In essence, being a connoisseur of jazz noir is living in constant pursuit of the music that summons some of the same feelings that the opening to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon does. It’s the desire to uncover an auditory experience that transports the listener into the shoes of the hard-boiled detective trailing a femme fatale along a dark avenue lit exclusively by the fickle amber light of streetlamps.

Buttoning down exactly what generates this “X factor” emotion is difficult. Many fans of the genre(s) would give you different answers when prompted — hell, that’s what kept happening to me when researching the culture surrounding this shadowy, melancholy corner of music. With my gumshoes on, I dug around for an answers. Tracing all the red string on my wall, I kept uncovering an oft-repeated phrase:

I can’t describe it, but you’ll know it when you hear it.

Which is sort of a wild way to describe a genre of music, isn’t it?

— however, it does make a bit of sense when you look further.

“Jazz noir” goes by many names. Terms such as “dark jazz,” “doom jazz,” “ambient jazz,” are used interchangeably, and all dip heavily into the wacky world of the genre-bending “post metal.” Each group that would even condescend to refer to themselves as any one of the monikers above all straddle a place along a gradient that incestuously samples from one defining characteristic or another of a given sub-subgenre.

For example, a landmark collection of artists, Bohren & Der Club of Gore, features downtempo instrumentals composed on synthesizers, saxophones, traditional ivory tickling, and beat machines cranked down to the lowest BPM possible. Murmuring, brooding saxophone vocalizations a la “The Gentle Side of John Coltrane” whisper over top a minimalist percussion accompaniment throughout their record “Black Earth.” An accompaniment that, by the way, you can start counting up from “one-one thousand” in between snare hits to gauge when the next one will fall. Good look finding a metronome that plays at their tempo.