(How) Is Jazz (Also) Indie (Now)?
And how might that matter?
Jul 17, 2025
In this post, I’d like to pick up where I left off, reconsidering the relationship between jazz and rock music. Specifically, I’d like to redirect us slightly, from rock in general to indie (rock) more particularly. In an article I’m working on, I make the case that a strain of contemporary jazz (or contemporary improvised music) can be productively understood as a type of indie music. Furthermore, I’m suggesting that jazz studies and popular music studies have insights about one another’s music from which each field can benefit.
There are already plenty of folks doing that kind of great, interdisciplinary work. Brian Wright, for example, works on the history of the electric bass (among other topics), so naturally researches jazz and rock history in order to elucidate the work of the bass across both genre spaces. Likewise, Stephanie Doktor researches the ways in which race and systems of racialized power get encoded into sound—and while she has focused on early jazz in particular, this research also enables her to theorize similar dynamics in more contemporary music. AJ Kluth works on the Jazz is Dead phenomenon, among other things, and many of the musicians involved in that west coast scene deliberately blur the line between improvised music and popular genres using the tradition of Great Black Music as a through-line. But whereas the Afrofuturist aesthetics associated with figures like Sun Ra have long allowed us to consider jazz/rock fusions (ahem),[1] the moment when indie and jazz were spoken about in the same sentence seems comparable blip.[2]
In an effort to continue this kind of (shall we say, crossover?) work, I’m arguing that jazz and indie share many formal qualities, and might be moving closer toward one another as time goes on. What can be gained by understanding jazz as indie music? What kinds of questions are we empowered to ask by considering this possibility, and what kind of music does it encourage us to hear, in new ways or for the first time?
This line of thinking was directly inspired by my friends, many of whom I went to jazz school with before they took that idiomatic knowledge into genres beyond jazz. If someone like Greg plays in an improvising guitar trio on Saturday and goes on tour with Perfume Genius on Sunday, what kind of musician does that make him? If Lauren can return from tour with Japanese Breakfast (or Iron and Wine) and play a gig with her own experimental large ensemble, what kind of career is she building? Musicians like these play jazz, indie, pop, and more, recording for film and TV beyond their own projects, playing in both bars and arenas alike.[3]
Yes, guitarist Mei Semones plays rhythmically complex indie rock that’s unusual in its own right for instrumentation, harmonic language, and more. Yes, she also plays jazz standards on her Instagram account (among other places!). If she’s doing both, I’m suggesting, scholars in both jazz studies and popular music studies—and especially those scholars straddling both fields—should be paying attention to her and musicians like her, to the working lives of people squeezed together no matter what genre they play in, unified by pressing economic circumstances as much as any creative impulses to break new ground.
I’m not going to get into too much detail here, because the article I’m working on is under review. But I’ll briefly outline the approach I’m taking below, which is based around four characteristics of indie music as I see it:
DIY
Indie is short for “independent,” a designation that came about in the 1980s punk scene in the UK to describe rock musicians who viewed other rock musicians who signed with big labels as inauthentic and suspicious. This subculture within a subculture broke with mainstream rock acts not aesthetically but logistically, and chose to compose, record, perform, market, distribute, and do all the other stuff required to get one’s music out there on their own; yes, having major labels help with that stuff made it easier, and it certainly made it easier to get paid. But for these punks, the tradeoffs weren’t worth it. Compromising artistic integrity by letting corporate sponsors get involved became the ultimate taboo in indie spaces, an ethos that lasted until Nirvana kind of broke everything.
This might be the most straightforward parallel to be drawn about jazz and indie music, insofar as the vast majority of jazz musicians working are doing everything themselves, unsupported by any major industry players whatsoever. Even if jazz record sales didn’t pale in comparison to other popular music genres, most musicians in those genres are increasingly on the hook for increasingly more aspects of music producing. As everyone moves into what I’m calling a space of “compulsory DIY,” jazz musicians and indie musicians have more in common than ever.
Subcultural Value(s)
Here the only point I want to make is that jazz culture—just like indie music—is defined by a division between the mainstream and many subcultures. The mainstream represents those rarified few with institutional backing, the support of non-profits, universities, grant-funding institutions, jazz festival promoters, and other players who legitimize a certain dominant mode of making jazz music by wielding financial capital in ways that gatekeep other approaches to the music.
