Bob Blumenthal - Jazz

As we move from the twentieth century the jazz century the music that has been called Americas only art form appears more multifaceted than ever. As a result, defining this now-venerable four-letter word is an ever more elusive enterprise, with any results destined to be as controversial as they have proven to be since the word jazz (or its early variant jass) first gained currency 90 years ago.

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Whats jazz? Fats Waller declared that if you have to ask, youll never know.

We surely cannot hope to return to the first jazz histories, written shortly before the Second World War, and find reliable guidance regarding what the music has become. Jazz has changed and despite occasional creative troughs in which some have mourned its passing is changing still.

So the language that we use to talk about jazz changes as well. The style that was originally played in New Orleans, which was jazz pure and simple during the 1920s (the Jazz Age), became traditional jazz about 20 years later, to distinguish it from modern jazz. Someone should have foreseen the problems such a term invited, since it was not long before modern jazz denoted a historically specific style of the music. Indeed, present-day jazz is no longer called modern (is present-day anything called modern?), and only the most commercially palatable style of todays jazz is called contemporary.

Yet the struggle to pin jazz down to capture its essence continues. The unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language touches the important bases in its primary definition, citing the musics origins around 1900 in New Orleans and its propulsive rhythms, stress on improvisation, and increasingly complex harmonies as time passed. Other definitions remind us that the term has also entered the popular vernacular as a synonym for excitement (Im all jazzed up) and excrement (Dont give me any of that jazz), without alluding to jazzs most notorious early usage as slang for sexual intercourse (as in The Jazz Me Blues). This last, figuratively four-letter usage has struck some who create the music as so indicative of societys failure to honour both them and it that they have rejected the word jazz entirely.

An early photograph of jazz musicians in performance.

Pianist Jimmy Rowles said that Jazz is a fleeting moment.

Some practitioners have made their own attempts at definition. In an album title the pianist Jimmy Rowles called jazz a fleeting moment, complementing critic Whitney Balliets more famous conceit that jazz is the sound of surprise. These notions stress the improvisational aspect of jazz, but does this mean that all jazz is improvisational? When Count Basie declared that jazz was nothing more than swinging the blues, did he mean all jazz? There was no mention of blues in the dictionary definition cited above, and Basie himself recorded loads of music (including such signatures as April in Paris and Lil Darlin) that are not blues in structure or nuance. Basies band always played with a propulsive rhythm, though, so is swing the essence we seek? Not unless we redefine that term to include the more irregular and esoteric rhythmic terrain of the free improvisers, the clave of Afro-Cuban music that informs Latin jazz, the samba inflections adapted from Brazilian bossa nova, and other international beats that jazz musicians hear and apply from around the world.

Pianist and bandleader Count Basie once offered that jazz is nothing more than swinging the blues.

Today, the formats of certain radio stations have led some listeners to believe that any popular music without vocals, and in some cases any popular vocal music with a saxophone solo, is jazz. Many people who consider themselves jazz fans would argue that the music these stations play, often designated as smooth jazz, is really anti-jazz. Thats the same basic position that some fans of the original New Orleans style adopted in the late 1930s when big bands became popular, or that many fans of the big bands took relating to bebop of the 1940s. And so it went in the early 1960s with the emergence of the avant-garde free players and later in the decade when fusion appeared.

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The diverse musical styles that huddle under the descriptive umbrella jazz make it impossible to give a single, unqualified definition of this music.

All of this should teach us, if not the need to abandon all standards, at least a bit of humility. To say that some viewed big bands as the smooth jazz of the Depression era is not to argue that Benny Goodman and Kenny G have equal value, though it should signal that the phrase jazz orthodoxy has been and remains an oxymoron.

A more interesting question might be why so many different approaches have each been considered jazz at one time or another. There is something going on in this music, something beyond the conjunction of notes, that speaks to the way we live and the way we aspire to live. It has seeped into the way we talk and dress and the way we view the world. The progress of the music, from the fringes of respectable society to the pinnacles of current culture, suggests the magnitude of the change that this music has wrought. This is why the musics wider ramifications are an essential part of the jazz story and why two points that the dictionary definitions overlook must be kept in mind as we tell the jazz story.

The popularity of clarinetist Benny Goodman in the 1930s led to early debates about jazz as art versus jazz as entertainment.

Jazz is not just improvised, but in most cases also collectively improvised. Spontaneity alone would not distinguish jazz from, say, Mozarts piano concertos, which were originally performed with improvised cadenzas. Though unaccompanied solo performances have been created at all points in the jazz continuum, what really made jazz so audacious to its early audiences was the simultaneous invention heard when two or more musicians formed a jazz ensemble. The process is unmistakable in early performances such as those recorded by the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, where cornets, clarinet and trombone spin variations collectively. Even after the individual soloist came to prominence in the recordings of Louis Armstrongs Hot Five and Hot Seven, each player in the band maintained a certain leeway. Everyone is also improvising in the Charlie Parker Quintets of the 1940s and the Ornette Coleman Quartets of the 1960s; even the brass and reed sections of many big bands often worked without written arrangements and devised spontaneous background figures.

King Olivers Creole Jazz Band, one of the first great jazz ensembles to be recorded. Oliver; Louis Armstrong;