Jazz
Jazz is a primarily American musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style’s West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.
What say vocabulary:
- Music
- A style of music, native to America, characterized by a strong but flexible rhythmic understructure with solo and ensemble improvisations on basic tunes and chord patterns and, more recently, a highly sophisticated harmonic idiom.
- Big band dance music.
- Slang
- Animation; enthusiasm.
- Nonsense.
- Miscellaneous, unspecified things: brought the food and all the jazz to go with it.
And what say famous jazz players about jazz?
If you need to ask what jazz, you will not ever know. - Louis Armstrong
What is jazz? Jazz is the folk music of the age of machines. - Paul Whiteman
Jazz must have “that thing”. You must be born with it. You can not even buy it. If I could buy, they were on sale at the next Newport festival. - Miles Davis
Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains. - Paul Whiteman
Jazz can be hard to define because it spans from Ragtime waltzes to 2000s-era fusion. While many attempts have been made to define jazz from points of view outside jazz, such as using European music history or African music, jazz critic Joachim Berendt argues that all such attempts are unsatisfactory. One way to get around the definitional problems is to define the term “jazz” more broadly. Berendt defines jazz as a “form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music”; he argues that jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a “special relationship to time, defined as ’swing’”, “a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role”; and “sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician”.
