What Is Jazz?

When I was a teen rocker, I took an interest in jazz and asked several aficionados to explain it to me so I could better appreciate it.  I got the same unhelpful answer four times in a row from four different people: “If you don’t just know, you’ll never get it.”

1) Either they didn’t know what jazz was, or

2) they knew but lacked the words, or

3) sharing knowledge was not one of their values.

Whatever their problem was, an explanation of jazz is not hard to come by. 

A few years later my friend Campbell Stanton gave me a tape with a lecture by Leonard Bernstein entitled “What Is Jazz?”   It appears to be the introduction to a 1956 recording by Bernstein.

And it’s wonderful. *

I listen to that tape once every 5 years.  It taught me a lot, and to that I add a few of my own observations.  Here’s some of what I think I know.

Jazz involves improvisation.  In jazz – and to lesser degrees blues and rock music - the role of composer is shared with the performers.  There is still someone out there who writes a song, but the musicians who play that song do not play the notes exactly as they would if it were a classical composition; instead they take the framework the songwriter provides and make up (or “improvise”) the vast majority of the notes you hear played.  

Where compositions are carefully constructed and written down to be played just as they are, jazz takes a tune, plays with it, and the resulting notes and rhythms hardly ever get written down.  In fact, many would say the best way to hear jazz is live, because every performance is unique, never to happen again.  Many of these impromptu musical stylings do get captured in recordings, but one beauty of a jazz performance lies in being there the moment it is being created, very often never to be heard again.

This “making it up on the fly” is not limited to professional musicians.  When you hum to yourself, do you always stick to a strict version of the way you heard the song on a recording?  No, probably not.  You might speed or slow the tempo to match your pace while you’re out walking (or like me you might think “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” would sound super as a Cha Cha tune); you might forget how it went and just “make up” how you think it went or how you feel it ought to go; you might even – wittingly or unwittingly - hear a certain stretch of notes in your head with the background harmony in C major, instead of the songwriters intended A minor.   

And then there are those hummed tunes that are unique to you, and perhaps even unique to that day.  I believe this last example includes some of the most wonderful melodies and jams ever created, and unless the person doing the humming is a professional musician intent on capturing it and recreating it later on an instrument, the tune will forever have an audience of one. 

All of this is improvisation, and while no psychologist or physiologist, I can say it feels to me as much instinctual as it is learned.  However we come by this creative impulse, it’s called improvisation, and it lies at the core of jazz music. 

Jazz rhythm is more unpredictable.  Unlike traditional European music, where one would expect a song in 4/4 time to have the emphasis on the first and third beat - and in 3/4 time on the first of the three beats - jazz is all over the place.   Bernstein explains that jazz rhythm surprises us by being “syncopated”.  It puts the emphasis in “unconventional” places, and in other instances some beats are left out entirely.  In some parts of the world, this rhythmic diversity is commonplace, but to those of us raised listening to “ONE-two-THREE-four” rhythms, these other possibilities are new, refreshing and exciting. 

A simple example of this “messing with the beat” is to shift the emphasis of a 4/4 rhythm to “one-TWO-three-FOUR” creating what’s called a “backbeat”.  While a Sousa march or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star puts emphasis on the 1 and 3 “downbeats”, shifting the emphasis to the backbeats gives us a rhythm we would instead expect in country swing or reggae, or even a Lawrence Welk offering.

“So, what does country music and reggae have to do with jazz?”, you might ask.  “And how is Lawrence Welk jazz?”  These questions could have long explanations, but I’ll say only that reggae – while not jazz per se – does share some characteristics with jazz (including backbeat and improvisation, especially improvisation in the base line).  And yes, Bob Wills and Lawrence Welk were both jazz musicians.

Jazz uses a special scale.  I am only starting to delve into scales myself, so I’ll only relate the basics.  European music uses a 12-tone system in which 8 of those tones (or “notes”) make up what’s called the “major scale”.  This scale is “harmonic”, and as long as you don’t stray from those 8 notes the music will tend to be familiar, comforting, happy – even triumphant.  The next-most-frequently used scale in European music is achieved by moving a note or two to form the “minor” scale.  Even those limited changes create a scale that lends a sad and unsetted feel to the music. 

Jazz tends to use the blues scale, which is achieved by taking the major scale and lowering the 3^rd, 5^th and 7^th notes one half-tone each (what would be one fret on a guitar).  The result is a scale that is even more attuned to the emotional lows of the human condition.  This isn’t bad; on the contrary I say a full and rich life includes both the happy and the sad.  And as almost any blues fan will tell you, the blues can make you happy too.

Jazz acknowledges the limitless possibilities of music, and the musical “scale” doesn’t escape this respect for potential and freshness.  We tend to all agree there are 12 tones in an octave, but jazz admits to a limitless number of tones.  There are “quarter tones”, which lie directly between any two of the 12 tones in the scale.  These come to jazz via the blues and have their origin in traditional African music. 

The variety doesn’t end there though.  In jazz, any singer – or player of any instrument capable of playing flat or sharp notes - may choose to intentionally go flat or sharp on any given note.  How sharp or flat they go is a matter of personal preference, and while this may grate on the nerves of some, others find it perfectly natural.  When you let go of the idea that every note has to be “nailed” and “in tune” a whole new world opens up.  Besides, about one in four opera singers I hear doesn’t seem capable of carrying a tune anyway.

Jazz instruments mimic the human voice.  Since the blues has had so much influence on jazz, it’s natural that instrumentalists would want to draw on that rich vocabulary of pain and joy one can hear in a blues singer’s voice.  Mutes are used to give wind instruments a raspy tone; the guitar can be squeak and squawk, fall down into a note or slide up into another; the harmonica and saxophone are particularly adept in mimicking weeping or sass.  This tendency of the instruments to “sing” is something one is very likely to encounter listening to jazz.

Jazz is a conversation.   The instruments and singers in jazz communicate among themselves.  This can happen in a more formal way, with a planned “call and response” – common in gospel music - where the lead singer sings a line and then the backup singers respond it kind.  Jazz takes it further, with the backup instruments doing little complementary “fills” when the main instrument is not playing.  This is an extension of call and response.

Another way jazz musicians communicate can be seen whenever two or more instruments or singers are improvising at the same time.  If neither instrument knew or cared what the other was doing, this could sound awful, and indeed I think some poorly-executed jazz music does suffer from a lack of listening and teamwork.  Ideally, the musicians are paying attention to the other players and shape their improvisations to be complementary to the whole.  They will play lines that are harmonically or rhythmically compatible, and they often take what the other is playing and come back with their own take on it.  Even the audience gets in the act with the occasional, “Yeah!” or “Mmmmmm . . .”

And then there’s the way an instrumental solo tells a story.  There are some solos that, if spoken, would be pure “Whoop! Ha, ha. Yeah, baby!  Whee-dee-oop-ask-laddly-zinga-bang”, but the great solos take you on a journey that has a beginning and an end.  It’s like a sculpture or poem with its own internal structure and beauty.  And it ends with some sort of statement or question to the listener.

I wish I could explain it more simply than that, but I have every confidence that if sit down and listen to some jazz, eventually you’re going to get it.  You may want to start with some Fats Waller or Louis Armstrong, rather that diving right into Miles Davis or Toshiko Akioshi, or maybe coming from the exact opposite direction would work better for you. What do I know?

Anyone can understand and enjoy jazz, and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t get it.

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* I just went looking on the internet, and this set of lectures is still available for sale.

Google "what-is-jazz bernstein".