JAZZ • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Jazz

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/dʒæz/ Listen

noun

jazz n.

A type of music that originated in New Orleans around 1900 and developed through increasingly complex styles, but generally featuring intricate rhythms, improvisation, prominent solo segments, and great freedom in harmonic idiom played frequently in a polyphonic style, on various instruments including horn, saxophone, piano and percussion, but rarely stringed instruments.

Empty or insincere or exaggerated talk; as, don't give me any of that jazz.

Synonyms: wind, idle words, nothingness.

A style of dance music popular in the 1920s; similar to New Orleans jazz but played by large bands.

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Etymology of 'Jazz'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Jazz" Quotes from Famous Books

... Propaganda. A bonfire of committees, communes, Jabberwocks, clubs, Green Walruses, False Whiskers, Snickersnees, War Boards, and Eagles Shrieking from their Mountain Heights with an obligato by the Avon Comedy Four—I'm a Jazz Baby.... ...

— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... argument is simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich feathers and diamond mines, and dance jazz dances over the misery and degradation of a whole race of fellow-beings of a different colour from their own. Possibly they believe that moral laws have a special domesticated breed of comfortable ...

— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... he had "got" them. Now they unslung their little trenching-tools, and began to burrow themselves like wood-chucks into the ground. "Dig, you sons o' guns, dig!" the officer would shout. "Keep your head down, Smith! Make the dirt fly! Put the jazz into it! ...

— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... thou learnt at last to jazz? Come take my arm, my clomplish boy;" O hectic day! Cheero! Cheeray! He chwinckled in ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... flageolets, snare drums, and rattles, or other noise-makers. The result is an indescribable hubbub; a garish human kaleidoscope, accompanied by fiendish clamor and unmusical noises which fairly outstrip a dozen jazz bands. It is bedlam let loose, a scene of wild ...

— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

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