What does jazz mean to you?

It's about now that everybody in the London jazz loop starts gearing up for the city's annual jazz festival, starting on November 14 and running for 10 days. We'll be aiming to cover as much of this internationally celebrated event as the logistics of trying to be in several places at once allow, with a mixture of reviews and hopefully the odd snatch of gossip.

The challenge of covering the festival made me reflect on what attracted me to jazz in the first place, and why it mattered so crucially to the cultural evolution of the 20th century - and matters still. I remembered hearing Thelonious Monk's playing for the first time, a strange, clangy, rhythmically wayward sound full of pauses where there didn't ought to be any, and then rushes of flinty notes as if he was trying to catch up with a band accelerating away from him. I remembered hearing Miles Davis's muted trumpet, a coaxing, plaintive sound that seemed to caress songs where Monk battered them like a woodpecker. I remembered Charlie Parker's searing alto improvisations, or John Coltrane's bone-shaking low sax note at the end of a phrase on Kind of Blue's anthemic All Blues. It all seemed like music that just exploded with character - idiosyncratic, verbose or baffling, passionate, introspective, fluent, shy, incoherent, restless or troubled. It seemed like facets of all the people I knew, or wanted to know.

Jazz is different now, and my attempting to reach a definition of it for this Friday's Guardian Film & Music jazz special is proving just how much it has changed. The programme for the opening night of the London Jazz Festival on November 14 confirms it: Femi Kuti's African jazz, Arve Henriksen and Iain Ballamy's dreamy improvisations with the London Sinfonietta, the singing of classic jazz stylists celebrated by today's stars, the fierce free-improv of saxophonist Ken Vandermark with likeminded virtuosi Barry Guy and Mark Sanders - and much more. Given all that, if you have any thoughts as to what jazz means to you, let us know. You might make a currently awesome task a lot easier.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/nov/03/london-jazz-festival