Jazz Jargon Jazz
Excerpted from The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, 1988

A music created mainly by black Americans in the early 20th century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics. A unique type, it cannot safely be categorized as folk, popular, or art music, though it shares aspects of all three. It has had a profound effect on international culture, not only through its considerable popularity, but through the important role it has played in shaping the many forms of popular music that developed around and out of it.

The attraction of jazz, as with any music, lies in its particular combination of rhythm, melody, harmony, instrumental sound, and the like. But three distinctive characteristics of jazz have given it a special appeal. One is the phenomenon of swing. The second is what may be called "individual code"—those subtle factors that make a jazz player instantly recognizable to knowledgeable listeners. Although some players can be identified by their ways of shaping melody, with most, the individual code is expressed in more subtle qualities such as timbre, sharpness of attack, length of decay, vibrato, pitch variations, and various distortions produced by throat tones, mutes, and other techniques and devices. The individual code is an important part of the communication between player and listener, and has to be taken into account in any discussion of a jazz musician's work. The third important characteristic of jazz is its ecstatic function. Jazz usually takes place in the context of an actual or simulated jam session, which has some aspects of a ritual. The players do not merely reproduce prescribed sequences of notes, they participate in a sort of ceremony in which they interact with the audience and one another, somewhat as a preacher interacts with the congregation at a "sanctified" church. As in any ritual there are certain forms of behavior to be observed: players are expected not to push themselves forward at one another's expense; audiences are permitted, indeed encouraged, to become part of the ceremony by dancing, stamping their feet, or offering cries of encouragement or bursts of applause. The relationship to West African dance ceremonies, and the practices of the black-American churches which descended from them, is obvious. These three elements are probably present to some degree in all musical performances, but in jazz they are central, almost indispensable. A jazz performance that lacked any of them would not be rated highly by most jazz enthusiasts.

It has been said that jazz, in a half-century, recapitulated the history of four centuries of European music, moving from the heterophonic polyphony of the early New Orleans style, through the big-band romanticism of the 1930s, to the chromaticism of bop and the free-form experiments after 1960. While this analysis is simplistic, it is nevertheless true that jazz has shown a penchant for rapid change, often rooted in youthful rebellion and accompanied by tensions between players of different generations. Two patterns emerge clearly within this development. One is the gradual emergence of jazz from the bohemian, even underground, environment in which it was originally played, through various levels of the entertainment business into the concert hall as a new form of art. The rise of jazz to respectability was part of a large shift in American culture as a whole, and is still by no means complete: although a great deal of jazz is now played in concert settings, it is still firmly rooted in the popular entertainment business through its continuing connection with commercial clubs, films, television, and radio. The second pattern is traced by the shifting balance between the free, improvisatory, and spontaneous aspects of the music, often seen as African or "black," and the more formal, arranged elements, sometimes viewed as European or "white." Jazz has continually crossed and re-crossed an imaginary line between these opposites, always being drawn back when it strayed far in either direction.