Jazz

Introduction
~Durjoy

Jazz has always been the concern of a minority – always. Even in the age of ‘Swing’, the thirties, the jazz of creative black musicians was – except for very few recordings – recognised by only a few. Yet, taking an active interest in jazz means working for a majority, because the popular music of our times feeds on jazz: All the music we hear in TV or in the radio, in movies, in pubs and nightclubs, ranging from rock to funk, from fusion to hip-hop; all those sounds that daily engulf us – all that music comes from jazz. At the same time, it is the most complicated and the simplest of all art forms. Jazz, which had opened the gates of popular music to every man and woman – to practise and to perform, almost ceases to exist in its actual form in the twenty-first century. All the big names of Jazz music in the twenty-first century seem to associate themselves with something which is slightly different from conventional Jazz. John Mclaughlin says his form of music should be called Jazz-Fusion; Jonas Hellborg too is Jazz-Fusion bassist; Al Di Meola and Ry Cooder plays something called the Gypsy-Jazz or better known as Latin-Jazz; Fela Kuti, from Nigeria performs African Jazz and Youssou N’dour practices a form, which in Senegalese is known as Mbalax, a fusion of Senegalese traditional folk with Cuban popular music and a tinge of Jazz impression. Almost all forms of contemporary Jazz music that we hear today, is more of a milieu of American Jazz and traditional folk music and in order to avoid the debate regarding what is jazz and what is not, they are simply categorised under the broader shade of ‘World music’.

Jazz is a form of music that emphasises performance over composition, so it is difficult to study its history through written scores as we can with classical music. Furthermore, Jazz was born before the popularity of the phonograph, so we cannot track the early development of the music through recordings as we can with rock and roll. As a result, there is considerable controversy over how jazz came to be, with various historians promoting conflicting theories, and various musicians claiming to have invented it.