Jazz is a lively music genre which has long been a favorite genre of music for computer music research. This tutorial aims at explaining the basics of jazz, show why it is interesting and give Ismir attendees insights that can be helpful for designing better jazz-focused MIR systems. François Pachet will show that jazz is a game that is based, on first approximation, on well-defined rules. The tutorial will describe these rules in a non technical way, understandable by non-jazz specialists, also covering some more advanced topics such as the use of side-slips as a reasoned mechanism to play “outside the rules”. The tutorial uses many video and audio examples throughout. It has been presented twice already with great success.