Writers have often portrayed the history of jazz as a narrative of progress. Their accounts show jazz evolving from a boisterous type of dance music into forms of increasing complexity, gradually rising in prestige to become an artistic tradition revered around the world. Certainly attitudes towards the music have changed dramatically. In 1924 an editorial writer for The New York Times called jazz "a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages"; in 1987 the United States Congress passed a resolution designating jazz "an outstanding model of individual expression" and "a rare and valuable national American treasure". In keeping with this general theme of progress, historians have emphasized innovation as a primary force driving jazz forward, identifying new techniques, concepts and structures that presumably helped push the music to ever higher stages of development.
But tracing lines of evolution and innovation in jazz reveals only part of a story much broader in scope and more complex in structure. For if some musicians have sought to make a mark as adventurous innovators, many others have viewed themselves as stalwart bearers of tradition. If some have struggled as uncompromising creative artists whose work reaches only a small, select audience, others have flourished providing entertainment for the masses. And if jazz has undeniably accrued status and respect over the years, it has also consistently provoked controversy. The term itself has often carried negative associations, which is partly why Duke Ellington and other musicians spurned the label, and why Max Roach once told an interviewer, "I resent the word unequivocally" (Taylor, H1977, p.110).
Several factors account for the volatility of jazz as an object of study. First, its musical identity cannot be isolated or delimited. Although often used to designate a single musical idiom, "jazz" (like the signifier "classical") refers to an extended family of genres, with all members sharing at least some traits in common yet none capable of representing the whole.
