A Word Borrowed From Baseball Slang
The earliest written record of the word jazz has nothing to do with music. It appears in a 1912 *Los Angeles Times* article, where a minor league baseball pitcher describes a pitch he called a "jazz ball" "because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it".
The word is believed to come from *jasm*, an 1860s slang term meaning pep or energy. Its first documented musical use came in the *Chicago Daily Tribune* in 1915, and in New Orleans in a *Times-Picayune* article about "jas bands" on 14 November 1916.
The musician Eubie Blake remembered the older, ruder sense of it clearly: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies." The American Dialect Society later named it the Word of the 20th Century.
Born in New Orleans Out of Everything at Once
Jazz emerged in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It did not descend from one tradition. Its roots run through blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song and dance music.
New Orleans jazz proper began in the early 1910s, fusing brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. Several musicians would weave melodies around each other at the same time rather than politely taking turns.
The music is recognised by a specific set of features: swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, and improvisation. As it spread worldwide it absorbed national, regional and local musical cultures, which is exactly why no two jazz scenes sound alike.
The Rule That Is No Rule
Improvisation is the one element almost everyone agrees on. Its central place traces back to blues, a folk form that grew partly from the work songs and field hollers of enslaved African-Americans, commonly built on a repeating call-and-response pattern.
Compare it to classical performance, which is judged largely by fidelity to the written score. The classical performer aims to play the composition as written. Jazz flips the weight from composer to performer, prizing interaction and collaboration in the moment.
The result is that a jazz musician never plays the same composition twice. Depending on mood, experience, and the reaction of bandmates or the audience, the performer may change the melody, the harmony, even the time signature. In early New Orleans jazz, players took turns with melodies while others improvised countermelodies underneath.
Every Decade Tore It Up and Started Again
Few genres reinvent themselves this often. The 1930s belonged to arranged, dance-oriented swing big bands, alongside the hard-swinging bluesy Kansas City style and gypsy jazz with its musette waltzes.
Then came the ruptures. Bebop arrived in the 1940s and pushed jazz away from danceable popular music toward a demanding "musician's music", faster and built on chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz answered at the end of that decade with calmer, smoother sounds and long linear melodic lines. The mid-1950s brought hard bop, pulling in rhythm and blues, gospel and blues.
The late 1950s produced modal jazz, built on scales rather than chord changes, and free jazz, which abandoned regular meter and formal structure altogether. Jazz fusion merged jazz improvisation with rock rhythms and electric instruments around 1970, smooth jazz won commercial radio in the early 1980s, and Latin and Afro-Cuban styles keep the genre multiplying today.
