One of the more exciting pop/jazz artists I’ve heard in recent months is this little known South Korean group called Clazziquai Project. This band melds together acid jazz, soul and electronic music to create a form of jazz that is accessible but also quite enjoyable. If you’re interested in how jazz has developed or mutated in other countries then check out the very unique sound.

I have been researching for quite some time about jazz music and jazz artists and it’s kind of fun to know that Jazz music has subgenres. I thought that jazz music is only classified as just a single music genre. Anyway, here is what I found out. Jazz music has subgenres such as Smooth Jazz, Acid Jazz, Pop Jazz, Mainstream Jazz, Jazz Fusion, Latin Jazz, Blues Jazz, Brass Jazz and Bosa Nova. It’s funny that I call myself a music lover yet I don’t know these jazz music subgenres or better yet know Bosa Nova as a type of jazz music.

It is just now that I found out that Norah Jones is a jazz singer. Well, her songs are kind of slow like some jazz songs but it never occurred to me that, indeed, she is a jazz artist. Anyway, that only proves that she was successful in bridging the gap between jazz and pop music and I think many people really adored her for that. However, if you are a fan of hers who wants to explore her jazzy side you might want to listen to some jazz artists like Cassandra Wilson, Madeleine Peyroux, Charlie Hunter, Billie Holiday, and Bill Frisell

The truth? It’s really hard to find something about jazz music. It’s maybe because jazz music is not really that popular in all countries unlike pop. However, jazz music is not considered to be really unpopular, it is just that only certain people appreciate this type of music. I did some reading and found out that jazz is actually popular in Europe and Japan. That fact came to me as a surprise. I expected these countries or continent to be more into pop music. Anyway, that’s what I discovered and according to the source, American jazz musicians prefer to live in Europe and Japan because business is better there than in America.

According to a research, the jazz musicians unconsciously switch off regions of the brain involved in self-censorship and firing up the area linked to self-expression.  The scientist from the University and the national Institute on Deafness and other communications disorders used FMRI to scan the brains of jazz musicians as they played a specially-designed piano keyboard.

A musical art form which is originally developed by African Americans from around the world since the 20^th century is Jazz. Characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythm, and improvisation, also as ht first original art form to emerge from the United States of America, it was described as the “America’s Classical Music”

 “There have long been debates in the jazz community over the definition and the boundaries of “jazz.” In the mid-1930s, New Orleans jazz lovers criticized the “innovations” of the swing era as being contrary to the collective improvisation they saw as essential to “true” jazz. Through the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, traditional jazz enthusiasts and Bop enthusiasts criticized each other, often arguing that the other style was somehow not “real” jazz. Although alteration or transformation of jazz by new influences has often been initially criticized as a “debasement,” Andrew Gilbert argues that jazz has the “ability to absorb and transform influences” from diverse musical styles^. Commercially-oriented or ‘popular’ music-influenced forms of jazz have both long been criticized, at least since the emergence of Bop. Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed Bop, the 1970s jazz fusion era [and much else] as a period of commercial debasement of the music. However, according to Bruce Johnson, jazz music has always had a “tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form.””

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz#Jazz_fusion