Fizz vs. Jazz

Jazz Pills and Fizz Pills

Fizz is a sub-genre of EDM with a huge amount of Jazz influence. There are countless similarities between Jazz and Fizz, but their differences warrant categorizing them differently. Similar to how it's useful to categorize Jazz separately from Blues, and Blues separately from Spirituals.

This is what skeptics tend to misunderstand about Fizz: Fizz can't identify their music as Jazz since they're musically, culturally and philosophically incompatible. If they did identify as such, the amount of norms being broken would lead them to (rightfully) get criticized by Jazz purists. The Fizz community doesn't identify as it's own thing out of arrogance, disrespect or a delusion that they invented something they didn't, it's purely out of refusal to submit to the Jazz imperial complex, and out of respect for Jazz purists who, if they heard a Fizz song like Weevil Lore by phonon or LACKSTRIKE by Convexity, would definitely not say that it's "real Jazz".

Let's just say that the "Fizz is just repackaged Jazz" talking point isn't coming from living Jazz legends like Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis or anyone actually invested in their tradition, it's typically parroted by casual Jazz Fusion fans that haven't listened to much Fizz, don't have the ear to notice the obvious differences, haven't interacted with any actual Jazz purists who would disagree with them, and think that anything with modal interchange and chord extensions is Jazz (Those things are used regularly in Classical music btw).

Differences between Jazz and Fizz

The following list contains some of the musical and philosophical differences between the two genres. Some of the characteristics mentioned in the Jazz column won't necessarily apply to genres that identify as Jazz, like Jazztronica or Nu-Jazz, but that's an issue for them to reckon with.

	Jazz	Fizz
Improvisation	A core part of the genre.	Utilized often, but not fundamentally important.
Recorded music vs. live music	In Jazz, the recording of a piece of music is commonly understood to be a snapshot of a live performance, making the record arguably less important than the live version.	Because of the production-heavy nature of Fizz, live performances are commonly understood to be instantiations of the recorded, high-effort "ideal" version of the song. Both are seen as equally important.
Sound design	Used widely in Jazz, but not fundamental at all.	A core part of the genre, alongside music theory.
Music theory	Heavily embraced.	A core part of the genre, alongside sound design.
Ethics of production tools	Quantization, autotune and editing are seen as permissible, but these kinds of tools used in excess can make a piece sound overproduced, which takes away from the humanity of it.	Quantization, autotune and any kind of editing are seen as tools that add humanity to the music. The term "overproduced" is almost never used unironically in the Fizz community.
Gatekeeping	Jazz Imperial Complex	A piece of music is Fizz if the composer identifies it as such. Charlie Kirk wouldn't agree with this kind of definition, but that's generally how the community thinks about it. The community will occasionally push back against an artist identifying their music as Fizz if they're demonstrably clueless about what it is.
Song structure	Jazz most commonly contains a "head" section, which happens at least twice in the song, and has at least one solo section somewhere in between. What happens around those sections varies from style to style.	Most Fizz features the kind of sections you'd expect from EDM, like swells, buildups, and drops. Even though Fizz commonly follows a Pop-like verse-chorus structure, it's notorious for having varied, chaotic, and even disjointed sequences of sections, including breakdowns and "aftersections".
Instrumentation	Jazz features Acoustic and Electric instruments for the most part.	Fizz features Synthetic/Electronic and Sampled sounds for the most part.
Common tropes	II V I cadences Chromaticism Swing Walking bass lines	VI VII I cadences Melodic hooks Rigid, quantized rhythms Jumpy bass lines
Swing	On a basic level, swing is described as a displacement of every other beat on the grid. In reality, swing is an extremely complex, fluid grid that takes years to feel intuitively (as a musician).	Swing is understood to be the mere mathematical operation of displacing every other beat on the grid, often described by percentages (ex. 57% swing, 66% swing) by DAW users.
Harmony	Jazz harmony doesn't shy away from utilizing concepts like altered chord extensions, chromaticism, bebop scales and diminished scales. Fizz harmony tends to be more diatonic and use simpler, brighter extensions and scales, with it's complexity arising more from modal interchange.
Percussion	For the most part, Jazz uses acoustic drums, whereas Fizz uses electronic drums. This is also the main factor that differentiates most Jazz from Jazztronica. This difference may seem trivial at first, but composers who have experience with both can confirm that acoustic kicks/snares and heavier electronic kicks/snares arguably don't even have the same percussive function. Other small differences include Jazz's iconic ride cymbal patterns, you won't hear much of that in Fizz, and conversely, you won't hear many quantized quarter-note claps in Jazz.