Jazz - For all the jazz lovers

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Welcome to [email protected], a lemmy community dedicated to all things jazz.

Anything jazz related, including fusion jazz and everything, are all welcome. Be sure to follow these rules.

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Stay on Topic: We’re all here for our shared love of jazz. Keep discussions related to jazz music, artists, history, and related topics. Production of jazz music is also out of scope for this community.
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founded 2 years ago

[Discussion] What is jazz, to you? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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:) I don't hope to provoke any major argumentation or hard feelings :)

Personally I feel that jazz is such a broad description, it can mean so many different things to so many different people!

When I meet new people and it comes to musical tastes I will say I love jazz, and often they'll scrunch their noses "oh I hate jazz"

It always reminds me of something my father said many years ago "I don't like curry". Which of course was kinda insane, because he loved curry, he just didn't know it was called curry or had curry elements!

I talk about the above personal experience because I want to set the tone for the discussion here, as not having to decide what is and isn't jazz, but in the context that it means something different to everybody. And wanting to discuss as a community what it means to each of us without that being "right" or "wrong"

I think for me, the first thing that made me connect to jazz, was it's absolute defiance. So that's what jazz is to me: defiance. It doesn't mean it's not other things too!

I really believe what made me fall in love with jazz was a song from The Flying Lutenbachers called Fist Through Glass. I could not stop listening to it... It was the first time I heard anything that just said fuck you. Like really just fuck you. And also that underlying the apparent dischordance and chaos, was a meticulously crafted statement. I didn't know I was listening to jazz though!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What a nice inspiring topic. Thanks for the discussion!

For me, jazz is variation. You take a straight melody, you play it in swing. After some time, you get bored with swing, so you surprise with a few measures of straight notes. One hundredish years ago, people heard popular music and got kind of bored with it, so they played a million variations on it. When Brad Mehldau does it with Radiohead, with melodies his audience already knows, it’s exactly the same thing.

In Belgium, we have this crazy drummer called Lander Gyselinck. He had a ‘classical’ jazz training, but wanted to do something less ‘classical jazz’, so he took hip hop beats, rock elements, crazy synths coming from a digital saxophone and created weird, crazy and wonderful music. This, for me, was the most jazzy thing to do. It’s all about variation. The band is called STUFF. by the way. You won’t regret listening to it.

I have to admit that I got in a theoretical swamp lately. On a certain moment, everything I heard and liked, became jazz in my head. And isn’t variation always the essence of interesting music? Bach and Beethoven did nothing else.

And then, you hear a nice version of ‘Round midnight with it’s syncopated rhythms and changes full of tritone substitions and you think: this really is jazz. So there is a style element that cannot be ignored.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Very interesting comment, your last remark about Bach and Beethoven made me reflect.

I don't think there's anything Jazz about those types of music, in fact they are highly formulaic and mathematical almost. To me they possess absolutely none of the qualities of jazz!