Known as Americas classical music, attempts to define jazz music in technical terms have repeatedly resulted in failure. Lexically, it is a style of music having a strong but flexible rhythmic understructure with solo and ensemble improvisations on basic tunes and chord patterns.
Later on, a high, sophisticated, harmonic idiom was added to the qualities that characterize jazz music. Grossly, it is conceived as big band dance music but this difficulty with definition has reckoned Jazz as the most enigmatic of musical forms. Still, jazz music is readily distinguishable from other musical forms.
Characteristics of Jazz Music
Three features combine to give jazz music its distinguishing nature:
* Spontaneity
* Vigor of Emotion
* Improvisation.
Spontaneity involves the whole personal aspect of the artist in response to the present moment. Thus, the performance is essentially the musical experience of a passing moment, which cannot be repeated in quite the same way.
Improvising forms part of the performance since jazz music is neither purely composed nor purely extemporized, and so cannot accurately be notated.
The performers own emotional state resounds in the music and a truism that is always applicable to jazz music is that the performer playing a theme always tries to make it sound not like itself but like him or herself.
Jazz as Social and Musical Force
The question of jazz music as a social, historical, and musical force was seldom asked until the 1960s. In the 1960s a belated acknowledgment was made of the power of jazz to evoke the urban ambience.
One of the most intriguing things about its life has been the way in which advancing technique has run concurrently with social improvement. Thus, the crude emergent music of the early New Orleans was brothel music, its more polished descendant in the 1920s was the music of the gin mill, and the suave orchestral felicities of the swing age became the wholly respectable background music for the innocent romances of young college audiences. Finally, jazz raided the concert hall and perched at festivals around the globe.
For the most part, jazz has remained the province of the urban US black. Though European musicians have made astonishing advances in the past 40 years or so, the Basque guitarist Django Reinhardt is acknowledged as the only non-US figure that contributed something significant and valid to jazz.
Preserving Jazz Music
There appeared at a time the distinct possibility that jazz, faced with the challenge that its room to expand is finite, may eventually merge into the world of music at large. This meant, for jazz, becoming an orchestral effect in a more general context, whereby the composed side of the performance will overwhelm the spontaneous artistry of the performer.
However, the tradition as represented by such artists as Armstrong, Ellington, Hawkins, Young, Tatum, Parker, and Holiday seems too fiery ever to extinguish altogether. Modern day jazz music appears to preserve and further this tradition.
