Some questions refuse to stay answered.
Ask ten jazz musicians “what is jazz” is and you’ll get ten different answers — delivered, more often than not, with complete conviction. Ask ten scholars and you’ll get a debate. Ask Louis Armstrong and he’ll tell you that if you have to ask, you’ll never know.
It’s been that way for over a century. And somehow, the question keeps coming back.
About a decade ago, the Smithsonian Institution — home to Duke Ellington’s archives, Ella Fitzgerald’s Grammys, and one of the most significant jazz collections in the world — decided to take a swing at it. They produced a short film. They gathered voices. They made their case.
It’s worth watching (see below)…
What the Smithsonian Said
Their answer isn’t really a definition. It’s more of a portrait.
Jazz, they argue, is a conversation — rooted in the call and response tradition of the Black church, where a soloist makes a statement and the band responds. It’s improvisation in real time, musicians reacting to each other in the moment, something new being created every night that can never be exactly repeated.
They frame it around American values — freedom, democracy, inclusion. In a good jazz band, every voice gets heard. Every player gets a solo. Nobody is drowned out.
They trace the lineage forward too — how jazz didn’t stay in its lane, how it fed into R&B, how it influenced rock and roll, how it shaped language and fashion and the way people moved through the world. You can’t tell the story of American music, they suggest, without jazz at the centre of it.
And they make the case for why it still matters — not as a museum piece, but as a living music. Jazz is history, yes. But jazz is also still happening.
It’s a generous, expansive answer. And it’s hard to argue with any of it.
What It Doesn’t Quite Settle
Here’s the thing about jazz: every time someone offers a definition, the music finds a way around it.
The Smithsonian’s framing — democracy, conversation, improvisation — captures something true and important. But Wayne Shorter once said that jazz shouldn’t have any mandates, that for him the word jazz means “I dare you.”
Charlie Parker said there’s no boundary line to art. Duke Ellington, who the Smithsonian rightly holds up as one of jazz’s great figures, was actually uncomfortable with the word itself — he preferred “beyond category.”
And then there’s the music. Does Weather Report swing? Not really. Is it jazz? Most people would say yes. Does every great jazz performance feature improvisation? Mostly — but not always. Does it have to come from an American tradition? Ask the ECM label, or the Brazilian musicians who fused jazz with bossa nova, or the European players who took the music somewhere entirely their own.
The honest answer is that jazz has always been too alive and too restless to sit still inside a definition. The moment you think you’ve captured it, it moves.
Jazz a Decade Later
The Smithsonian made their film around ten years ago. The conversation hasn’t cooled since.
New artists keep arriving with new answers. New fusions keep pushing at the edges. The debate about what counts and what doesn’t — who’s in and who’s out — rumbles on in clubs and conservatories and comment sections.
Which is probably exactly as it should be.
The video is a good starting point. But if you want to go deeper into the history, the sub-genres, and what some of jazz’s greatest figures actually thought about the question, check out our own guide to the history of jazz or all our best stories from jazz history.