Why jazz is important

Jazz is a complex, highly blended, sometimes contradictory music and, indeed, since its inception, it has been hotly debated exactly what forms or styles constitute this music. Is it music theory or a technique that is applied to music? Is it one music or several loosely grouped forms of music that deal with improvisation?

Its roots are African and European, classical and popular, dance music and art music. It has been called both cool and hot, earthy and avant-garde, intellectual and primitive.

It has been influenced by Latin American and Afro-Cuban music, by Middle Eastern, Indian, and other forms of Asian music, by African music, and by varieties of religious music including gospel and the Protestant hymnal. Jazz also has roots in the American popular song which makes up a good deal of its repertoire , the blues, hokum and circus music, marching band music, and popular dance music.

It is known for being improvised and touted for the freedom it permits its players, but jazz in its heyday of swing was largely composed and tightly arranged; although many jazz players have soloed, relatively few, as might be expected, were exceptional, memorial, or highly influential soloists. In any case, why did so-called free music generated on the spot by the player become more highly valued by jazz players and audiences than notated music that, by its very nature, is presumed to have a greater range of expressiveness?

Improvised music goes back to Western classical composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, who were superb improvisers, but has also existed elsewhere around the world for millennia.

What makes jazz improvisation different? Singers made jazz popular, but the music is mostly instrumental, and the great instrumentalists are considered its most important innovators. Because most of the great singers were women-from Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee to Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves-male bias on the part of both the musicians themselves and of critics most of whom were and are male likely skewed our sense of this music. Jazz has always sought a popular audience with varying success but, since its earliest days, it has been a music that is often performed by musicians for musicians.

This has made many listeners impatient with it, feeling that if one needs practically a degree in music theory to appreciate it, its practitioners should not expect untrained or casual audiences to be bothered with it. But on the other hand, its technical pretensions have made jazz a kind of status music with some audiences.

Early sound technology such as phonograph records and radio spread jazz around the world, and the speed with which it spread frightened many people in its early days, especially because the music in its inception appealed so powerfully to the young. Jazz emerged in the twentieth century, the Age of Music, when people not only heard more music than ever before but consumed it more voraciously than ever before in human history, largely attracted to music for its emotional and psychological effects.

Jazz became the first, though not the last, popular music to be trapped by its intellectual pretensions, on the one hand, and its anti-intellectual appeal, on the other. So powerful was the presence of jazz when it first emerged that it is the only music that has a social epoch named in its honor: the Jazz Age s. Jazz is, of course, about race in America not only because African American musicians were so central in its creation and African American audiences so important in their creative responses to it, but because whites played such a dominant role in its dissemination through records and performance venues and its ownership as intellectual and artistic property.

Whites also played jazz music from its earliest days and always constituted a major portion of its audience. Whites, both in the United States and in Europe, were leading critical interpreters of and writers about jazz as well. This attitude of the cool and the hip has influenced literature, including the production of the so-called jazz novel and jazz poetry, as well as art, speech, dress, and antibourgeois habits of indulgence such as using illegal drugs like marijuana and heroin.

Even interracial sex, considered rebellious by some and deviant by others, was associated with the demi-monde of jazz. Every dimension of jazz outlined above is the subject of academic and critical study in a variety of fields including English, history, American studies, musicology, African American studies, studies of the Americas, and culture studies.

Indeed, jazz studies as an interdisciplinary field of research and pedagogy formally exists and has its own journal, Jazz Perspectives. What is this all about, anyway? And why should those with no interest in jazz care about any of this? Whether its future lies as a high-culture, transnational, privileged form of taste and practice or in a new synthesis joining jazz artistry with global hip hop and the popular is an open question. In either case, jazz today is a form of cosmopolitanism.

But perhaps that was always what it was striving to be. Whatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities.

Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice.

Kater's Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany or author Josef Skvorecky's extraordinary novella The Bass Saxophone to know how profoundly true Monson's observation is-that jazz was a beacon, an act, a trope of freedom, an expression against repression that inspired many people around the world. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice.

Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis. Is jazz still a relevant form of artistic expression, still a significant force in the world of popular music or the world of art music?

