With Canadian summer jazz festivals featuring everything from the gospel sounds of The Sojourners and straight-ahead jazz saxophonist David Sanborn to Nigerian superstar King Sunny Ade & His African Beats, the definition of jazz has become fluid.
Okay, so here's another question: What is jazz? And another: Is jazz a meaningless term?
Or even: Is jazz dead?
If ever there was a word loaded with multiple meanings, it's the word jazz. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines it as: “music of African-American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm." But there's a whole group of performers at this year's festival for whom a regular or forceful rhythm is to be avoided at all cost, others whose musical roots lie more in European New Music than anything African-American, and a select few who keep improvisation to a minimum.
Ask a half-dozen friends and relatives to define jazz and you'll get a half- dozen different answers.
It has to swing. It needs to break out of rigid pulse constraints.
It's for listening. It's for dancing.
It must have a melody and harmonic structure. It's better when it's completely free.
Even the origin of the music is a source of debate, with some books, like Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz, tracing it to the old slave plantations in 19th-Century America, while others centre it in New Orleans at the start of the 20th Century.
However it started, jazz has amounted to a series of movements, each intent on moving the music forward, then rooting there until the next movement came along. Urban New Orleans spawned ragtime piano and uptempo group jazz, which spread north to Chicago, Kansas City and New York and evolved. Ragtime evolved into boogie-woogie and stride, small-group play led to big-band swing, the latter becoming the dominant popular music of the 1930s and '40s. Be-bop, with its frenetic tempos, complex chord changes and virtuosic soloists then rose in the late 1940s and '50s, alienating the big-band fans. The post-bop era refined the rough edges and created mini-movements like soul jazz, bossa nova and cool jazz.
The bebop-vs-big band fight became a theme in jazz, with each new movement dividing musicians and listeners. The 1960s avant-garde movement, led by Ornette Coleman in 1959, pushed bebop aside and set traditionalists against experimenters. Jazz-rock fusion of the 1970s created electric-vs-acoustic camps. The neo-conservative movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, when musicians returned to the structure of previous decades, divided the mainstream and the experimentalists. Instead of seeing the music as one big multi-dimensional community, people split into camps, the hardliners complaining about the others.
With all the divisions over the years, would it not be better to just eliminate the labels altogether, and call this summer's big jazz festivals in places like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal international music festivals?
“We have talked about that," says Ken Pickering, artistic director of Coastal Jazz & Blues Society, which has produced the Vancouver jazz festival since its 1986 inception. “The danger with that is it's really easy to lose sight of your core values and your roots if you go in that direction.
“We're real fans of this music and we want to reflect that in our programs. If you go that route, you may see a lot of dilutions where the jazz element ceases to exist."
Okay, so here's another question: What is jazz? And another: Is jazz a meaningless term?
Or even: Is jazz dead?
If ever there was a word loaded with multiple meanings, it's the word jazz. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines it as: “music of African-American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm." But there's a whole group of performers at this year's festival for whom a regular or forceful rhythm is to be avoided at all cost, others whose musical roots lie more in European New Music than anything African-American, and a select few who keep improvisation to a minimum.
Ask a half-dozen friends and relatives to define jazz and you'll get a half- dozen different answers.
It has to swing. It needs to break out of rigid pulse constraints.
It's for listening. It's for dancing.
It must have a melody and harmonic structure. It's better when it's completely free.
Even the origin of the music is a source of debate, with some books, like Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz, tracing it to the old slave plantations in 19th-Century America, while others centre it in New Orleans at the start of the 20th Century.
However it started, jazz has amounted to a series of movements, each intent on moving the music forward, then rooting there until the next movement came along. Urban New Orleans spawned ragtime piano and uptempo group jazz, which spread north to Chicago, Kansas City and New York and evolved. Ragtime evolved into boogie-woogie and stride, small-group play led to big-band swing, the latter becoming the dominant popular music of the 1930s and '40s. Be-bop, with its frenetic tempos, complex chord changes and virtuosic soloists then rose in the late 1940s and '50s, alienating the big-band fans. The post-bop era refined the rough edges and created mini-movements like soul jazz, bossa nova and cool jazz.
The bebop-vs-big band fight became a theme in jazz, with each new movement dividing musicians and listeners. The 1960s avant-garde movement, led by Ornette Coleman in 1959, pushed bebop aside and set traditionalists against experimenters. Jazz-rock fusion of the 1970s created electric-vs-acoustic camps. The neo-conservative movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, when musicians returned to the structure of previous decades, divided the mainstream and the experimentalists. Instead of seeing the music as one big multi-dimensional community, people split into camps, the hardliners complaining about the others.
With all the divisions over the years, would it not be better to just eliminate the labels altogether, and call this summer's big jazz festivals in places like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal international music festivals?
“We have talked about that," says Ken Pickering, artistic director of Coastal Jazz & Blues Society, which has produced the Vancouver jazz festival since its 1986 inception. “The danger with that is it's really easy to lose sight of your core values and your roots if you go in that direction.
“We're real fans of this music and we want to reflect that in our programs. If you go that route, you may see a lot of dilutions where the jazz element ceases to exist."
For more information contact All About Jazz.
