Jazz is blues is jazz is...What is JAZZ? defined and to you? Origins, examples & faves

Jazz is blues is jazz is...

Blues and Jazz...purely an American invention? Did the blues become jazz, or did they emerge simultaneously?

How do you define JAZZ in your lexicon? In your library.

So educate me. What IS jazz? Is it loosely defined as an excursion into improvisation, or is there a more defined pattern, chord structure, or what....?

My personal mental timeline would be pretty vague, but is as follows:

Folk blues>Delta blues>Dixieland jazz>dance jazz>big band jazz>crooner jazz>improv>avant-garde...




I am far too much of a novice to keep up with most of you guys on the fantastic "Jazz & Conversation" thread, but I try to contribute. My unconscious jazz roots go back to the 50's when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old...and of course I hadn't a clue.

It all started with 1950's TV, when they started airing old 1930's and '40's films. I was digging "jazz" with Groucho's scatting, Fred & Ginger, Hoagy, Cab, Bing, Judy, & Micky, Satchmo, Krupa, Miller, Benny, then variety shows introduced Frank, Mel, Tony, Peggy Lee, Ella, Sarah, Nat, Etta before I knew what hit me...

...then my jazz consciousness awoke with the strangest of places>the 1960's country-rock innovators, Buffalo Springfield (and Stills' "Everydays" with its sustained fuzz guitar feedback in 1967), and exploded with Spirit's 1968 LP ( especially with the brilliant closing 10+ minute improv "Elijah")...







So did I just answer my own questions? But I'd really like to know:
What is JAZZ...literally, and to you?



And what does JAZZ mean to you? Truly, and personally...

Hopefully...I pose these questions without treading on the great "Jazz & Conversation" thread, or the cool new thread concerning how we all got into jazz...if I have created a retread, or redundancy, have a GORT dump "me thread, mates"... and I'll move on.

 

Jazz isn't this complicated. It's more complicated. Jazz and blues were the same thing both deriving from the Mississippi Delta. I tend to see an evolution in this analysis from primitive to modern. And this isn't right. Let's start with Folk blues. Both Jazz and Blues are folk music. And what there really isn't any difference folk blues and delta blues, there is frame of reference. Both of these are just a way to describe non-electrified blues. Blues and Jazz weren't different in the beginning. A blues was simply a song-form of jazz not any different from a ballad being a song-form in other types of music. If you look at Dixieland, it was New Orleans form of Jazz where bands were formed using the military marching band model. It's New Orleans, where marching bands are a Mardi Gras tradition. Then you move that music into clubs, you somehow get Scott Joplin who started playing the music on a piano. You also got smaller bands because if you wanted to make money, smaller units split the take. Since New Orleans is the city where the Mississippi terminates into the Gulf of Mexico, the rural music ends up in New Orleans. Then it travels. It goes up the Mississippi River on Riverboats. Up the Mississippi is Memphis where Blues takes further blends rural forms of Jazz and focusing more on the song-form of Blues. From Memphis, the music travels to Chicago, because music doesn't pay the bills. Jobs in factories do. As divergence the music also travels to New York where the Big Band model fills dance halls. From the Big Bands, musicians leave to fill smaller clubs for the same reason smaller units filled New Orleans clubs. By the time you get to the 1960, the music has diverged. It's diverged because New York isn't Chicago. And Chicago isn't Memphis. And Memphis isn't New Orleans. And New Orleans isn't rural, it's urban. But it diverges because Jazz of the first thing. Chicago got the Blues and New York got Jazz. There are lot of things the made the music diverge. Consider Prohibition, where drinking clubs went underground and became the Speakeasy. These smaller venues limited the size of the band you could hire. There are so many things that led the rural forms of music the amalgamated in New Orleans. But the size of the band is probably the most formative. If you have a lot of musicians, you get more orchestrated song. If you have smaller units, you get more improvisation because you aren't limited by the Solo. If you look at Blues, it travels back and forth from New Orleans to rural settings because people have to visit family. But if you travel all the way to Chicago, it isn't on the Mississippi, it's on the Lake Michigan, there isn't a lot of travel back home. The same can be said for Jazz and New York. From New York, you travel the country in touring groups, then you travel internationally. Keep in mind I'm completely ignoring recorded music which transforms the music even more.

In 2020 we also live in a world where we there are things that are unspoken. But we are humans and there are skeletons in our closets. Racism is viewed as the highest form of bullying. But in the formative years of Jazz and Blues, both types of music were bullied. In New York, the dance halls were in the slums of Harlem. Church goers in the South chastised the Blues as Devil music. The odd thing is that the rural form of Jazz and Blues started from the same Negro Spirituals sung in cotton fields that later entered churches as Gospel songs. It's all really complicated.

 

Jazz is a genre of music you either listen to or don’t. If you listen and then don’t, then you didn’t. If you did and did, then you know.

