I mean, it sure sounds fancy when you listen to it, but what specifically did they change in the way they write and perform music? Why are certain chords/progression labelled as ‘jazzy’?
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A lot of the fundamental chord progressions of jazz are drawn from music that was popular in America at the time. Blues, ragtime, showtunes, etc. A good example is the “Rhythm Changes.” These are the chord changes from a George Gershwin song called “I Got Rhythm,” part of a mostly-forgotten musical called “Girl Crazy.” Jazz musicians found that they were fun and intuitive to improvise over, so they became the foundation of a large number of jazz standards.
The stuff that sounds uniquely jazzy is then mutation and experimentation beyond this. If you’re a jazz pianist, you’re going to spend *a lot* of time playing the rhythm changes. To keep things interesting (for both you and the soloist), you’ll eventually start to play around with the chords. Add new notes from that scale. add pedals, add new transitional chords, etc. Unlike a popular musician, you’re not supposed to be delivering a close recreation of an established song. You’re supposed to be delivering a unique and interesting experience for whoever came to your club that night (and may well have already been there every night that week).
Thus, “I Got Rhythm” doesn’t sound convincingly jazzy. It sounds like an old musical number. But the many jazz performances built on I Got Rhythm feel jazzy. There’s no unified reason for this. They all just take a playful and creative approach to the same source material. I’d say the main marker of jazz is when the musician manages to deliver something the listener didn’t expect but still enjoys.
Jazz music is a separate branch of music theory, coming about in the early 20th century. It uses chord structures and progressions that are quite different from classical music theory.
In classical music, a chord will have the 1st, 3rd, and 5th steps of the scale, so a G major chord is G-B-D. Sometimes the 7th is added, but this is always noted and written out.
In jazz, the 7th of the scale is always assumed, and the 5th is often dropped. So a G major chord is G-B-(D)-F. (The seventh is always assumed as lowered). It’s also common to add the 9th, 11th, or even 13th to the chord, to add color, and dropping the root. The 9th and 13th could be raised or lowered too. So a G major could be played B-E-F-A : 3rd-13th-flat 7th-9th.
A few things;
1) Jazz is no longer that popular, ergo the only people who listen to it are people who are *really* into jazz, thus you see musicians pushing the envelope of musical conventions and technical ability, in part because that’s what the audience wants. The same phenomena has shown up in the experimental and progressive rock and metal scenes. It’s a kind of hipster-esque “we like it because it’s not popular” kind of thing.
2) Jazz, from the outset, has always had a more cosmopolitan audience, and (given the nature of prohibition) a more wealthy audience, particularly back in the heyday of Jazz during and after Prohibition. It was the popular music in the right place at the right time, and the sophistication of the era was attached to the music.
3) Jazz generally abides by musical conventions that are much older in the Western tradition (e.g. ancient, medieval, and baroque eras). Those kind of conventions fell by the wayside a long time ago in the “Classical” musical tradition, and while a lot of modern music inherently stems from Jazz, it did away with the complex conventions of Jazz music in favor of “simpler” musical conventions seen in pop, rock, and rap today. This is also why “jazzy” chord progressions exist; those chord progressions basically don’t show up in the ~~cookie cutter garbage~~ musical standards that basically all popular music since the ’50s has abided by.
4) Jazz favors improvisation, and a lot of that improvisation can be hard for the audience to keep up with at times (doubly so if the audience doesn’t have a musical background). Thus, a lot of the people who listen to jazz these days are people with the musical background needed to keep up with what’s actually going on in the song.
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