Sweet jazz

Sweet jazz is an early derivative form of jazz which adapts the blues-based harmony, syncopated rhythms, and complex arrangements of Dixieland jazz to a popular dance band format with a slower, straighter rhythmic framework which allowed it to find popularity with white American and European audiences in the early 1920s. Though considered the height of sophistication in the genre by some critics at the time, the sweet jazz style has long been criticized as inauthentic and generic compared to "hot" jazz, and by some later critics has even been excluded from the category of jazz altogether due to the reduced role of improvisation and the general lack of swing time.

Sweet jazz was typically performed by an early big band ensemble known as a sweet band or sweet orchestra, which typically incorporated a string section alongside brass, woodwinds, piano, percussion, and more distinctive instruments like the banjo or marimba. The sweet jazz genre emerged as early as 1914, and was highly popular on record and radio through the mid-1920s and even into the 1930s as an alternate popular form of jazz in the swing era.