The players carry on musical dialogues with each other in the present, an also with the musicians and traditions of the past. Full enjoyment of jazz requires more than passive listening. It requires a commitment of focus at a time when you are free from distraction. Swing has two meanings in jazz. It is a style of music, chiefly associated with big bands, popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
Vibrato is a tremulous or pulsating musical tone.
Trombonists create vibrato by rapidly moving the instrument's slide back and forth. To articulate in music is to separate musical notes precisely rather than to blur them or run them together. The style was a bridge between ragtime and mature jazz. Jazz singers must combine a free, jazz feel with the necessity of making intellectual and emotional sense of lyrics. A polyrhythm is a complex musical structure in which one rhythmic pattern is superimposed on another.