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 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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