Perhaps, like Miles Davis, jazz itself is a mystique wrapped in an enigma, an essential or inescapable unknowingness that makes this music attractive for its audience.
Perhaps, like Miles Davis, jazz itself is a mystique wrapped in an enigma, an essential or inescapable unknowingness that makes this music attractive for its audience. But if jazz is partly – through its challenging demands as a musical form, through the various changes through which it has sustained itself over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and through its aspirations to both embody and transform modernity – a music of clear and revealed intentions, it remains an art that many, even many of its devotees, do not fully understand. Even the word “jazz” itself is wrapped in mystery. How did the music come to be called this and what does this word mean? Jazz bassist Bill Crow points out that some have thought the word comes the French verb jaser, or to chatter. Others say that the word “arose from corruptions of the abbreviations of the first names of early musicians: ‘Charles’ (Chas.) or ‘James’ (Jas).” Some have thought it came from the slang word for semen or that it came from “jazzing,” a slang word for fornication.2 Anthropologist Alan Merriam notes that there are also Hausa and Arabic words that may be related to the term: jaiza, the rumbling of distant drums, and jazb, allurement or attraction.3