According to the speaker, what is the distinctive characteristic of good jazz musicians?

To play their music well, jazz musicians don’t really need to know a lot about the rules of harmony and rhythm. Of course they might have knowledge of both harmony and rhythm, but that kind of knowledge isn’t what makes them good jazz musicians. What does make them good is having an intuitive feeling for how the music works. For artists in the medium of jazz, the music comes naturally. It flows almost spontaneously through them. Their music performance is not planned in advance. As they play, they don’t monitor themselves in terms of a formal theory of performance. As a result, jazz is a natural expression of moods and feelings of the artists, a moment by moment expression of the self. Now you are in for a treat. I brought some recordings of my favorite jazz artists. We’ll spend some time listening to some examples of really good jazz.