well, i know i like it, i know im interested in it. and this may seem like a silly question on first glance, but, define it for me...what is jazz?
I love jazz and I've been mainly a jazz pianist for 8 years. Surprised?
What do you think of jazz?—Ryan
Jazz? Not Kenny G
I agree with Arensky. But the harmonic language and the rhythms are only jazz because of historical reasons. I mean, I could accept calling all improvised western music; jazz.
Pink Floyd has come pretty cloes.
Well, what if the Stones or the Beatles would have solely played improvised music? It wouldn't have been pop because no one in their right mind would fill an album with improvised bland and shallow music.
I mean, both the harmonic language and the rhyrhms aren't really part of the philosophy of jazz. It is just the way jazz turned out because of historical reasons.Of course not all western music that is improvised is jazz. But I also don't really think that jazz must have a swing feel.I think my point is that the philosophy is the most important. The way this is manifested, from what cultural background it originates, to me isn't that important.
All right. In the absence of any clear definition, are there any invariant properties of jazz we can all agree must exist ? In other words, if such a property is clearly absent from a piece, then we would all agree it is not jazz. Let's approach it from the negative angle. A negative definition is better than nothng.Improvisation is the first and most obvious invariant. If it isn't improvised then it might be jazz influenced composition, but it isn't jazz.Prolonged and extensive syncopation is the next one which comes to my mind. I would replace Arensky's "swing" with "syncopation" to eliminate any implication of triplet rhythm. Some jazz does not contain "swing" in the sense of implied triplet rhythm. If syncopation is completely absent then I think whatever the music is it isn't jazz. This, of course, presupposes a definition of syncopation, but I think we can manage that a sight more easily than a definition of jazz. Or at least even if a watertight definition eludes us, we would probably all respond similarly when asked whether or not a given section of music involved syncopation.Fancy chords seems a good idea, but I think there are a few too many counter-examples to make it a strictly invariant property. For instance, old-fashioned jazz and indeed, many passages in say Jarrett's concerts, involve very simple chords and rely heavily on rhythmic variation.I would prefer to leave it to others more knowledgeable to come up with other invariant properties in the social and musicological areas as I don't really know a lot about those aspects.If we cannot think of any more necessary properties, then perhaps we can start listing properties which are "almost necessary", in the sense that their absence "almost always" indicates the music is not jazz.
Anyway, we have two, maybe three invariant possibilities, I want to include my Fancy Chords (I love them so ) but maybe they are not an absolute......I will continue to ponder this important question... y'all chip in now!
I think these all boil down to it "sounds like jazz" Modern day perhaps there's lots of genres that overlap, but nevertheless our bod on the street is going to think Summertime played from a score is Jazz, even if our Jazz aficionado won't accept that and wants improvisation involved. Although I think improvisation often involves cliches and patterns that have been played for years by lots and have a place in exercises so they are as composed as anything else now.Bill Bailey in his stage show does a joke where he says "Not jazz, that wouldn't work" and then plays a single line of notes which "sound like Jazz" I guess that's modal scales used and the timing.He does that with other genres and styles too, playing stuff that "sounds French" "sounds Cockney" "sounds like Billy Bragg" and so on that I think lend some weight to the idea.
here comes harmelodics reply
Did you not notice that I foretold harmelodics reply?
Yeah, relax, mission accomplished, we noticed you.https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?action=who
thanks for blowing my reputation as a psychic
Ah HA!Phil
We're not doing too badly; probably as well as anybody has, I would say. The trouble with "fancy chords", of course, is agreeing on a universally acceptable definition of fancy. If it were all just a matter of the combinatorial analysis of note groups then we could reason that any chord type, reduced within an octave, is a partition of twelve; therefore "fanciness" is simply proportional to the order of the partition. Unfortunately this won't do for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the question of implied "fanciness". As Arensky rightly pointed out, to a naive primitive like me, a simple group of notes played by Jarrett (the sort of thing he used to grind out for ten minutes in his earlier solo concerts) is just that and no more; to a musician trained in two hundred years' worth of tonal theory, three notes can imply a whole host of complex harmony both momentary and contextual.Secondly, "fancy", harmonies, in the sense of meaning complexity and nothing more, is not really what we want to say. In this sense, Charles Ives used "fanciness" beyond the wildest excursions of any well known jazz pianist, but although it was, in fact, conceived through improvisation, nobody would refer to the Concord Sonata as a prime example of jazz based composition with respect to chords. We would probably not hesitate, however, to do so with the Rhapsody In Blue.Actually, these two examples are much better than I intended as an illustration of why I have insurmountable difficulty with distinguishing between "jazz fancy harmony" and "otherwise fancy harmony". I think my own naivety, perhaps a decided advantage in my own playing, I hasten to add, severely limits my ability to formulate this distinction in words. Somebody on the forum who is well versed in both general Western harmony and jazz could probably do so well enough for our purposes.
Topic: What do you think of jazz? 