What is jazz? Good question! Louis Armstrong said if you had to explain it to someone, they just didn't get it, just didn't dig it, in Satchmo-speak. Jazz journalist Whitney Balliet, oft-quoted, called jazz "the music of surprise". It's been called America's art form and America's gift to the music world.

Jazz comes in many styles and has many labels-trad, Dixieland, mainstream, bop, modern, avant-garde, fusion, funk, acid, Latin, you name it. Everyone else does.

It originated as a blend of European and black American music and evolved from there, drawing inputs from many sources. It's not much more than a century old. The essence of jazz is improvisation, usually within a written framework. But it's also about emotion, a feeling, like you "feel" a blues number when you hear one.

There are books written about how jazz started in New Orleans, with black musicians in brass bands playing at funerals and street parades. Then it went "up the river", the Mississippi, to cities like Kansas City and Chicago and spread far and wide, including to Europe.

Jazz was usually played in sleazy joints like bordellos and speakeasies. Vocalist Blossom Deane told her club audience that she didn't tell her mother she was singing there. "She thinks I'm in jail!"

But no more. Jazz, though still not well paid, has come of age. It's now recognised as a genuine, sophisticated art form, as simple and yet as complex as music by Bach or Beethoven. Jazz fans often love Bach and if he came back today, I'm sure he'd love jazz.

Popular music feeds off jazz and jazz feeds off popular music. Many of the good songs, the best popular numbers, become jazz "standards". Jazz musicians not only play music, they play with music-change it, improvise it, kick it around in a group.

How do you get to like jazz, to learn about jazz? Listen, if possible, to live jazz. It's fascinating and exciting to see and hear top jazz being created and played in front of your eyes and ears.

You may find you like the simple, toe-tapping trad or Dixieland. You may like the more sophisticated modern jazz such as bop (the revolution led by saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, considered by many to be the next jazz genius after Louis Armstrong). You may like fusion, which developed after the arrival of electronic instruments on the rock scene in the 1960s. Most people like swing, as played by the big bands like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller around World War II.

Or, if you're lucky, you may like it all!

Neal Sellars is founding co-ordinator of the 4ttt Palmer Street Jazz Festival in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia.