I kid, I kid. I bought a Greatful Dead album download recently, and enjoyed it, although that particular album was not very jazzy, i.e. not a lot of improvisation.

I would say improvisation is the most crucial element defining jazz, though I would broaden the definition to include uniquely arranging or transforming the original composition through performance in some way. For example, Susannah Hoffs and Matthew Sweet have done two covers albums, and some of their covers come dangerously close to trying to reverently replicate the original recordings. Those kinds of “faithful renditions” are very far away from jazz. But when Shawn Colvin performed the Talking Heads' This Must Be The Place on her album Cover Girl, that was truly a transformation of the song. If not jazz, it was in the spirit of jazz.

Jazz is ripping music apart and putting it back together in a unique and hopefully still musically valid manner.

I went to a school (Northern Illinois University) where swing and blues were ESSENTIAL elements of the “official” jazz definition. Every CD the jazz ensemble ever released had the word “swing” in the title. “Swingin' into the Millenium,” “We Came to Swing,” “Swingin' Every Which Way But Loose,” to name but a few. Our director also insisted that every solo played by every member of the big band must sound bluesy. His standard instructions to a student whose solo was less than great was, “more blues!!!”

It was tough to reconcile this perspective with what I saw occurring in the real world. The aforementioned educator responded by simply saying, “that isn't jazz,” if something didn't sound like his definition of it. I'm not really that offended by that, to be honest. You might even hear me say, “Carrie Underwood isn't country,” because to me, it sounds like it has nothing to do with Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. What I have a problem with is people saying that the music is invalid because of its lack of swing or blues. That discounts the entire canon of Western Classical Music, for starters. I'm reminded of this quote from a recent John Zorn interview:

“People started judging this new music with the standards of jazz, with the definitions of what jazz is and isn’t, because stories about it appeared in jazz magazines. And now I’ll do a gig at the Marciac Jazz Festival and I’ll get offstage and Wynton Marsalis will say, 'That’s not jazz.' And I’ll say, 'You’re right! But this is the only gig I’ve got, man. Give me another festival and I’ll play there.'”

I call the new stuff, the European stuff, the free stuff, the Bjork and Radiohead covers etc., “jazz,” because it's part of the jazz continuum. Jazz players take their jazz training and apply it to other repoertoire, other sound experiments. This is part of a long tradition of jazz musicians borrowing from other genres (Manteca, anyone? Sketches of Spain? Bird with Strings?). But: if some militant says, “that's not jazz,” I guess it's OK. Just don't say that means it's not worth listening to, and don't get mad at me for calling it “jazz.”