 

I wouldn't dare to offer a definition of Jazz, but it emerged from traditional music forms in the American South in the late 19th century, as mentioned above, and becoming ever more sophisticated, absorbing other influences along the way (including Latin American styles, classical, etc., which it influenced in turn). For me the defining characteristic of Jazz, especially since the middle of the 20th century, is improvisation. It's not a coincidence that Rock bands that engage in a lot of improvisation and jams are often inspired by Jazz (as well as Blues). But the reason why I am responding to the thread is not to give you my limited knowledge about Jazz (although I do have a sizable collection), but to mention an album that made me think more about the early and very diverse influences on Jazz and explore the genre further, which is Ry Cooder's album "Jazz":

 

I don't think jazz and blues are the same thing at all. I think the idea that these musics were the same thing and then diverged is wrong. I'm also not sure either were folk forms. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that jazz was never really a folk form. I was a commercial form played by people in commercial situations like whore houses and gambling operations.

When you listen to Jelly Roll Morton's early solo piano recording of "King Porter Stomp," maybe the quintessential composition of early jazz, from 1924 and compare that to say Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1926 record of "Got the Blues," I don't think you're hearing two different examples of the same form of music. I think you're hearing to different forms of music.

But they both share a common history in African American music from before the 20th century.

They are both African American musical forms that emerged in the shape, style and modes that we understand them to be today probably around the turn of the early 20th century. The earliest records we have of each are basically either recordings or written descriptions from the first decade of the 20th century of something that sounds like what we recognize each, formally. We do know about lot of prior forms of and practices in African American music that informed these musics. Dana Epstein's classic survey of the historical record, Black Folk Music to the Civil War, is helpful here.

Jazz and blues share antecedents in other African American musical traditions that go back centuries before the emergence of these genres -- both in terms of methods and techniques and in terms of formal elements. Everything form corn husking songs and singsong vocal games like the dozens, to Africanisms that survived new world music like floating lead lines over steady ground beats, and certain kinds of syncopated rhythms, and instruments like the banjo, partially flatted 5ths and 7ths, etc.

But they diverge as well -- much of jazz descends from ragtime which involved multi-strain, multipart song composition on harmony and construction ideas that are much broader and to a considerable degree much more draw from the European American tradition, than blues (the combination of European American cultural strains and African American cultural strain are together much more at the surface in jazz than in blues as the forms emerge as distinct styles). The jazz tradition also relies heavily on European concert and marching band instrumentation in a way that emerging blues does not (listen to WC Handy's recordings of Yellow Dog Blues, originally titled Yellow Dog Rag -- his attempt to kind of write a band arranged delta country blues number in the 1910s, it's kind of lumpy and not entirely effective as either jazz or blues.

But clearly jazz musicians played blues, and in the 1920s, when the blues craze made blues popular, it was a kind of jazz-blues that became popular that was being played on the black vaudeville circuit by the likes of Ma Rainey. But jazz can incorporate a lot of music. Jazz was original a verb, not so much a noun -- you jazzed themes. You could jazz the blues, you jazz classical music too (as was done), you could jazz martial music, you could jazz Tin Pan Alley songs -- you just played them with a certain kind of syncopation and front line group improvisation on the thematic material.

What is jazz? is a question that has caused many fights and destroyed relationships, I had to venture into it, but, I'll take the risk -- it's an American music form probably developed around the turn of the 20th century principally in African American communities and spread largely along the riverboat routes along the Mississippi between New Orleans, Louisiana and Iowa, built on the antecedents of ragtime and Afro-cuban syncopation in a rhythm feel that later came to be known as swing. The form is characterized by certain improvisation practices and a creative tension between composition and arrangement and improvisation. Since the 1960s, it's formal structure have hybridized and expanded beyond the genre's original parameters to the point where musicians, historians and scholars have continued to argue over what is and isn't properly to be thought of as jazz among these hybrid and formally expansive musics.

 

But the question is, when does the music become a distinct form and tradition that is identifiable as "jazz" -- is folk New Orleans funeral march music jazz (and what's the earliest record we have of that)? Is Maple Leaf Rag jazz? Or are these still predecessors to and influences on the emergence of jazz as a unique, definable form and tradition?

 

One of the main differences between Blues and Jazz is their goals. Blues was originally a musical form, a vehicle, for communicating a lyric. The simplicity in its form and structure was largely there because the singers weren't largely classically trained musicians, for one, but more importantly, they had something to say about their condition. And often the only way they could say it was to sing it.

Jazz, on the other hand, was largely a vehicle for musical improvisation. Jazz is first and foremost about the music. Its main mission is not to deliver the lyric. Therefore musical exploration is important to Jazz. Blues still keeps it quite simple for the most part. If Blues gets too complex, the message of the lyric can get lost.

That's not to say that some Jazz doesn't use the Blues I-IV-V harmonic form, but their missions are different.

 

Jazz is the section of the music stores where I spend more time at. It usually contains items that I feel compelled to buy.

