The blues element, improvisation, and the swing feel are all very important parts of jazz, but you're always going to have exceptions that will cause arguments that go on forever.
I think that's a very important point "and it brings us back to do" as it was called into question weather that style of music is "jazz" and to whose satisfaction and what really constitutes "jazz"
I totally agree. It's pointless to try and define jazz, because you're always going to find exceptions. I think the whole beauty of jazz is that it can't be defined.
It may very well not be definable , and with that axiom there wouldn't be definitive answer and we can't really call what we have a definition or definitive
(just like we might feel like we dont' want to call things that aren't "jazz" -- "jazz)
It may also be pointless for some to ask "Is this Jazz?" just as "defining jazz" is pointless to others
esp as we re all still learning (interestingly - both Eastern and Western fencing have similar expressions "It takes two lifetimes to master")
it's not a bad thing - some very cool math surrounds those areas too
I mean definitions are just a tool, they aren't the full experience (anymore than genetics and proteomics are life itself) -- they can be a valuable tool
but not the only one
and it can be a heavvvvvy task to try to forge that tool - and some (even the entire racet) may not be up to the task
that's the thing - if we don't have a solid definition, then we don't have a solid definition
and there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we dig that we don't
that's part of that learning process that's ongoing (that one extends well beyond music, that's part of the human experience)
Reminds my of what an old Artifical intellegence prof said about tractable class problems (problems where you can map out the solution space) -- "where's the fun in that?!?!"
whoops - anyway - sorry for the drag off topic
I guess I'm like many here I have my passions - and I suppose our passions direct us as to what we focus on in a thread about "nu jazz"
Some guys are passionate about Jazz and so their posts maybe push toward the "is this jazz?" question
I'm passionate about the pursuit of knowledge (not just the pursuing, but the pursuit itself - "meta-knowledge" I guess you could say) and its expression, so my posts maybe tend to veer that way