Džez između popularne glazbe i elitne umjetnosti
Jazz between Popular and High Art

Summary/Abstract: At the very beginning of his paper titled "Is Jazz Popular Music?" Simon Frith claims that it is very easy to give an answer to that question. He simply and clearly says "Yes! End of discussion". However, the fact that there has been no consensus concerning that question for a long time, neither among theorists nor among musicians and audiences, indicates that the answer to that question isn’t that simple and emphasizes the complexity of jazz as a cultural and musical phenomenon created at the beginning of the 20th century. Considering, in a way, the paradoxical nature of jazz and its specific historical development, the fact that "popular music studies" and "jazz studies" are completely different scientific disciplines seems symptomatic. Although in its beginnings, in the 1920s and 1930s, in one of its variants, jazz indubitably had the character of popular music, some theorists believe that this side of it has been completely neglected unfairly. Jazz music maintains a minority status in popular music research. On the other hand, jazz is often defined as "American classical music" rather than as massmediated popular music, and should as such be treated as serious high art. The advocates of this position believe that jazz music isn’t neglected within "popular music studies", but that it doesn’t even belong there. Whether we view the history of jazz music in an evolutionary way, as a genre progressing from folk form to commercial entertainment to an art, or as an ever-changing dialectic relationship between the mainstream and the avant-garde, jazz still remains problematic to define.

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