Dim Light Doesn’t Make It a Jazz Bar

The other day, during our Chicago blues night, a customer asked me,
“What other jazz bands do you have besides this one?”

I said, “This is blues. We don’t have any jazz bands at the moment.”

She persisted, “Okay… but what other jazz bands do you have on other days…?”

It stayed with me, because it wasn’t an isolated moment.

Many reviews describe Bangkok Mojo as a charming jazz bar or jazz club.

It’s not just us who experience this.
“Yes, we got a bad review from a customer because we didn’t have jazz that particular night — but we don’t call ourselves a jazz bar, some of our customers’ reviews do,” a friend who also owns a live music venue told me the other night.
And the other day, a popular internet portal published a list of the best jazz bars, and many places on it had no dedicated jazz program at all — or were simply live music venues that include jazz among other genres, much like us.

And it’s not limited to Southeast Asia either.
A friend from back home recently asked me, “How is your jazz club doing?”

So I found myself wondering: when did jazz become a synonym for live music… or for music in general?

There is a habit — in everyday talk, casual reviews, travel writing and venue listings — of calling almost any intimate live music room a jazz bar. Some of that may go back to a time when certain venues used “jazz club” to separate themselves from more touristy places with variety bands and background entertainment. Over time, “jazz” became shorthand for a dimly lit, intimate room. And somewhere along the way, the term stuck — often with very little to do with what’s actually being played.

We get why. It’s easy. It tells your friends what kind of place it feels like. Everyone uses it.
But atmosphere is not genre.

And when a venue presenting blues, rockabilly, soul, roots music, classic rock and occasional jazz is simply called a jazz bar, something gets flattened — not just accuracy, but the identity of the music itself.

That is one reason we call Bangkok Mojo a Music Lovers’ Club.
It’s intentional — we gave it a lot of thought. No single genre defines the room.

Some of this confusion is generational. People who grew up on records, FM radio DJs, music magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem and Melody Maker, dedicated music programs like Top of the Pops, and early MTV encountered genres as living traditions with histories, rivalries, crossovers, lineages and distinct looks.

We had shared points of reference. You didn’t just hear a song — you often knew where you first heard it, which movie it was featured in, what the video looked like.
We didn’t have the multitude of sources available now, but we had obsession. For many, it was more than taste — it shaped how you dressed, how you spoke, how you saw the world. A way of life.

“It’s only rock ’n roll, but I like it.”
— The Rolling Stones

Finding something tangible to own from your favourite band — a record, a book, a shirt or a poster — that was joie de vivre. You held on to it like treasure because it meant something, and because you couldn’t just instantly replace it with a click.

Today, music is more available than ever, and you can order merchandise on a multitude of websites. In a way, it’s a gift, but it comes with a cost — you appreciate it less, there’s simply too much of everything all at once, and our attention spans are getting shorter in this sea of information.

“Too much information running through my brain…”
— The Police, Too Much Information

And perhaps some people will say they don’t care about genres or bands or background, as long as they like the song. That’s fine too.

But this abundance is also an opportunity.

There has never been a better time to use it as a way into music.

To discover how genres became what they are. How blues fed rock. How gospel fed soul. How dub shaped post-punk. How punk and early hip-hop shared underground energies. How The Rolling Stones and The Doors built their sound on a deep blues obsession. How The Clash pulled in reggae and dub. How Talking Heads opened themselves to funk and African polyrhythms. How jazz fusion borrowed from funk and rock.

That is where listening moves beyond consumption — where the listener becomes part of it.

There are many things you can discover just by listening to a live band and following that thread: What is that song they just played actually about? Who originally wrote it? Which movie was it featured in? What records shaped the artists? Which genres did they borrow from, reject, or bend into something new?

That kind of curiosity changes how you hear music.

Yes, in this flood of information, genres get flattened. And when distinctions blur, everything old-school or improvisational risks being called jazz.

There is no shame in not knowing these distinctions. But there is pleasure in learning them.

A Very Short History of Some Often-Confused Genres

Jazz

Jazz emerged in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from African American musical traditions, blues, ragtime and brass band music. It evolved through major phases — New Orleans, swing, bebop, hard bop, modal jazz and later fusion.

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Art Blakey,  — a deep, specific language built on harmony, rhythm and improvisation.

Blues

“The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.” — Muddy Waters

Blues grew from African American work songs, spirituals and folk traditions in the American South.

Its emotional vocabulary shaped much of modern music.

Delta blues brought the early form. Chicago electrified it. Jump blues pushed toward rhythm and blues. And blues fed directly into rock ’n’ roll.

Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King,  Etta James, T-Bone Walker, Etta James, Bessie Smith — not a branch of jazz, but one of the roots of modern popular music. 

Rock

Rock grew out of blues, country and rhythm and blues in the 1950s, quickly becoming a broad umbrella — rockabilly, garage, psychedelic, hard rock, punk, post-punk, alternative and metal.

Early figures like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard helped shape its sound and carry that energy into the mainstream, blending rhythm and blues with country and gospel influences.

From there, rock kept evolving — absorbing influences, splitting into scenes and shaping much of what followed — while its roots remain audible underneath.

Soul

Soul grew from gospel and rhythm and blues, carrying church-rooted vocal intensity into popular music.

Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield — voice, feeling, phrasing. 

Funk

Funk sharpened the rhythmic focus, placing groove at the center.

James Brown reworked rhythm; The Meters, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire each pushed funk in different directions — blending it with soul, rock, psychedelia, jazz and pop while keeping groove at the center.

Disco / Early Electronic

Disco emerged from soul, funk and dance culture in the 1970s, feeding into electronic music.

Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, produced by Giorgio Moroder, replaced traditional instrumentation with sequenced synthesizers — a turning point toward modern electronic sound.