What is Jazz? 

by Nathan Winthrop | 27 April, 2025

​"I play Postmodern New Orleans music. Donald Harrison plays Neoclassical New Orleans music. If you think Jazz is a style of music, you’ll never begin to understand.” 

Jazz is not a descriptor for a particular type of music, but instead represents some unidentifiable beauty within an art form or, anything really. 

Jazz is when Kobe Bryant hits the game winning shot in the NBA Finals. Jazz is when one listens to you and lets you speak freely. Jazz is that bit of unknown magic that makes something particularly the way it is. 

So jazz music can be Amine rapping over a beat as much as it is Immanuel Wilkins blowing over a beautifully complex tune. 

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So I agree in a sense that jazz is dead. Jazz, the genre of music is dead because jazz is no longer a genre of music. 

 “Jazz died when cool stopped being hip.” 

Jazz is a new word for hip, maybe. Jazz is really hip. If hip is not actually hip it is not jazz. Jazz is when something is actually, undeniably hip. In this way, non-subjectively hip.