Against The Grain: Hugh Morris has had enough ‘jazzy’
Hugh Morris, editor of VAN magazine, writing for The Wire (originally published in issue 495):
What does it mean to be jazzy, exactly? On a fundamental level, jazzy implies something being held at arm’s length. To be jazzy is to not be jazz, but, rather, be like jazz, and, crucially, be distant from jazz. […]
The jazzy thing is a British thing, and, I reckon, a male thing, a relic from the age of the multi-talented TV showman. Roy Castle was a jazzy man, as was Bruce Forsyth. Richard Stilgoe, as Peter Capaldi’s Thick Of It character reminded us, was “a jazzy bastard”. Jools Holland, with his ubiquitous boogie-woogie and interminable chat show rambling, is today’s exemplar jazzy man.
For the younger generation, Jacob Collier is the digital version of the jazzy archetype. […]
My own musical education came via the true protectors of the jazzy flame: brass bands. Yet you know exactly what the sudden entrance of jazzy music sounds like: overly deliberate swing; tsk-tsking cymbals played by a drum kit struggling to sound surreptitious; a sudden, overwhelming feeling of noteyness; a handbrake turn from seriousness into frivolity; and the awkward introduction of embodied concepts like feel and groove into spaces which have traditionally expelled them.