What is jazz?

Jazz is a musical style that emerged around 1900 in the southern United States, originally created and practised by African Americans, which has been developed in many different ways and often appears in crossover with other musical traditions and genres. Jazz has left its mark on other modern musical styles; without jazz many genres today wouldn’t exist in the form we know them. Nowadays many musical forms are therefore also counted as jazz, often only loosely or scarcely connected to the African-American tradition.

Jazz draws on a predominantly European tonal system and uses European melodic and harmonic concepts, as well as European instruments. These elements from Europe are, however, used in a distinct way in jazz. Characteristic features include, for example, a particular rhythmic feel related to a sense of movement and a lot of improvisation. These elements, especially the rhythmic aspects, can be traced back to the musical sensibilities of African musical cultures, which especially shaped jazz in its early days.

To this day numerous subgenres of jazz have developed, such as bebop, swing and Latin jazz. Jazz continues to evolve. More modern jazz subgenres include Smooth Jazz, ethno-jazz and electro-swing.