Electronic Music Read/ November 30, 2025/

Future Jazz music

Arising in the second half of the 1990s and also called nu jazz, Future Jazz is higher tempo, less funky, and less live performance-oriented than acid jazz. It has stronger influences of Brazilian and Latin jazz styles, although it rarely uses horns. It often comes from producers influenced by drum & bass.

Future Jazz music is a new style of music that is popular among the Post-rock generation. This genre of music is a resurgence of jazz music, but for a younger audience. This form of jazz combines the elements of music enjoyed by younger generations, such as hip-hop, EDM, and world beat music. Some hip-hop elements, such as beat-boxing and turntablism, have been added to the jazz genre along with some EDM elements, such as remixing, mashups, breakbeats, sampling, dubbing, etc. Worldbeat elements are added to this genre to make it a very exotic and diverse genre. This shows that jazz is an ever-evolving genre of music that is beginning to become more abstract and complex as time moves on.

The rise of future jazz is simply the opposite effect of rock music. Before rock music became mainstream, jazz was the dominant genre of music among the younger generations. The fans of jazz music started to age, making this genre “the establishment,” while rock music was the music enjoyed by young people. Now, rock music is enjoyed by senior citizens as much as jazz used to be in the past. Currently, jazz is seen by many people as a “high-brow” genre of music similar to classical music that is not enjoyed by the mainstream, less educated, and intelligent population. To fully appreciate modern jazz, many people have to be educated (or highly intelligent) to understand the complexity of this genre of music. Earlier forms of jazz (such as swing) blended into popular culture and are liked by almost everyone. Newer, younger people started to look at jazz as an emerging genre of music that can be combined with more modern, youthful styles such as hip-hop and EDM, giving it a progressive edge. Since the younger generations are more educated than any other generations before them, either formally or by access to the internet, they are more likely to appreciate more complex musical styling. The younger generations are starting to see rock music as simple and archaic for the times, and would rather listen to more complex, innovative music.

The roots of the future jazz trend could be traced back to some artists on YouTube. Artists such as Dirty Loops and Jacob Collier, even Pentatonix, have been introducing young people to the complexity of jazz with the rhythms, vocal harmonies, etc., by making cover songs of popular music enjoyed by young people, such as Justin Bieber.

This new jazz trend has introduced many young people to playing musical instruments. With rock music, the only instruments that young people wanted to learn were rock instruments, such as the electric guitar, so they could be like their favorite rock stars. Hip-hop and EDM were made mostly with computers, which made learning a musical instrument “uncool.” Learning to play a non-rock musical instrument in high school would make you a “band geek.” This changed with this new genre of music, which made it more “cool” to play musical instruments such as saxophones, trombones, flutes, clarinets, etc. The rebellion associated with rock and roll music is not a “shocker” in general society anymore. Tattoos, piercings, long hair on men and short hair in women, and even simply wearing jeans have been accepted in society and are starting to even become the “establishment.”