JAZZ FACETS #1: Defining the Parameters
My more than modest attempt to explain America's greatest musical gift to the world
Most people know jazz when they hear it – it has become that ubiquitous around the world – but few venture to put what they hear into words except in halting phrases and ideas. This makes abundant sense for such an amazingly complex and interpretive art form that has earned a primary place in the timeless tapestry of humanity’s outstanding artistic achievements.
Trying to define jazz is like trying to define love or hope, but it must be done. Definitions may never tell us the whole truth, but they bring us closer to its realization. Most importantly, they help us to contextualize and crystallize the things of this world. Here is my long-overdue attempt. It’s one of hundreds that have been offered in the past and will be again in the future, but I hope it credibly conveys the most relevant aspects of the music’s history and its most common attributes as a music well worth listening to and learning from.
What is Jazz?
Jazz is a brilliantly inventive genre of music that originated in slave communities near New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a codified collection of written and spontaneous sounds that evolved from the earliest musical forms of the blues and accompanying styles that germinated in the steamy fields and impoverished shacks of nefarious southern plantations. Originating in the Deep South and first popularized in the mid-1800s, the blues is a secular folk music of Black Americans that incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and simple rhymed ballads.
The blues is typically characterized by syncopated melodies and emotional lyrics with the emphasis on feeling. Among the common adjectives applied to jazz as it matured are exuberant, joyous, swinging, funky, toe-tapping, finger-snapping, head-bobbing, democratic, integrative, free, and above all wedded to improvisation as a core principle of its expression. More broadly, jazz can be rowdy or pensive, soulful or intellectual. It can be as basic and animated as a country hoe-down or as complicated and cerebral as an avant-garde twelve-tone symphony.
Geographically circumscribed at first by the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, which encompasses the northwest section of Mississippi and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, jazz quickly morphed into an iconic global phenomenon in less than fifty years with players of all colors and cultures on every continent embracing its precocious possibilities. As befits its imaginative and expansive nature, it embodies multiple musical styles largely divined, defined, and initially played by slaves who mastered European instruments and musical notation to expand their sense and delivery of the music’s vitality.
The spirit that gave rise to jazz began to emerge generations before as a means by which Black people could address and survive the unconscionable suffering that accompanied chattel slavery, which began in earnest in 1619 and even earlier in the Spanish territory of Florida. Over the next 250 years, give or take, Africans and a smattering of poor whites forcibly worked the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the southern coast from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia, and south to Georgia. Owned and freed slaves were also conspicuously present in northern colonies, especially in and around major cities such as Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.
In the late 1800s, as if lightning had struck, jazz quickly evolved from plantation singing to the basics of Dixieland to the intricacies of Bebop, Big Band, Cool, Modal, Fusion, and scores of other stylings. Since the 1940s, the music has been generally marked by complex harmonies and rhythms with greater emphasis on chord progressions than melody, and on more elaborate improvisation, even as the blues has remained a foundational principle for each generation of jazz musicians and jazz composers.
Today, jazz embraces – and is embraced by – by virtually every musical genre: folk, country, house, pop, R&B, soul, hip hop, symphonic, operatic, electronic, reggae, salsa, gagaku, Benga, Afrobeat, you name it. Along the way, individual perspective and improvisation have grown more essential to the delivery of these forms. The myriad accompanying shifts and changes keep the music fresh and vibrant. No jazz performance is ever the same. Nuance reigns. The daedal workings of the instruments combine and recombine based on the melodic underpinnings. Jazz will never rest any more than the experiences that inspired it and have continued to drive its fruition. Duke Ellington, one of the music’s great pianists and seminal composers, said, “Jazz is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.” One can easily add, and around the globe.
Regardless of how it’s defined, the best way to understand and enjoy jazz is to experience it personally, both live and pre-recorded. When you listen carefully, it will inform your heart and mind as well as leave an indelible mark on your aesthetics and ideas about American history, culture, art, and musical expression. Given a fair chance, it will alter your sense of reality and appreciation for the truth. It will free your imagination and the possibilities of your development as a better person in a better world.