 

Not to hijack the thread, but would you say that Billie Holiday is Jazz or Blues? And why? This is a genuine question as I have struggled placing performers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, where the lyrics and the message are definitely paramount.

 

Billie Holiday was a jazz singer. She came up in the jazz tradition singing jazz in a post-Armstrong style in jazz venues for a jazz audience. In her early records with Teddy Wilson she was just one of the soloists, not even necessarily the first soloist, and she "jazzed" the melodies, bending the phrasing and timing and varying the melodic content, like someone playing trumpet, clarinet or trombone in an early jazz front line. Maybe towards the end of her career, in the '50s, she make some torchier kind of projects, though I'm not sure she was ever less than a jazz singer even if the context was somewhat a little straight ahead jazz. I never thought of her as a blues singer in any way, myself. I mean, here's classic Billie Holiday. It's just jazz:

 

Of course, there's no reason blues music has to have any lyrics at all. Nothing out of the ordinary about instrumental blues music.

 

Jazz is who you are.

 

So, according to AnalogJ, the lyrics and the message are and important element of what distinguishes blues from jazz, for which the music is paramount, whereas chervokas thinks this is not a defining issue. I see both points, but that doesn't make it any clearer and perhaps there is no need for it to be clearer? Nice discussion!

 

Here's Jelly Roll Morton with King Oliver playing his classic composition "King Porter Stomp" in 1924, quintessential jazz. The tune is almost to jazz as "Johnny B. Goode" is to rock.

I don't think formally or structurally or for that matter rhythmically there's much that the piece has in common with blues.

There is something in common with some of the modes of playing by Oliver in terms of bending and slurring notes and blues practice, but some of that is also practice you might find in pre-blue African American music, so I see thost common elements not as coming into jazz from blues but coming both into blue and to jazz from other prior music.

 

Here's Blind Lemon Jefferson from 1926 playing something that is most definitely blues music, and I think formally not much like "King Porter Stomp" at all:

 

Here's the two forms kind of coming together in the hands of WC Handy in his "Yellow Dog Blues" in 1922:

 

And maybe coming together more successfully in the hands of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong playing Handy:

 

Music at the intersection of all this stuff -- martial band music, syncopated ragtime, blues, etc., there's WC Handy's "Memphis Blues from 1914:

 

Here's another tune, "Tiger Rag," that was recorded as much as "King Porter Stomp" probably in the annals of early jazz. From a 1917 recording. Is the same thing as blues? I don't think so:

 

Except that's not how it started. As black people were persecuted and sometimes enslaved, often the only way they could safely communicate was to sing about their problems at the end of the day. The blues wasn't merely an instrumental form.

 

Right. Jazz could use the standard three-chord format of the Blues, but their goals are entirely different.

 

Jazz doesn't mean that conveying lyrics has no place. Certain vocalists place more meaning than others on interpreting the meaning of the song. Shirley Horn, Nina Simone, etc., were more interested in the meaning of the lyric than, say Ella Fitzgerald. But their performances were equally about musical exploration.

And Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist, certainly ventured into straight Blues, even Pop. When a piece becomes more about the musical exploration than the lyric, that's where it's more Jazz than anything else.

Tony Bennett is essentially a Pop singer who ventures into jazzy arrangements. But I wouldn't say he was a Jazz singer, per se.

 

First of all, you can express your feelings in music without words. There's absolutely no reason to presume that the only feelings being expressed are in words. Second, we don't know any of that to be true -- that blues is somehow a coded or hidden expression of feelings that could otherwise not be expressed. In fact, I doubt it is. The subject of a lot of blues are common everyday woes. Blues was performed openly in gathering places, on street corners. It's not a hidden coded expression of something that otherwise couldn't have been said. Third, I don't think we can say with any confidence based on the historical record that blues as a music form as we know and identify it today, existed before the 20th century. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but its impossible to say. Is it as a music form related to things we know existed -- like work songs, corn husking songs and things like that -- in the 18th and 19th centuries -- or things like ring shouts? Probably. But I don't think blues is the same thing as work songs or corn husking songs or ring shouts.

 

Jazz could be performed with lyrics or without. Blues could be performed with lyrics or without. The lyrics in a jazz performance can be deeply a deeply important part of the performance (like, say, with Billie Holiday singing "God Bless the Child") or not significant at all (like say with Ella Fitzgerald virtually dispensing with them in "How High the Moon"). A blues can be basically instrumental -- like WC Handy's "Yellow Dog Blues" or vocal but without lyrics like Blind Willie Johnson's gospel blues classic "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" (which is probably, based on what we know from the written record of what African American music was like 200 years ago, closer maybe to something like a work song or a church moan from history than it is to say the first blues hit, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues"), or it can have a lyric. And the lyric can be important, or it can be just (and often was) some floating couplets commonly used and slapped together almost at random to comprise a performance. I don't think lyrics or an approach to lyrics works as a clear functional dividing line or defining characteristic of any sort.

 

Jazz and Blues to me is the musical expression of the African-American experience in America.