JAZZ • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Jazz

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/dʒæz/ Listen

noun

jazz n.

A type of music that originated in New Orleans around 1900 and developed through increasingly complex styles, but generally featuring intricate rhythms, improvisation, prominent solo segments, and great freedom in harmonic idiom played frequently in a polyphonic style, on various instruments including horn, saxophone, piano and percussion, but rarely stringed instruments.

Empty or insincere or exaggerated talk; as, don't give me any of that jazz.

Synonyms: wind, idle words, nothingness.

A style of dance music popular in the 1920s; similar to New Orleans jazz but played by large bands.

See images of 'Jazz'

Etymology of 'Jazz'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Jazz" Quotes from Famous Books

... was Jazz Nelson and Mahaney Nelson. He come from Louisiana durin' slavery. She come from Richmond, Virginia. I think from what they said he come to Louisiana from there too. They was ...

— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... stay down-away at the Sausage Farm? It's a scream, it wouldn't seem you could dream such perfect ch-e-arm; You can bet that Jazz'll be beat to a frazzle, And the old Fox Trot'll be a pale green mottle, When they gauge what's the rage of the age at the Sausage ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various

... alone, seize each other in an ecstasy of amusement, and jazz to the settee, where they sit down again ...

— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... with me, young feller," he said. "You won't ride Jazz in the ring to-night; he's the rottenest, most treacherous little wretch with the outfit, and I only put you on him to call your bluff. Want to join the show? We had to leave our rough-rider back in the last ...

— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... mentally to find signs of an alarm here—to encounter persons hurrying toward the Thirty-ninth Street side of the building. But nothing of the sort was afoot. A darky orchestra was playing a jazz tune very loudly in the cafe at the left of the Broadway entrance, so it was not only possible but very likely that the sounds of the shots had not been heard inside the hotel at all. Certainly his eye, sweeping the place, discovered no evidences of any unusual stir. Perhaps half ...

— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

More quotes...