I consulted the Collins English Dictionary and even they, the compilers of the final words on all matters and meanings of the English language seemed to have difficulty pinning 'jazz' down, describing it as: "A kind of popular music of African-American origin that has an exciting rhythm and often involves improvisation."

This definition is only part of the story.

Ask the question: What is jazz and you'll likely get as many answers as there are questionees. (Yes I made that word up. I improvised)

Is it dance music?

Can you dance to jazz?

Well yes, but then again you could dance to one of those wretched wind chimes or the sound of a howling dog if it took your fancy.

Does jazz have an exciting rhythm?

Sometimes, and the exciting rhythms are many and varied.

But ballads are a major part of a jazz player's repertoire, not to mention moody atmospheric jazz and here the rhythms can be far from exciting.

Improvisation is making do with whatever is available at the time and improvising in a musical sense essentially means making it up as you go along.

Improvisation is the core of what jazz is all about.

Imagine standing blindfolded on a diving tower and taking a leap into the unknown.

This, in my opinion, is what true jazz musicians do each and every time they perform.

It takes courage and there's always the chance of a belly flop.

In a sense early European composers played jazz, as did the African-Americans mentioned in the Collins English Dictionary.

Schubert often improvised at the piano for garden parties.

Mozart and Bach improvised within a harmonic framework called 'figured bass' similar to our modern chord system.

Unfortunately their musical colleagues were either cerebrally challenged or artistically inept so that the notes eventually had to be written down for them in order to facilitate a successful performance.

Rumour has it that aspiring composers were wary about offering their pieces up for performance by the virtuoso pianist Franz List because he tended to improve and modify them as he went along. So much so that by the third performance it had become an entirely new piece.

Surely he was playing jazz.

So what is jazz?

My personal definition is 'spontaneous composition'.

Innovators like Charlie Parker (Alto saxophone) and Miles Davis (Trumpet) used the harmonic structures of popular tunes in the 1930s and 40s. They'd tell the house band to play chords for "Sweet Georgia Brown" for example over which they'd composed a new and more challenging melody (In this case "Dig" by Miles Davis) as a launching pad for many and varied improvised solos.

That's what makes jazz exciting: The search for something new.

It's always fresh.

And it's dangerous.

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