Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

Beat by Beat | Jazz Notes
Notes Toward a
Definition of Jazz
Part One: The Forest and the Trees
STEVE WALLACE
It seems the longer I’m involved with jazz, the less I understand it.
I’ve been immersed in it now for nearly 50 years in many ways –
studying it, playing it, reading about it, collecting records, listening
to it, and more recently writing about it and teaching it – and yet
at times I feel I know less and less about it and would be hardpressed
to offer a succinct definition of its essence. If it even has an
essence anymore.
Part of it is the truth of that old saw: the more you learn about a
subject, the less you know about it, or so it seems. As knowledge of
jazz expands, so do the boundaries; the forest keeps getting bigger to
the point where you can’t see it for the trees.
Perhaps this is as it should be, because jazz is not a simple music,
though often at its best it seems so. But it’s quite complex, and part
of the problem in trying to get a fix on what jazz actually is, is that it
never stands still. It’s constantly shifting and expanding, taking on
new influences while also exerting an effect on other types of music.
Like many things in the digital age, this cross-pollination process has
sped up in recent years, leading to a bewildering array of hybrids,
which I call “hyphen-jazz”: Acid-jazz, smooth-jazz, jazz-rock, vocaljazz,
Latin-jazz and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. Well, okay, these
are contrived terms to describe narrow sub-genres of varying validity,
but increasingly I hear people asking – and often ask myself – “Well,
yeah, but what about ‘jazz-jazz’”? Does that exist anymore, and if so,
then what the heck is it?
A further complication, as always, is
the timeline, on various levels. Firstly,
jazz, being a largely improvised and spontaneous
music, has always had an ephemeral,
in-the-moment present. Unless it’s
recorded, a jazz performance takes place
in real time and then evaporates into thin
air like vapour. This is one of the charms
of the music, but also a source of frustration
because this evanescence makes
analysis, and thus understanding, difficult.
But jazz is over 100 years old now
and thanks to various forms of documentation
– thousands of recordings, many
films, books, publications and the like –
it has a palpable history, an appreciable
backlog of tradition and evolution, a past.
Thanks to the internet, all kinds of information
about jazz history is more readily
available than ever before. Simply by
sitting at a computer, one now has access
to thousands of recordings and videos of
live performances; to articles and reviews
about the music; to solo transcriptions
and sheet music; and to biographical
information about key contributors and
how they changed the music. There’s no
longer any excuse for what music educators
call “jazz ignorance.”
But at the same time, the very nature of
the internet, and the sheer vastness of the information it contains, has
created a generation of (mostly) younger people with shorter attention
spans than ever before, and with less curiosity about (and perhaps less
appreciation for the importance of) history and the past. This will be
a familiar refrain to others more or less my age, but I’m often stunned
by what young jazz students – a largely hard-working, bright, talented
and sincere group – don’t know about its history, and how few records
some of them have listened to. There are exceptions, but some of them
are completely unaware of Zoot Sims or Roy Eldridge or Ben Webster,
never mind more distant figures like Sidney Bechet or Rex Stewart.
On the other hand, they are much more up on contemporary figures
and goings-on in the music than I am; I’m forever learning about new
players and records from them, for which I’m grateful. This brings us
to another wrinkle in the jazz timeline: an individual’s age and the
effects the aging process can have on the perception of what jazz is.
For example, I’m 63 and it’s a fact that more of my life is behind
me than ahead; I have much more past than future. Throw in that I
happen to have an extremely historical bent of mind and it’s small
wonder that a lot of my ideas about what jazz is are rooted in its past,
its history and traditions, and that I struggle to keep up with the
present. Whereas many of my students and other younger players
have their finger on the pulse of now, with little sense of the past or
concern for history.
This generational disconnect is what makes teaching challenging,
but also rewarding. I get to inform young players about elements
of the music’s history and then hear how they use these in their
own, contemporary-minded ways. While being around young
players sometimes makes me feel out of touch, it also makes me
realize the value of my past experience and knowledge. These people
want to learn from what older experienced players know and, if
anything, being around them makes me feel less out of touch and
more convinced than ever of the continuum of jazz, the connection
between its past and its present. So in trying to come up with a definition,
I want it to reflect not just the past or what I think jazz ought to
continue to be, or what “good jazz” is, but also to be inclusive of how
it’s changed and what it is now.
All of these factors and others make defining jazz a daunting task,
perhaps even a useless and unnecessary one. After all, Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Orchestra
38 | March 2020 thewholenote.com