The New British Invasion: Bringing Jazz to Pop and Urban Music

The Complexities of Jazz Harmony Are Starting to Show Up Everywhere in All Popular Music Genres

A recurring debate is starting up again that might be more complicated than the usual political ones. I'm not talking about a religious argument about creationism vs. evolution or something profound enough to really ruffle a few feathers. This time it's highly subjective art and what some might call not all that important ahead of everything else: The continuing debate over what constitutes jazz and whether it's still jazz when mixed with more popular forms of music. But it seems the UK has set the precedent for an all-new musical debate the last few years. Almost forty-five years after The Beatles brought a new wave of sound and attitude to American music in 1964--new British artists such as Amy Winehouse, Jamie Cullum, Joss Stone...and, yes, even falsetto voice par excellence, James Blunt, have brought a new hybrid form of jazz to the mainstream pop charts in both the UK and America.

The jazz community has always been a bit of a close-knit coterie akin to a political party for a long time--going back to the beginnings of the musical genre here in America around the turn of the 20^th century. Outside of classical music, Jazz was the popular music of that time and set a template for itself that lasted for at least thirty years before the Big Band era started and brought on angry factions that were similar to political parties breaking apart in the early formations of American politics during the late 1700's. Ever since, the musical genre of Jazz has broken into further factions that continue to break further apart when a new controversy pops up every 10 to 20 years. The previous factions that developed after the Big Band era were the Bebop party, the Free Jazz party, the Fusion party...and the more recent faction seceding from the pack: The Libertarians of Jazz in pop music.