We all know jazz as a music genre, but is it a language too?
Some experts think it is. They point to the fact that jazz has its own vocabulary that has been expanding since the musical genre first emerged from African American culture and started spreading around the world. Every jazz musician has used this musical language to build upon the work of their predecessors.
Thus, each generation uses aural communication to pass down their language, with jazz developing and evolving organically, just as language does.
But unlike a language, there’s no dictionary of jazz, and although there are cultural and musical norms, there are no rules, either. Each musical jazz artist is free to draw on what they’ve learned from previous generations, but also to create their own musical vocabulary and to borrow and create their own musical grammar.
Whether or not you think jazz is a language, it’s certainly an interesting concept to riff off.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-playing-saxophone-dBWvUqBoOU8
