Penza, 17 May 2015. PenzaNews. The editor-in-chief of Jazz.ru magazine Kirill Moshkov held a lecture “Improvisation and Jazz: Who Will Win?” during the project “Intellectual park ‘Academia’” in the Penza regional Philarmonic Hall on Saturday, May 16.

“I chose the topic I put into words in the most provocative manner. Of course, the first question the people ask is ‘Isn’t that one and the same?’,” the lector added, and explained the similarities and the differences using video recordings of well-known jazz musicians.

According to the journalist, when “the jazz art appeared, boiled down in the melting pot of the vivid cultural life in the US South, those who researched it took time to notice this music is mostly improvisation.”

“When it became clear improvisation is the core of jazz, many jazz analysts forgot about everything else but that. For the first fifty years of the development of jazz as a musical genre, improvisation was developing along very strict guidelines defined by its beat and harmony structure, the harmonic scale, the set of chords written in the composition. As a result, the notion we can define as a jazz idiom fully materialized by the 50s of the previous century,” the music critic said.

The idiom is a set of characteristics that helps a listener identify jazz music, Kirill Moshkov said.

“Certain beats, the manner of working with the harmony, and, most importantly, a musician’s tone, the way he plays the musical score. And since jazz usually has no set musical score per se, a musician’s tone plays an even more important role. A jazz player practically rewrites the music every time he plays it,” the journalist explained.

The editor-in-chief of “Jazz.ru” also provided examples of classical music score used in jazz compositions, and told the foundation history of the modern school of jazz.

“Jazz has the conservative wing that says the jazz of the 50s and 60s is its face, the golden state of the jazz idiom, something that should be preserved forever, if possible. This wing is led by the American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Of course not all musicians agree to that, and the conservative wing coexists with the experimental wing that disassembles the old-school jazz idiom to find new sounds,” Kirill Moshkov noted.

“For the musicians of the new age, improvisation in jazz is more important than preserving the elements of the jazz idiom intact,” he stressed.