My ignorance is on full display here. I want to know what quantifies jazz music. When is it “jazz” and not “the blues” or some other form of category of music?
My impression of jazz is thus, and please correct me if I am wrong: It is generally blues-based in many respects, is born of a culture of oppression (even if many of the musicians are decidedly NOT any kind of victim of racial or other discrimination), is generally more advanced musically than the blues, is more improvisational and played by “musicians” that can actually read sheet music rather than “blues” (or whatever) players that play by feel, is more “free form”, involves more chromatic scales, is more improvisational (without sounding like it at times), etc.
Please educate me. I am slightly familiar with Miles Davis, Thelonious, Charlie Parker, etc. I am trying to understand what defines “jazz” as a distinct genre that is “easily” separated from others. Any links to appropriate mind-blowing players is welcome.
This is exactly what I mean. I DO have to ask, because I can hear a Miles Davis composition and think “yeah, that’s JAZZ”.
Then I hear Kenny G play an elevator music tune on the soprano sax and I think “well, that MIGHT qualify as jazz but I don’t particularly like it”.
I get that virtuoso playing can be a big part of it. I am all for it. Heck, I love Steve Vai’s guitar playing. But that’s rock and roll (I think).
Can anyone “define” jazz for me and give me examples of what “good” jazz music is supposed to be? And if so…what IS it supposed to be, exactly?
I am certain that many posters will rain down with links to Thelonious, Parker, Bird, Davis, etc…I haven’t heard them all so please do so.
But what makes “jazz”…JAZZ, exactly? What is the defining element that makes something distinctly jazz rather than something else?
That sounds right…I’ve been to a few clubs. What I don’t seem to get is the interplay that “good” jazz musicians seem to display…you know…that “feel” whereby the trumpet player seems to “suddenly” burst into a solo, followed by a standup bass riff…which is then followed by a return to the melody (if that even exists), then a brief flurry by the guitar player, a riff on the drums then back to the melody of the “song” (if jazz compositions can even be called that).
Is it then the “unnatural” free-form structure that makes it jazz? What I am trying to understand is if this is the case, how are the musicians so in tune to the changes that seem so utterly random? It’s like the Dead and their weird key changes here!
This is what I do not understand. What necessarily makes that “jazz”? A drifty keyboard entry, followed by standup bass and some breathy vocals? And it’s disjointed to a degree?
ouliern, please forgive, I am not picking on you. But you provided the perfect example of what I am talking about. When I listen to that, I say “YES! This is jazz!”.
The question of whether jazz must contain an element of blues is a bit controversial. Some jazz musicians don’t play many blue notes. For example, Bix Beiderbecke didn’t, and he’s considered one of the best of the twenties.
Jazz can be considered a way of playing (or singing) - a performance style, as opposed to a form. Blues is a form - a piece of music can be in blues form simply by the way it’s written. A piece of music becomes jazz if it’s played in a jazzy style. For example, people didn’t think of My Favorite Things as jazz until John Coltrane got hold of it.
Forgive You? Shit, I’m flattered you like my example. Thing is, and I say this thinking you’re a lot closer than you know, it’s hard to define.
The wiki definition
How’s that for a lead ballon of a definition to describe this?
There’s lot’s of improvising in this track, they’re building on each other, grooving on it, playing with it. If you think that looks like fun, it is.
If I can’t bear to be in the same room as it, that’s jazz!
If it makes me want to tear my ears off, that’s jazz!
Can’t stand it. (at least not jazz as loosely defined in this thread) It has a place for me as an influence on others (Pink Floyd et al) but in its raw state? no thanks.
I would tend to disagree with a couple of these, #1 and #3. While rhythms are important in jazz, polyrhythms don’t have to be and I’d say usually aren’t, depending on how you define polyrhythm. A typical “standards” jazz tune doesn’t typically have a lot of polyrhythmic action going on at all.
#2 is important, and I agree with syncopation.
#3 I quibble with, once again depending on what you define as “blue” notes. If you mean the flatted third, flatted fifth, and fatted seventh, then I disagree. Jazz has degrees of blues influence to it, but I would say most jazz does not have this direct connection with the blues. It may have started and grown out of it in the early days, but I don’t hear a lot of “bluesy” influence in anything from, say, the 30s or 40s onward. Once you get into bebop and cool jazz, you don’t hear much blues influence, in my opinion.
#4 I agree with.
It’s very difficult to define jazz. At its core, I would say it’s an improvisational music form, but that’s not necessarily its defining characteristic, as a lot of different types of music have improvisational elements to them. The rhythm of jazz is very much based on “swing,” where the the first half of a beat is slightly elongated and the second half of a beat is shortened. The amount of swing varies from song to song and even player to player within a band. Swing is typically notated with a symbol at the beginning of the piece showing that two eighth notes equals a quarter note and eight note of a triplet. like this. But that’s only an approximation. The slower the song, the heavier the swing, generally, so the rhythm may be closer to dotted eighth and sixteenth note, and the faster the song, the swing generally gets lessened, approaching straight eight notes, but not quite.
Rhythmic in accents in jazz tend to happen on what are “weak” beats classically. The pulse tends to work around the 2 and 4 (as in rock) instead of 1 and 3 (as in classical music) and also accenting the second half of an eighth note pair, instead of the first. This type of syncopation is important in jazz’s rhythmic language.
The harmonic language of jazz is quite important, too. Funky sounding chords tend to be referred to as “jazz chords” in musician circles. What does it mean when somebody calls something a “jazz chord”? Jazz tends to employ a lot of extended and altered harmonies. The building block of western harmony is the triad, composed of three notes: root, third, and fifth. Certain chords also very often get the dominant seventh added to create tension that resolves (like G7->C in the key of C, for instance, a V7-I cadence.) Now jazz tends not to use plain triads at all, and gussies them up with 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and even 13ths. Add to that these degrees that can be raised and lowered to taste (so you might have something like a C13#11, a jazz chord if I’ve ever seen one.)
So, where you have something like a simple “Heart and Soul” which is C-Am-F-G, a jazz take on it might be something like Cmaj7-Am7-Dm7-G7b9, so there is a tendency to include the seventh in there, in addition to adding color with something like the flat nine or what not (I tried to keep it relatively simple by only adding one extended chord like that. An “extended” chord is one that goes beyond the seventh, and this is featured a LOT in jazz harmony, although if you look at a jazz chord charts, they are often simplified with the performer adding in all the “color” notes of the harmony.
That’s a couple of stream-of-thought ideas on jazz. And the problem is, not all jazz exhibits all of these at all times, but I’d say the basics generally are: improvisation, the rhythmic feel (swing, syncopation), and harmonic complexity (although early jazz tends to be very simple harmonically, and even cool, modal jazz tends to keep harmonies pretty straightforward, often just a couple of chords.)
Hate Jazz but wish you knew a bit more about why? A Jazz 101 thread.
Jazz, to me, is a modernist approach to music - it starts with the “rules” of classical music and selectively experiments with breaking them. Impressionism relaxed the rules for accurate representation; Abstract Expressionism (e.g., Pollack’s splatters and drops) challenged a whole lot more rules.
Different types of jazz could be mapped out in a similar fashion…
