How stretchy is your definition of jazz?

Pondering abuses, alleged and otherwise, of a genre tag

What’s undeniably in jazz territory? What’s out? How elastic is your definition? Where’s the line between personal expression through improvisation and the sonic wallpaper of Kenny G., which has been effectively marketed as jazz?

We could play a version of this game every week — and hey, it’s all individual taste so no wrong answers.

Pick a new release listed under jazz in any of the online streaming realms, or better, Bandcamp. Listen. Does it line up with your definition? Could it work in a generic Dinner Jazz playlist or, perhaps, one devoted to Late Night Jazz? Or is it too jazz for those?

We inevitably don’t agree on the perimeters of these terms of classification, which have, in recent years, become delightfully muddy with cross-references. They’re not precise like GPS — rather, a shorthand that can put you in the general vicinity. Or not.

This week’s most significant jazz release is Return Concert, the 1973 Town Hall concert by visionary pianist Cecil Taylor and an agile, profoundly conversational small group. As this terrific story in the New York Times explains, Taylor, then age 44, had deliberately shifted his emphasis from recording to teaching in the late 1960s, after a run of acclaimed records for Blue Note. He’d not documented any music for five years when several key members of the Cecil Taylor Unit — alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and percussionist Andrew Cyrille — along with bassist Sirone (Norris Jones) assembled at Town Hall.

What transpired was free improvisation that pushed well beyond the expected frenetics, and re-established Taylor as the most thoughtful magician in a fertime time. A chunk of the performance has been available before. The two-part “Spring of Two Blue-J’s” was issued in 1974 and hailed by Village Voice critic Gary Giddins as the jazz album of the year.

The new release includes a previously unavailable opening piece, the 88-minute “Autumn/Parade,” and it’s an essential document. Without imposing a rigid structure, Taylor used small chordal phrases in writerly ways, as provocations, or rhetorical questions, or, sometimes, as meta framing devices that return when least expected. The group caught these implications and amplified them; there are moments when the free interplay moves at head-snapping velocity, a torrent of new ideas interspersed with antic inversions of jazz themes like Sonny Rollins’ “Pent-Up House.”

Despite the density of information, the jazzness of this one is pretty clear. Unless, that is, your timeline stopped during the big band era.

The people who classify Return Concert as jazz might put Kyoto Jazz Massive in a different bucket. The crossover-minded collective is the brainchild of brothers Shuya and Yoshihiro Okino, DJs and producers who came to the attention of DJ and BBC-affiliated coolhunter Gilles Peterson with the 2002 album Spirit of the Sun.

That album, which begins with a roiling 6/8 groove called “The Brightness of These Days” and features vocals from Vanessa Freeman, was marketed as electronic music. Alongside Jazzanova and others, Kyoto Jazz Massive became part of a wave of DJ-driven subgenres with names like “Future Jazz and “Broken Beat.”

After laying low and doing remixes and such for 20 years, KJM returned in December 2021 with a super-alive, sometimes spiritual record called Message From a New Dawn. This time, a bunch of musicians (including the endlessly sampled vibraphonist Roy Ayers) are credited, and the sweet, sculptured atmospheres are spiked with electric piano and brash analog synth solos that actually go places. It’s not the kind of searching invention associated with Cecil Taylor, but it’s not all consonant Happy Place noodling either: There are moments of rippling tension and surges and peaks. When a few of these pieces end, you might have the sense that you’ve been taken on a journey.

Which pretty much shortcircuits all that “Is it Jazz Enough?” talk, and aligns this project with one of the legendary drummer Max Roach’s enduring broad notions about jazz: Does it tell a story?

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