Noun

jazz (uncountable)

1. (music) A musical art form rooted in West African cultural and musical expression and in the African American blues tradition, with diverse influences over time, commonly characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms and improvisation.
2. Energy, excitement, excitability. Very lively.
3. The (in)tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a thing.

   What jazz were you referring to earlier?

   What is all this jazz lying around?

4. Unspecified thing(s).

   I'm just going down to the shops and jazz = I am off to purchase items and etcetera.

5. (with positive terms) Of excellent quality, the genuine article.

   That show was the jazz! = That musical concert/television program was most enjoyable.

   This risotto is simply the jazz. = This risotto was cooked in the classic manner.

6. Nonsense.

   Stop talking jazz.

Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. Its West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note. However, Art Blakey has been quoted as saying, "No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa".

The word "jazz" (in early years also spelled "jass") began as a West Coast slang term and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915.

From its beginnings in the early 20th century jazz has spawned a variety of subgenres: New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz, free jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz fusion from the 1970s, acid jazz from the 1980s (which added funk and hip-hop influences), and Nujazz in the 1990s. As the music has spread around the world it has drawn on local national and regional musical cultures, its aesthetics being adapted to its varied environments and giving rise to many distinctive styles.

Jazz music

• "By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."
  • Duke Ellington

• "Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."
  • Theodor Adorno, quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978. ISBN 0094602204.

• "Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound ... jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."
  • Wynton Marsalis

• "What makes the performance is the dialogue created between you and everybody around you spontaneously. And you have to interact with everybody up there, interacting and reacting, throwing out ideas. Jazz is a purely democratic music. It's collective creativity where somebody introduces something and we all get a chance to say something about it. It always amazes me, the whole of it is just a great spirit. It grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath."
  • Max Roach

• "There is nothing but jazz."
  • Konrad Stragier in a poem

• "Jazz is not a 'form' but a collection of tags and tricks."
  • Ernest Newman. The Sunday Times, "The World of Music", 4 September 1927.

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sat May 15 02:03:43 2010