Jazz REdefined
While jazz may be difficult to define, improvisation is clearly one of its key elements. Early blues was commonly structured and designed around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition. A form of folk music which had emerged in part from work songs and field hollers of rural Blacks, early blues was also highly improvisational. These features are fundamental to the nature of jazz. While in European classical music elements of interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment are usually remained to the performer’s discretion, the performer’s primary goal is to play a composition as it was written.