Jazz is...

"Jazz, then, breaks with Western convential thinking, denying the distinctions between composer and performer, creator and interpreter, composer and arranger, soloist and accompanist, artist and entertainer, even soloist and group. In jazz, it is the activity itself that is as important as the result. It is a music that is learned in the doing, in collective play: it is a social music, with some of the features of early African-American social organization still evident in its execution. As such, it is a way of being as well as a way of doing. It is an emergent form, a social form, and as much an ethic as it is an aesthetic."

John F. Szwed

link via the jazz theologian.