Jazz is not Blues and Blues is not Jazz.......

When it comes to music it's best to follow your heart, not your mind.  As fun and enlightening as analysis may be, don't let analysis get in the way of a good time.

Yeah, Orpheus, I was trying to be as straightforward as I could when describing the technical differences between the two genres.  That, though, doesn't mean I prefer one genre over the other.  Particularly, when it comes to the guitar, blues has it all over jazz in my book. To my ears, most jazz guitar playing comes off as fussy, smug and under powered.  More interested in technique than passion or emotional expression.  As a matter of fact, the only jazz guitar player I ever truly loved or aspired to play like was Django (and I do relentlessly play Django-style guitar and Stephane Grappelli-style fiddle).  Good blues & rock guitar playing, by contrast, truly plumbs the emotional depths.  Happy, sad, angry, ironic, jubilant, tender, strutting...guitarists put it all on the table.

Through sheer good fortune, a book of piano sheet music a neighbor laid on me happened to have a xerox of Scott Joplin's rag "The Chrysanthemum" hidden inside.  I thought I was a knowledgeable Scott Joplin fan, but this particular piece had completely eluded me.  Anyway, I'm hearing it for the first time, under my fingers. It's totally wonderful.  Yeah, to put it gently, the music is a bit above my station in terms of difficulty, but on a good day I can almost pull off maybe eighty percent of it.  BTW, the music the book actually contains is uniformly awful.

As for my piano, it's an early 20th Century Mason-Hamlin studio upright.  It can no longer be tuned to standard pitch, and it will never be fully in tune with itself but it's got tone, tone, tone!  My audio-fool ears bathe in luxury.

three easy payments -- It’s because jazz is a hell of a lot more difficult to play.

If you really want to search down a root difference between jazz and blues, go to the chord progressions that underpin the vast majority of the tunes & licks in the two genres.  Forgive me if I simultaneously over-simplify and get a little technical here, but the bedrock blues pattern is One Four Five One.  In Jazz, it's Two Five One.  If you say it in your Do-Re-Mi's, the Blues chord progression is basically Do-Fa-So-Do.  In jazz it's Re-So-Do.