Jazz Is

It seems that I’ve been writing a lot about words and their meanings in most of my posts. I know this is not a semiotics course, but I think that inevitably problems arise when you try to use words to address music. But sometimes, however rarely, you just might do better to accept the given meaning of a word or concept—to respect the collective understanding of an idea.
When we talk about jazz, we are talking about something that is very complicated—problems about history, aesthetics, religion, race, language, tautology, maybe even eschatology, arise. With the case of jazz, it seems we all know, for all practical purposes, what it is. But it’s like Lewis was saying yesterday in class about jazz singers—we can’t necessarily translate an aural understanding to verbal explication.
When we get into the question of what a jazz singer really is, we hit on some even deeper problems. This is because not only are we dealing with a tough issue about the nature of singing; we are dealing still with the issue of what jazz really is.
Sometimes you have to think really hard about answering a question before you can begin to consider whether or not you should have been asking it at all. In this case, about jazz singers, I think that Lewis’s answer to our question in class yesterday is the most accurate—and the wittiest, which is always good: Jazz singers are those who work with jazz musicians.
It reminded me of something I read by Gary Giddins about what jazz is. (I know you guys might not like Gary Giddins, but bear with me—he is a good writer.) He wrote: Jazz is what jazz musicians do. Similar to Lewis’s, eh?
Both of these answers are tautological—they rely on the word they’re defining to define the word. But it’s intentionally so. The definition itself is a seemingly humble attempt—but looking closer, it’s an affront to all those who think these questions actually matter.
They’re answers and non-answers at the same time. They’re silencers. If we wanted to take it a little further, we could quote Nat Hentoff: Jazz is.