What is Jazz?

As good a place as any to start such a venture: the definition.
What is Jazz? It's not something I can truly say - if I've gathered anything, it would be easier to say what it is not than what it is. There are certainly conventions that characterize Jazz forms, some that have developed over the last century or so, some have dropped off the map, and some have come and gone. Szwed mentions this in his book "Jazz 101." Therein, he outlines styles, compositional elements - a general history of "objective" traits, at least during the first section of the book. These are, no doubt helpful, necessary, even.

But I don't believe in a definition of Jazz beyond those. A tradition as old and complex cannot be wrapped up with a ribbon in one definition. In many ways, this parallels efforts to claim and define another form and culture I identify and am more fluent with - Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop has traceable roots, much like Jazz, but the closer and closer to an origin point - "The moment Hip-Hop was born!" - the fuzzier the details get. People's personal accounts start to conflict - who's exaggerating/who's downplaying? The weaknesses of history-writing (as a process the greater U.S. society puts so much stock in - or has) are stressed in these situations - where subjective accounts are all we have. But with so much disagreement about when and where Jazz began - and with few to no surviving artists or fans from that era - it almost seems irrelevant to spend as much time focused on that, as looking at other aspects of the culture - at what we do have.

So, then...what do we have? The music itself? Here I will take a tip from Martin Williams - he warns against reading too far into songs, as we risk projecting our reaction to music as the meaning it holds. I believe an auditory history is one of the only possible ones available at this point, though it should be approached with caution. The roots of Jazz could surely be traced sonically, but do there even exist enough records to piece this together? Did there ever? Not addressed in what I read of Williams' book, nor Szwed's, is that the percentage of active artists who end up recording is always very low (and was especially before our current technology had proliferated, especially with CD burning and MP3 sharing capabilities so widely available). This means, more or less, that the diversity of sounds that existed all over the country during the formative years of what became known as Jazz never existed beyond that point (and this, as with many notes I make, is true for any period). Here it may be hard or impossible to create this solid sonic timeline of the evolution of sounds that influenced and became Jazz. It is certainly a positive (and fun) process to go through, but at this point it will only create a partial history, and one that continually looks to unidentifiable origins. Then where else does one turn?

With a musical style, and, indeed, culture, that has affected millions of people - across many lines of difference - definitions become less important, each being personal. What, becomes my focus, instead, is the sharing of a multiplicity of stories. These, together create what we know as "Jazz." Just as Hip-Hop means something different to me than any other person in the world. These are both communal forms - they are performative, they have "scenes" surrounding them, often only locally. That said, I don't think anybody should feel free to claim Jazz, to claim to know it, what its "essence" is, or the like, without first taking into account the position they bring to the conversation (and that's, if those things are even knowable). For example, it is accepted across the sample of readings I've done thus far that Jazz has its roots in the experience of African Americans. But to put this in my own words: within their own bodies, black originators housed a unique confluence of musical expression and creative voice that reached back in some ways to Africa - even if the work is not necessarily politicized as such, the very existence as an "other" signifies the history of African slavery in the U.S. - and was also very rooted in that experience in the United States and its history - both experiences within the continent and on the way here, but also the European traditions influencing what "North American Culture" or, maybe more accurately, society, presented to them. This, of course, could be said about every artist of every kind from every style of music - and art in general. But it's so important that that never be forgotten, no matter how many decades pass. The changes and innovations that have pushed along the style since the earlier forms of Jazz, then into bebop and swing mid-twentieth-century, and to what one could currently hear at the Dakota Jazz Club have not erased the origins or history. But, they perpetuate a synthesizing and dynamic form.

Jazz is like a tree, with its roots going ever deeper, as people continue to look back at early innovators, as Hip-Hop artists dig through and sample Jazz, synthesizing it and coming out with something not entirely new, but different (but is it also Jazz then? Is Hip-Hop Jazz?!), and while all of that is happening, its branches grow ever-higher, searching for new directions, innovations, and styles.

The struggle to answer this question is evident, as I stated earlier, of the limits of our current approach to history writing. For better or worse, the "Hip-Hop generation" has at its disposal many recent technological developments that allow a much broader group of listeners (and non-listeners) to comment on and write the histories of Hip-Hop. Blogs, like this, provide outlets for the creation of histories and archives - THE democratic medium for self-expression, as hundreds have pointed out - by anyone who has access to computers and the internet. While there is the characteristic lack of accountability in such an unmediated source, with a lot of disengaged and disengaging writing posted, there are many people invested in their work. I hope to be another of those who contribute to the discussion. It's unfortunate such a range of expression was not available during the rise of Jazz to document that process.

That's Jazz as of 10/9/09

Readings used:
John Szwed, "Jazz 101" (Sections: 1, 2)
Martin Williams, "The Jazz Tradition" (Intro)
Burton Peretti, "Jazz in American Culture" (Intro)

Future readings:
Scott Deveaux "Constructing the Jazz Tradition" (reread)
Amiri Baraka "Blues People"
Kodwo Eshun "More Brilliant than the Sun"
Further reading in Szwed, Williams, Peretti