uKanDanZ - War Pigs (2025)

I think the reason for labeling this 'jazz' becomes more apparent when you consider the route that Ethiopian music came to influence Western music in general - some of the first examples were people like Mulatu Astatke, Hailu Mergia, etc., who during the early 1970s fused Ethiopian folk music with jazz (especially latin jazz), a style aptly known as 'Ethio jazz'. The particular sound of Ethiopian music - its use of unusual pentatonic scales, for instance - became associated with jazz, and as the genre spread, the jazz label stuck even if the music it influenced lost some of the qualities which originally defined it as jazz.

I've heard that there are 3 main qualities which define jazz - 1) a focus on improvisation and mutuality, where the players actively listen and acknowledge each other through the music; 2) swing rhythm; and 3) complex harmony that is often (but not exclusively) rooted in dominant chord tensions. Music that has all three of these qualities is definitely jazz - your standard stuff like John Coltrane, Bill Evans, pre-fusion Miles Davis, etc. Music that has two of these three qualities I think is also pretty clearly jazz, though usually there's a clear influence from other musical forms. Fusion jazz often does not have a swing rhythm, being more influenced by rock or funk, but still has the improvisation/mutuality and complex harmony. Then there's jazz subgenres that don't have much improvisation - stuff like pre-arranged big band swing jazz, or 'chamber jazz' compositions in the third stream style. But they keep the complex harmony and rhythmic looseness. And of course if you look at something like free jazz, it usually maintains the swing and improvisation of jazz, but the harmony might get into really atonal or otherwise unconventional stuff that breaks from the jazz paradigm.

Ethio jazz in its original form is much like latin jazz, which often substitutes the more rigid Afro-Cuban type of rhythmic architecture for swing - this should be apparent if you listen to some of Mulatu Astatke's hits. But there's still plenty of jazz harmonies and improvisation, and indeed there's plenty of modern Ethio jazz that follows this format. But I think the compatibility of this style with things like funk rock or psych rock eventually lead to a degradation of the music's harmonic elements. If you listen to uKanDanZ's usual stuff, it pretty much avoids jazz harmony in favor of simple rock chords alongside the usual Ethiopian pentatonic stuff, though improvisation is still a vital aspect. So, 1 out of 3 isn't really jazz, though you could probably still call it 'jazz adjacent'.

This distance from the original Ethio jazz is exacerbated in the linked song, which is a cover, so there's also no improvisation. But that's language for ya - meanings shift over time and no one is the wiser, and all of the sudden we're calling this jazz.

Agreed on the jazz question. Jazz is about extemporaneous collaboration between the musicians using a shared musical vocabulary. This was a great song and a great cover, and I feel like the sax did great things for the overall tenor of the song, but it didn't look like jazz to me.