American urban folk music of the 1940s. The term is also applied to a style of jitterbugging or athletic dancing, and to marijuana. Jive music is a form of blues (later rhythm-and-blues) characterized by the extrovert style of its principal exponent, the saxophonist and singer Louis Jordan.

The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.