What is Jazz, Really?

Standing next to my son, Trey, in the middle of Millennium Park, soft grass worn under thousands of feet. Around us, the Chicago skyline rises out of the trees, all glass and steel catching the evening’s last light. A cool breeze off Lake Michigan cuts through the late summer heat.

In front of us, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion opens up like something half building, half spaceship. Frank Gehry designed it to look like ribbons of brushed steel peeling back off the stage, curling up into the sky in every direction. A trellis of speakers stretches out over the whole great lawn in a grid overhead, so the sound doesn't stay trapped up front near the stage. It follows you back across the field, clear and balanced no matter how far back you've laid out your blanket. You could close your eyes fifty yards from the stage and still hear every brush stroke on the snare.

Thousands of people are spread out across the lawn. Blankets and lawn chairs, families and college kids. Old couples who've clearly been coming for decades, all of them here for the same reason. Nobody paid a cover charge. The Chicago Jazz Festival is free. It's always been free. Founded in 1979 as a public gift to music lovers. For over 40 years, they’ve shown up for jazz.

The Bruce Henry Quintet launches into Earth, Wind & Fire's "Mighty Mighty.”

I recognized the song immediately. Earth, Wind & Fire is a powerhouse funk and R&B group, not a jazz band, but this wasn't their record. This was five musicians taking that tune apart in real time. The quintet didn't just play the record's tight, fixed groove. The rhythm section constantly altered the time feel, reacting to the soloists' re-harmonizing of the chord extensions and phrasing on the fly. It was spontaneous, conversational, and risk-taking. They transformed an already exciting funk R&B tune into an act of real-time composition, and I never once doubted I was listening to high-level jazz.

This is nothing new. Throughout its history, jazz has functioned like a sponge, constantly absorbing and reinterpreting the popular music of the day rather than sitting in isolation. Pioneer brass bands transformed military marches, ragtime, and folk blues into an entirely new sound. During the 1930s and 1940s, popular Broadway show tunes and radio hits became the primary playground for swing bands and bebop innovators. Artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie took those simple melody lines and radically reworked them with fresh harmonies and wild improvisation.

That habit of soaking up the surrounding culture only grew stronger as popular music evolved. Mid-century musicians embraced bossa nova and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Miles Davis famously fused jazz with psychedelic rock in the late 1960s, and modern innovators like Robert Glasper regularly blend R&B and hip-hop into their arrangements. Jazz musicians treat the popular tunes of any era as a shared language to experiment, innovate, and connect with listeners.

As a jazz educator and working saxophonist in Central Arkansas, there is a question that has haunted me for years. What is jazz, really? It’s heavy on my mind every time I see a flyer advertising "Jazz Night" at a local restaurant or upscale cocktail lounge, only to walk in and hear a group playing locked-in R&B, funk, or rock instrumentals.

Venues love to use the word. To many venue managers, jazz is not a musical tradition. It's marketing shorthand for a classy, dimly lit ambiance where they can charge fifteen dollars for a premixed Old Fashioned. But on the bandstand, blurring these lines creates a real disconnect.

A buddy of mine recently reminded me this is hardly new around here. Back in the late 1950s, tenor saxophone giant Pharoah Sanders was coming up right here in Little Rock. In later interviews, Sanders said the local gig scene back then was dominated by commercial R&B, blues, and strict venue demands that boxed musicians in. To actually play jazz and stretch the boundaries of the art form, he had to leave the state. The regional habit of calling every instrumental commercial groove "jazz" has been alive and well for decades.

I think about that every time I'm back in Chicago.

My wife and I started going to the Chicago Jazz Festival back when we were still in college. I remember how surreal it was, being in a big city that supported and encouraged it. This year, we took our kids to experience the festival, and it did not disappoint. Yet again, I found myself surrounded by thousands of people all there in support and enjoying one of my favorite art forms. Standing in that field with Trey, hearing "Mighty Mighty" turn into something else entirely in real time, was the clearest version of that feeling I've had in years.

Don't get me wrong, because I love a heavy groove. I play bar gigs, country clubs, and wedding receptions with cover bands all over the region. When I am playing with a funk group or commercial wedding band, we respect the job. We play a convincing, authentic swing set during the cocktail hour if it’s requested, pulling out real swing feel, conversational dynamics, and jazz vocabulary. When the dance set starts, we switch hats entirely. We drop into a locked pocket, hit the heavy backbeats, and play Earth, Wind & Fire or Bruno Mars or whatever popular music is called for. We play those styles with precision and grit, but we don’t call the dance set “jazz” just because I am holding a horn on stage.

The disconnect I see comes down to a truth my mentors and respected jazz teachers drilled into me years ago. Song choice doesn't dictate the genre. The players do.

A rock band can pick up a Real Book, play the head to "Autumn Leaves," and read the chord charts perfectly off the page, but without swing feel, dynamic interplay, or jazz phrasing, it will still sound like a rock band. Conversely, when true jazz musicians take a song from outside the genre, the entire architecture shifts. That's exactly what I heard happen to "Mighty Mighty" in that field.

This distinction hits even closer to home standing next to Trey, watching him navigate his own way into the local music scene on bass, playing alongside me in my jazz combos and attending local jams. Today's younger rhythm section players are often insanely virtuosic, raised on modern gospel chops, neo-soul, and tight sixteenth-note funk pockets. But playing a heavy, repetitive thumb-groove over a static two-chord vamp is fundamentally different from playing jazz bass. Jazz requires a fluid pulse, micro-dynamics, harmonic leading tones, and the ability to steer the harmony while conversing across the bandstand in real time. Heavy emphasis on "conversing."

I don't say any of this to throw shade on local musicians. The region is full of incredible talent. Rather, the dilution of the genre comes in part from a combination of surface-level venue marketing and a genuine gap in education regarding the history, culture, and language of the genre.

Jazz is an oral tradition and a discipline, not just an aesthetic vibe or a playlist. Great music deserves to be called by its real name. We don't need to stretch the definition of jazz to validate a killer funk or R&B band, because funk and R&B are already brilliant on their own. By honoring the specific language and culture of each genre, we do right by the audience, the players, and the music itself.

Standing there under the beautiful Chicago skyline, listening to incredibly balanced and clear sound, surrounded by thousands of people who never once doubted what they were hearing, I wanted that for my city. Not just the crowd. The clarity.

- Dave Williams II

Read more from Dave here: www.davewilliamsii.com