Jazz is the music that came out of New Orleans a hundred years ago, built on swing and on players inventing as they go. A trumpet climbing over a walking bass, a drummer brushing the snare, a room where no two nights sound the same.
It has grown into a whole family — big band, bebop, cool, modal, free jazz — so the word says as much about how the music is played as about how it sounds. In front of a noun it stays put: a jazz band, a jazz club, a jazz standard. To jazz something up is to make it brighter or livelier: jazz up a plain dress with a red belt, jazz up the slides with a few photographs. 'And all that jazz' at the end of a list means 'and everything else of that kind'. Jazzy has drifted away from music altogether and now describes a shirt with too much going on.
1nounjazzA kind of music with strong rhythm and improvised solos, first played in the American South.
“He plays jazz on a Sunday night in a bar near the river.”
2verbbrighterTo make something brighter, livelier or more interesting.
“They jazzed the room up with paper lanterns and a string of lights.”
3nounphraseOther things of the same sort, in the phrase 'and all that jazz'.
“Forms, passport photographs, fees and all that jazz.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
jazz is a kind of music.
Nobody knows where jazz comes from, which is unusual for a word this famous. It turns up in print around 1912 and not about music at all — the subject was baseball — and only reaches the music around 1915. The guesses point at old American slang words like jasm, meaning energy or spirit, but nothing has ever been settled.
unknown. First attested around 1912 in a discussion of baseball; attested in reference to music around 1915. Numerous references suggest that the term may be connected to jasm and jism.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA