Jazz Music Definition

Jazz can be hard to define because it spans from Ragtime waltzes to 2000 era fusion.

While jazz may be difficult to define, improvisation is clearly one of its key elements especially when contrasted with classical music which defines a tempo and musical interpretation on sheet music. In European classical music elements of interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment are open to interpretation at a performer's discretion, but the performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written.

In jazz, however, a skilled performer is expected to interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending on the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with fellow musicians and often members of the audience, a jazz musician or performer may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will.

European classical music has been said to be a composer's medium. Jazz, however, is often characterized as the product of democratic creativity, interaction and collaboration between musicians, placing equal value on the intentions of the composer and the contribution to it of the performer.

Jazz originated at the start of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a blending of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has also incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. The word jazz began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915.

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition. Early blues, a form of folk music which rose in part from work songs and field hollers of rural Blacks, was also highly improvisational. These features are fundamental to the nature of jazz. The style's West African influence is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.

In New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized - many early jazz performers could not read music. Individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements.

Later, in bebop the focus shifted back towards small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody (known as the "head") would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations in the middle.

Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, and even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop.

There have long been debates in the jazz community over the definition and the boundaries of “jazz.” Commercially oriented or pop music influenced forms of jazz have both been criticized, and traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed Bop, the 1970s jazz fusion era and much else, as a period of commercial debasement of jazz music. 

Andrew Gilbert argues that jazz has the "ability to absorb and transform influences" from diverse musical styles. Gilbert notes that  the "achievements of the past" may become "…privileged over the idiosyncratic creativity..." and the innovation of current artists. 

David Ake warns that the creation of "norms" in jazz and the establishment of a "jazz tradition" may exclude or sideline other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz. While some enthusiasts of certain types of jazz have argued for narrower definitions which exclude many other types of music also commonly known as "jazz", jazz musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play.

Some critics have even stated that Duke Ellington's music was not jazz because it was arranged and orchestrated. Duke Ellington summed it up by saying, "It's all music."

On the other hand, Ellington's friend Earl Hines's twenty solo "transformative versions" of Ellington compositions (on Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington recorded in the 1970s) were described by Ben Ratliff, the New York Times jazz critic, as "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there."

History of Jazz

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