Jazz ™

Admittedly, it’s old news but I find it a real pain in the keester that companies are using “jazz” as a brand or product name. IBM has a new “product” named jazz. There’s Jazz Technologies which recently flopped on their IPO. The basketball team, the airline…egad.

Maybe they never read the million jazz articles saying there’s no money in jazz! It’s kinda funny – except that I have to rewrite all my automated Google searches to exclude all the noise caused by these corporate hijinx.

The major downside which upsets me is that it just needlessly waters down an already watered down word. What is jazz anymore? Even if you just stick to the music known as jazz, it goes all the way from traditional (dixieland) to swing to bebop to mainstream to free to fusion to jazz-rock to smooth (and at least a million variations in between these).

It’s a shame we didn’t trademark “jazz” if only just to keep out the corporate riff raff.

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