Throughout our time in Los Angeles, we have been wrestling with the question, “What is art?” But after we attended the LA Philharmonic’s January 15 performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, I found myself discussing a new question with my classmates on the walk back to the metro station: “What is jazz?”

Musical genres are typically hard to define as they tend to emerge gradually from pre-existing genres, evolve drastically throughout their lifetime, and give birth to new genres while often still remaining in existence. The lines are fuzzy. Though attempts to classify types of music are educational and helpful, music—like art as a whole—is too complex and diverse to conform to simple tidy definitions or be organized into a set of orderly boxes.

I will nevertheless share my most basic, non-technical definition: jazz is the product of the collision of European and African musical traditions.

Jazz originated in New Orleans, one of the most diverse cities in America at that time. After originally being an area occupied by Native American tribes, the city was established by the French in 1718 and passed through Spanish hands and back through French hands before becoming part of the United States in 1803. German and Swiss immigrants also constituted a significant part of the population from early in the city’s development and large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived in the 19th century. But most importantly for the history of jazz, the African influence was present right from the city’s conception. A 1721 census records the population as 37% black and by the time New Orleans became part of the U.S., that figure had risen to 50%.[1]

This confluence of diverse musical influences not surprisingly led to the development of a new form of musical creativity—jazz. The first music called jazz was played by untrained African-American musicians. It at first retained the flavor of New Orleans’s characteristic marching band tradition along with more complex African rhythms, and synthetic scales of combined European and African elements. These new scales led to the distinctive melodies and harmonies of jazz. Following Reconstruction, the racial violence in New Orleans led many jazz musicians to move to other parts of America. Reaching a wider audience, jazz (at this point in its development called “ragtime,” example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPmruHc4S9Q ) became popular throughout much of the country and took a new turn: white musicians started modifying the genre to make it more palatable to white middle-class Americans and started transcribing it onto sheet music so that classically-trained musicians could learn to play the new trendy music. Jazz became America’s distinct contribution to the world music scene and served as the vine from which sprouted the plethora of genres that constitute everyday American music—rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, rock, rap, hip-hop, and pop.

Jazz even made its way into the most prestigious classical music circles ever since George Gershwin’s orchestral jazz pieces such as Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. The influence of Jazz has so thoroughly permeated our culture that we usually fail to notice its presence. As another example, most of the Christian music from the past hundred years that is sung and listened to by evangelicals includes a direct or indirect jazz influence, and even churches with more liturgical traditions might have Jazz Vespers, as some classmates and I experienced at Pasadena’s Episcopal Church last Sunday:(see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57MaRunWcYY ).

When I saw the title of our LA Phil concert “The Edge of Jazz” and saw every piece on the program labeled “world premiere,” I imagined a concert displaying the cutting edge of jazz. The music certainly was avant-garde, but the jazz presence in the music turned out to be more muted than I had anticipated. This made sense once I realized that “The Edge of Jazz” referred to the borderline between jazz music and classical music. This lineup of six world premieres was an exploration of the border line—perhaps even a rejection of the boundary—between the styles of classical and jazz in the 21st century. Just as jazz emerged as a hybrid form of music in one of the most diverse cities of the 19th century, now jazz and classical styles have been more recently melding into a new hybrid. On Tuesday night, we got to witness this new hybrid reach a new level of maturity in one of the most diverse cities of the 21st century world. What a privilege it was!

Besides showing us an interesting new development in the evolution of music, the concert also showed us a thrilling example of that which started as an outlier form of art created by the most oppressed sector of the American population being now performed by one of America’s best-trained orchestras in one of America’s most prestigious venues. Jazz is both bringing contemporary composers much-desired possibilities for originality, and—as we saw Tuesday night—is starting to bring some contemporary composers back to classical music’s roots in improvisation.

How does this relate to the city of LA specifically? First of all, it shows us that Los Angeles, the desert city built on dreams, and self-fulfilling prophecies has become in reality a true hub of valuable artistic production. All of the pieces were commissioned and premiered by the LA Phil and half of the composers were based in LA. Also, the program was curated by Herbie Hancock, who lives in Hollywood. We saw LA proving its status as a production center of high art. Second, the hybrid music of the concert, reflects the hybrid culture of its city. Los Angeles is the product of the confluence of countless ethnicities, among the most influential Mexican, Anglo, African-American, and Asian. This diversity has often led to turmoil and violence in LA history. But it also has created an atmosphere filled with creative energy. Just as the clash of cultures in the swamp of New Orleans brought beautiful new art into existence, so the clash of cultures in the desert of LA is doing the same today, both in music and in many other forms of art.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Orleans-Louisiana/History#ref11812