If indie music was at one time defined by its ideological opposition to mainstream rock culture, many avant-garde, experimental, and popular jazz artists (that is, jazz musicians who consciously make music that steps outside of neoclassical jazz) express something of that ideology themselves in their refusal to normalize despite receiving comparatively less support. The best example I can think of here is university jazz programs, which as I’ve written elsewhere, consistently marginalize the avant-garde across the board. Rather than mitigating their experimental impulses, jazz musicians who want to keep making other types of music often express their identities and values as oppositional to the mainstream, Wynton Marsalis way of doing things.
Genre Characteristics
At a certain point in the early 2000s, indie resurfaced not as a mode of making music but as a genre in its own right. The problem was that the genre was rather incoherent: garage rock bands like the White Stripes counted, but so did electronic bands like Bibio. Some leaned heavy into synthesizers (MGMT, Phoenix) where groups like Grizzly Bear balanced them against guitars. More eclectic groups like Beirut and Neutral Milk Hotel expanded textural possibilities while retaining something of the Decemberists’ folk-leaning sensibility. So on the one hand, I’m suggesting that contemporary jazz musicians use many of the signifiers of this indie genre today. But at the same time, these sounds are diverse, unified less by specific instrumentation and more the abstract qualities associated with emotional complexity. The point I’m trying to make is that lots of jazz musicians are making music today that involves improvisation to a certain degree, traditional jazz instrumentation, and musical gestures that fir more within the evolving and amorphous indie genre than other, comparable genres of popular music.
In the sense of both genre and ambivalent sensibilities (see the next point), many jazz musicians today play indie music insofar as they 1) combine improvisation and jazz instrumentation with popular music song structures and 2) they avoid the virtuosic, dance-oriented posture of funk adjacent fusion music. Songs that incorporate distorted guitar or swirling loops or arpeggiated strumming eschew fusion’s emphasis on (if I may) rocking out, instead opting to explore texture imbued with emotional ambiguity. In this way, a certain strain of improvised music—made by musicians trained in jazz, but often playing with musicians in other genres—can’t be accurately described as “fusion” music.
Affective Shift
Indie and jazz have always been uniquely multivalent terms as genre designations go. As such, they are perhaps particularly vulnerable for the kinds of dynamics the streaming era has entered, which are in part breaking apart our traditional genre distinctions in several ways. Whereas sonic characteristics and social values used to hold relatively consistently around the idea of a given genre, today both are under pressure from streaming algorithms that prioritize moods and vibes more than they do genres, suggesting to listeners that the latter are outdated indexes of a time in which identity politics mattered to music consumption.
Of course, as Robin James has argued, we haven’t left genre behind completely. But as the music landscape gets increasingly ambiguous, genres are showing up in new ways, deployed as affects by artists who may or may not “properly” belong in the genre they’re utilizing. I’ve talked before about Olivia Rodrigo, for example, who turns to the guitar for a pop-punk sound when she wants to express anger, at the same time that she’s never reduced to being defined by that genre in the press. This is a matter of her doing, rather than being.
For this reason and others, it may be more useful to think about both jazz and indie as affects that traverse musical genres, in addition to being genres in their own right. And if I convincingly make that case, then I also think that opens up a bucket of new questions for jazz studies and popular music scholars alike. If artists who come from many traditions can utilize indie and jazz affects without pigeonholing themselves into one or another genre space, when, how, and for what ends do they do so? In other words, what is the work that jazz affects perform when deployed? Likewise for indie? Who turns to these sounds and what use do they make of them? If (a certain kind of) jazz and indie are finding common logistical and sonic spaces in which to co-mingle, how does that change our understanding of both? Is it a coincidence that even some of the visual language is shared??
I
Don’t
Think
So
(cry hard)
——
1 Essentially “jazz rock” and “fusion” became synonyms at a certain point in the literature. When I talk about “indie,” by contrast, I mean it specifically to contrast with both fusion and jazz rock as they have become understood.
2 I’ve found one NYT piece by Nate Chinen that names this moment, and associates it with bands like Tortoise and Jim Black’s AlasNoAxis.
3 I almost spat my seltzer last summer when I spied Lauren playing in a session with that dog. on a track from an album that’s organized around missing Charlie Haden, who had just passed. (Two Haden sisters were original members of that dog., but Lauren and I’m guessing many other musicians in that Los Angeles studio knew and revered him, making the linked session above all the more poignant.) “I never wanted you to leave” the reconstituted trio (now with Maya Rudolph) sings, buoyed by the orchestra. “I hate that there’s no choice/That I can’t hear your voice/Unless it’s on an old LP.”
