Jazz

Some might say jazz exists to make us all comfortable with the fact that we don’t understand everything and we don’t need to. Perhaps the most academic of genres—excepting classical—jazz has descriptors like “free,” “ethno,” “cool,” and “improvisational,” which makes it seem more like a philosophical movement than a music genre, and maybe it is. Sometimes it’s so chaotic that it melts away the chaos in your mind, and sometimes it’s so smooth you forget you’ve been on hold for ten minutes. Subgenres include Big Band, Swing, and Bebop, regional varieties like African Jazz, Latin Jazz, and Dixieland, and Fusion Jazz, which blends genres such as funk, rock, and blues.