In other words, is jazz so insufficiently hip that its pretensions and its conceit no longer matter as either a theory or a practice? Has it become, in many respects, like mainline Protestantism, a theory and a practice prized by its followers because of its limited and slowly declining appeal and its glorious history as something that once did matter? Fifty or one hundred years from now will more accessible and commercial jazzers like saxophonist Kenny G and trumpeter Chris Botti be more remembered than trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Brad Mehldau?

To be sure, for many of its fans and followers, jazz has gone from being an anti-establishment to an establishment art form, something that may have drained the art form of its purpose and its emotional correlatives. If jazz has acquired a new power, a new appeal, then what precisely is it and what is the relationship of this new power, this new appeal, to the power and appeal that jazz once had when it was the dominant music of the United States? Has jazz transcended the marketplace or is it a music that deserves to be protected from the desecrations of the market as we try to protect classical music?

Protectionism, when it comes to the arts, has usually been a lost cause. Jazz's advocates and supporters say that jazz is more popular, more listened to than ever despite its low market ratings, and this may be true: it certainly shows up in unexpected places such as, for instance, two unrelated Tom Cruise movies, 's Jerry Maguire which features a long sequence with an avant-garde Charles Mingus tune and 's Collateral which features a trumpeter playing Bitches Brew-style Miles Davis jazz.

There is no question that jazz is still present in the culture, but the larger question is: does jazz still matter? In a lot of ways, improvisation takes a back seat and conformity becomes the way to produce order. But in a modern world where we are constantly expected to innovate and create new things, this kind of environment can be suffocating. In a world where we are constantly trying to improve technology, come up with solutions, and make medical and scientific breakthroughs, we need to be accustomed to innovation.

Jazz music forces one to innovate. When a jazz musician takes a solo, they must come up with new ideas on the spot without hesitation. They must boldly and unashamedly create! Sometimes this means that the rules must be broken. As a professional jazz musician, I improvise a lot. In a jazz setting, everyone gets a chance to take a solo. Everyone gets the opportunity to play something regardless of their experience or role in the band.

Often there is a band leader, but usually the leader is only facilitating and guiding the musical process. A jazz band is like a miniature democratic society of sorts. Social class, race, religion or gender should not dictate the worth of ones voice, and no one should be suppressed. This is the social essence of jazz music. In the same way that everyone gets a chance to take a solo, everyone must listen to their fellow musicians take a solo. The rhythm section, who is accompanying, must listen in order to compliment the soloist adequately, and non-accompany instruments must stand by and wait their turn.

In a jazz scenario, everyone not only has to consider what another soloist plays, they want to. This will help them add to the conversation and play their part. A jazz musician listens intently to what is being played because they need to keep track of where they are at in the song, listen for harmonic alterations, and harness the musical energy to create. Playing and even listening to jazz can help one develop deep listening skills.

Jazz music begs its audience to listen. To fully appreciate jazz music the listeners need to pay attention. Listening is a crucial part of our everyday lives. It helps us catch important details and it helps us learn effectively. It may even get us a job promotion or help save a relationship from going sour.

Listening to jazz can train the mind to hear things more clearly and hold focus better. Jazz matters. Jazz is not just a style of music. Jazz is a music that can shape our character by giving us courage, prepare us to improvise, innovate, give others an equal voice, and listen.

Jazz education is important for young and old minds alike. I found it interesting that jazz requires the audience to listen and pay attention to enjoy a unique experience. Jazz musicians like to play their songs in their own distinct styles, and so you might listen to a dozen different jazz recordings of the same song, but each will sound different.

The musicians' playing styles make each version different, and so do the improvised solos. Jazz is about making something familiar--a familiar song--into something fresh. And about making something shared--a tune that everyone knows--into somethingpersonal. Those are just some of the reasons that jazz is a great art form, and why some people consider it "America's classical music.

Jazz developed in the United States in the very early part of the 20th century. New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, played a key role in this development.

The city's population was more diverse than anywhere else in the South, and people of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, and American Indian, as well as English, descent interacted with one another. African-American musical traditions mixed with others and gradually jazz emerged from a blend of ragtime, marches, blues, and other kinds of music.