all that jazz?

big talk over at ye ol' daveworld yesterday regarding the grammys and miss norah jones. one of the newly delurked listees has a husband who is a musician and it seems as if he might be a bit of a music snob. no judgment on that — to each his own. but this led our new listee to declare that jones was, indeed, Not Jazz (with which i thought her label, verve, might disagree).

so i decided that instead of getting into a big heated debate over what Is Jazz and what is Not Jazz (which is an unwinnable argument, btw, much like trying to convince some that folgers is not coffee and suave is not shampoo), i thought we could just add more definitions to our label-conscious music society. we could hyphenate — or we could just compound the words. or jam 'em together to make new ones.

here are some of those thoughts and suggestions:

maybe norah's playing quazz — quasi jazz.

or jop — jazzy pop.

or spazz — smokey piano jazz

what about all those shwidly piano guys (i used to date one of them)... shwazz. not to be confused with muzazz (pron muse-ass -- soft zz) which you often hear in the elevators... muzac posing as jazz.

norah also might be classified underneath the unfortunate "nepojasm" title, for those whose parents helped pave the way or open doors.

i improvise all the time on my guitar. maybe i'm playing jazz and didn't know. ;) i thought i just sucked. ;) this could be called whoopazz — as in whoops... jazz!

actually, mistakenly playing jazz is called misjazz. the problem with this is that the same word is used for those who think they are playing jazz (even their label might think they are playing jazz), but aren't. they are also playing misjazz.

more confusion comes in of course, as people misinterpret this as Miss Jazz, which at the moment is a title held by both diana krall in the united states and bebel gilberto in brazil (who actually plays jazzilian) (not to be confused with krall who actually *makes* jazilions).

our new listee offered up some new labels of her own which i thought were great: jazz-a-billy and bluegrazz. "jazz mixes well with all genres!" she said, and i agree. and now we finally have a way to classify bela fleck.