playing a jazz melody over a rhythm usually more associated with country music, etc. I have noticed that this last option seems to be more and more popular since 2000, with a lot of use of the guitar as a backing instrument, such as in some songs by Melody Gardot, Madeleine Peyroux and Stacey Kent.

So what is “jazz”?

Looking at all these forms of jazz throughout the decades, I personally have distinguished certain qualities for myself that I consider to place a piece of music in the realm of “jazz”.

Some people say that improvisation is essential to a piece of music being jazz, but I personally disagree with that. Duke Ellington for example, who was a big band leader during the 20s, 30s and 40s (when “jazz” was most widely popular and in fact was synonymous with “pop music”) and considered by many to be the greatest jazz composers of all time, wrote many pieces that were fully orchestrated and arranged. For this reason, some people consider that those are “not jazz”. I disagree. Although we can certainly say they were not bebop jazz….

I for myself have identified the characteristics as jazz as follows:

- strong rhythm (e. g. drums and bass) of a particular kind (while it is possible to delve into the technicalities of what constitutes that exactly, for me personally, it is enough that I know it when I hear it)
- melody does not follow the accents of the rhythm exactly but “dances” around the rhythm accents (also known as “syncopation”). This is also associated with the “free” and “carefree” feel of jazz.
- Between the music and the lyrics of the song, there is a certain “carefree”, insouciant attitude about whatever is being sung about, a sort of “detached” quality towards life that, such that even when everything is going terrible, there is still a sort of unseriousness about it. Even in the blues, which originated in singing about miserable and hopeless conditions, I still usually detect a certain “but we’re going to bear it with diginity” sort of attitude. For me, this is an integral aspect of the spirit of jazz. As one musician said, and this is one of my favorite quotations: “Jazz is a music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.” Johnny Griffin

This is of course highly subjective, but in my mind, I know jazz when I hear it (or at least a “jazz influence”).
Some examples of songs that I consider to fall into different categories:

Both jazz and blues: Basin Street Blues

Jazz, but not swing nor blues: My Baby Just Cares For Me by Nina Simone (who, by the way, apparently hated being classified as a jazz musician)

Blues: Bring your fine self home, Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins

Swing (which is always also jazz automatically): Mack The Knife by Ella Fitzgerald

Swing (and thus also jazz): Take The A Train by the Duke Ellington Orchestra

Very hard to classify: Come Away With Me by Norah Jones

However, especially now that there are so many variations of mixes between jazz and other types of music happening, I don’t think it’s that important to argue over what specific category a song falls into. The main reason for placing music in a certain category anyway is that when you know certain people like a certain song, they may also like another, which makes it easier to promote the right songs to the right people. So if someone wants to say that “Come Away With Me” by Norah Jones is a jazz song, because jazz lovers might like it, and someone else wants to say that it’s a country song so they can promote it to country music listeners, then power to both of them. It’s a great song in my opinion, and however people want to categorize it is fine with me.

To quote Duke Ellington, “It’s all music.”