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Jazz History “What Jazz Is—and Isn’t” Summary and Response In Wynton Marsalis’ piece on perceptions of “what Jazz is”, he asserts that there are two camps of people: those that view Jazz in the tradition of a great art that resulted as a break from conventional European rules and established rules all it’s own, and those that view Jazz as an extension of unstructured African music; one in which “all blacks are automatically born with the ability to sing and keep rhythm.” The latter opinion is rightly attacked by Marsalis as being both unjustified and ignorant. The author elaborates that people in t