It is easy for traditional jazz critics to go on and on about the genre’s importance. They can say things like, “Jazz is one of the few true American art forms,” or, “It laid the groundwork for all music in the last 50 years” (rock and hip-hop included). They could even try to tell you about its racial significance — possibly that it’s another black contribution eventually subsumed into white culture.

Why, then, does jazz music feel so damn irrelevant today?

It’s true that our current outlook on the genre — and more problematically, the popular outlook — leaves much to be desired in the way of excitement and progress.

The best-known jazz musician ever made his primary musical mark in the ’50s and ’60s and died more than a decade ago. Yet most people recognize Miles Davis as jazz, and thereby recognize jazz — like Miles — as having made its mark half a century ago and since dying.

Sadly, most people think of jazz as old — an old music played by now-old people (either that or lame young white guys wearing silk shirts and toting Real Books to hotel lobbies).

Maybe we’re focusing on all the wrong things.

Instead of looking at what jazz did, where it has been, and who played it, we should be looking at what jazz means. It means personal expression; it means improvisation. It means freedom from structure, and it means shaking asses. Can these qualities not exist in music today?

By now, you’re probably screaming about hip-hop, and one can hardly blame you. MCs freestyle, people get on their feet, and another type of black music takes the world by storm. This is hip-hop, but the current state has gotten too far away from the root. Hip-hop has been tainted by a commercialization that jazz never felt.

Sure, jazz was pop music in the ’40s, but that was pop then, not pop in the 21st-century conglomerated media culture. While post-pop jazz was some of the most important music in history, accomplishments in hip-hop came before the MTV appearances and magazine covers.

Fortunately, there are other places to look. Away from the hopeless retro scene of Marsalis and Co., far from hip-hop’s commercial confusion and separated from the embarrassing smooth jazz genre, real jazz is happening. And it’s happening more often than you think.

Try these names on for size: Medeski Martin & Wood, Béla Fleck, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Herbie Hancock (yes, that Herbie Hancock), Jason Lindner, John Scofield, Pat Metheny, ?uestlove (and his Philly crowd), Roy Hargrove, Ulu, The Bad Plus, Chris Thile, Erykah Badu …

Okay, now I’m stretching to make a point — jazz is everywhere, it is everyone. What does it sound like?

The sound is pretty irrelevant — in fact, only five of the artists listed above feature horns (an instrumental standard in traditional jazz) in their music. One plays a banjo. One is a hip-hop drummer. One recently covered Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

With all this variety, what defines jazz? That, my friends, is outside the scope of this column (not to mention that I am horribly underqualified to answer the question).

But that’s not important. What is important is that these artists are taking the same musical direction, the same artistic direction as the black musicians who reinvented American music in the first half of the 20th century.

They are experimenting. They are breaking boundaries. They are improvising and expressing themselves for the sake of art, not for profit.

In the next 15 weeks, I hope to encourage you to think of jazz in a different way, and I hope you’ll be exposed to jazz that makes you think differently. The goal of this column is to give you an overview of this jazz and to give you a tour of the modern jazz genre in all its splintered glory.

John Zeratsky is a senior news designer at The Badger Herald. Other than that, he plays a blend of Billy Martin and ?uestlove on the drums and read 13 books between June and July. His best friend is the only jazz harpist he knows. You can reach John through his website, www.johnzeratsky.com, or at [email protected].