What is Jazz?
by Emile and Laura De Cosmos

Jazz has more than one definition, and jazz has different definitions to different people. It also can mean different things to the same people at different times.

Some may savor the sounds and emotional flavors of a familiar tune played in a new way, while others may bask in the ambience of jazz; exotic night clubs or specific city streets or neighborhoods.

Some think about a quality of swing when they define jazz - a sound that evokes a feeling of wanting to tap your feet or clap your hands.

One quality of jazz common to all definitions is improvisation - to ad lib, fake, ride or jam. This is when a musician composes and performs simultaneously. Some musicians use jazz as a synonym for improvisation.

Some audiences will recognize improvisation as being when a soloist in a group stands up, or when musicians stand up after playing a familiar melody, launch into unfamiliar sounds. Creating melodies spontaneously is a joyful feeling, as natural as wanting to sing on the spur of the moment about something thrilling - a thought, a feeling, a vision, or a sound.

Creating

Creating melodies spontaneously is euphoric, a feeling similar to what a quarterback must feel completing a great pass, or what a baseball player feels hitting a home run. For a performer to transfer that emotional feeling to others, he or she must have technical expertise. Creating spontaneously takes skill. The quality of improvisation depends on the performer's depth of thought. It's not just fingers reciting a lesson. You bring all your creativity and knowledge, like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Parker or Herbie Hancock, is comparable to the skill of the greatest writers, fiction and nonfiction - the finest artists and painters - the most noted classical soloists, instrumental and vocal - the most skilled actors, athletes, doctors, surgeons, scientists, educators, engineers or pilots.

Technique

In the course of creating jazz, a song's melody or it's underlying chords may be altered. The rhythmic values of the notes may be lengthened or shortened or syncopated - played off the beat. There need be no consistent pattern of rhythmic variations, so long as a steady beat is explicit or implicit.

If we play the exact melody as written we are not improvising. If we rephrase the melody slightly, changing it's rhythm, adding accents or bending the notes, we are improvising. If the note rephrasing was relatively spontaneous, we are improvising. If we keep the most essential notes of a melody, deleting some notes and adding others, and then between melodic phrases, which is called 'playing around the melody', we are improvising. If we ignore the melody altogether and simply play on the chords that accompany the melody, called 'change running', we are improvising, but not necessarily creating new melodies.

Finally,

if we ignore the melody and build new melodies over the chord progression, called lyricism, we are improvising. It also is possible to improvise using fragments of the original melody to create a spontaneous theme and variation form.

In Closing:

One necessity for any musician interested in learning to play jazz is knowing how to read music.

Albert Einstein, dropped out fo school, but he knew how to read. You've got to learn how to read.

Many great jazz solos have been transcribed for musicians to play and study. If you want to write like Shakespeare, you need to read Shakespeare. If you want to play like Duke Ellington or Miles Davis or Charlie Parker, you need to read their music.

Emile and Laura DeCosmo
© MusicStaff.com, 1999