1968 - no more suits and ties when performing at a concert

[l p]

what happened here. did the union tell the musicians that it was ok to wear clothes other than suits and ties? it seems that everyone, all at once, started wearing clothes of their choice after 1967.

[BillF]

What happened is that the world changed. 1968 was the year of revolutions. In dress middle-aged formality gave way to the cult of youth. Jazz musicians had been rapidly losing audience since the emergence of the Beatles in 1964 and altered their image (and often their music) in a desperate bid to survive. See, for example, before-and-after pictures of Miles and Bill Evans.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Among black musicians, the dashiki became popular from about 1967. from Wiki

The term dashiki began appearing in print at least as early as 1967. Reporting on the 1967 Newark riots in the Amsterdam News on July 22, 1967, George Barner refers to a new African garment called a "danshiki."

(the Yoruba word from which it's derived).

It began to be manufactured in the USA in the late forties.

The Dashiki was made popular in the western parts of the world by Oba (Yoruba word for king) Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi, who was born Walter Eugene in Detroit, Michigan, USA in 1928. He became interested in African Studies at the age of 16, and travelled to Haiti at the age of 20 in order to be exposed to African religion from indigenous Africans. Soon after, he returned to the U.S. and began a small scale manufacturing business which included African attire, most notably dashikis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiki

MG

[Big Beat Steve]

Yeah, to those to whom 50s music also brings up a certain visual impact, those musicans who'd been around and active in the 50s (or even in the late 40s) just stopped looking sharp from around that date in the 60s.

Of course it's quite natural that, like BillF said, jazz (and R&B) musicians tried to stay with the times, but honestly, if you look at some of those sharp R&B dudes from the 40s and early 50s and then compare their attire from the 70s (as documented on photos e.g. by the ubiquitous Norbert Hess) when those (by then) middle-aged, grey-haired performers caught on stage in garish 70s garb that would have befitted a Johnny Guitar Watson but not, for example, a Charles Brown, then some of these pictures were a bit sad to see. Particularly since 70s fashion was a no-no anyway ...

I have a feeling somehow many elder jazz men have managed to age with more dignity in their stage presence through the decades.

[l p]

but how did it happen all at once. was a letter sent out to everyone?

i could understand it if everybody slowly migrated to wearing their own choice of clothing over a period of a couple/several years.

[medjuck]

Things changed faster in those days. There seemed to be a new generation every 3 years.

[garthsj]

No.

The Tentette sides are not on the PJ set. The PJ set includes Annie Ross stuff and the reunion session not included in the Mosaic set.

Some jazz musicians, like the great and woefully under-appreciated Art Farmer, remained immaculately dressed throughout their careers. The last time I saw Miles Davis live, he was wearing a bright red leather jump suit, and looked ridiculous ...

Edited July 29, 2014 by garthsj

[JSngry]

I have to think, though, that some people talked to their agents, or their agents talked to them, and said, hey, ok? and then yeah, ok.

Not everybody, mind you, but some. Like, hey, all the gigs is gone, so let's...adjust.

[Chuck Nessa]

No.

The Tentette sides are not on the PJ set. The PJ set includes Annie Ross stuff and the reunion session not included in the Mosaic set.

Some jazz musicians, like the great and woefully under-appreciated Art Farmer, remained immaculately dressed throughout their careers. The last time I saw Miles Davis live, he was wearing a bright red leather jump suit, and looked ridiculous ...

??

[StarThrower]

but how did it happen all at once. was a letter sent out to everyone?

i could understand it if everybody slowly migrated to wearing their own choice of clothing over a period of a couple/several years.

The same letter also stated that nobody should get haircuts anymore. But I think it was due to The Mothers. They never wore those stupid suits, and they had long hair before the other bands.

[A Lark Ascending]

'Scruffy' dress had been a youth code for some time by '68. Think of all those Woody Guthrie look-a-likes from the 50s onward. The whole 'beatnik' think that preceded the hippie era by a decade or more.

By 1968 that had gone mainstream. I expect that some young musicians wanted to dress like their own generation. In other cases the less formal attire would have been one of the many strategies employed by jazz musicians ( or their managers) to try to appeal to an audience that was moving away from jazz.

The association of suits with conventional white culture would also made them suspect in the Black Power era.

The suits went back on when jazz headed for Lincoln Centre respectability.

[ArtSalt]

It all went bell-bottomed and psychedelic, contrast this with the cool of the Ivy League look and you see how much was lost, sartorially speaking.

Bill Evans was still dressing sharp upto about 1969, then he reinvented himself a BeeGees impersonator. You could say a lot about Miles, but his one piece ladies swimsuit look, is probably not a good place to introduce a novice to his genius.

Was it their choice, or was it just a fashion dead-end?

What amazes me, when put in the perspective of what was immediately before, so many fell for the world of dog turd browns, felts and that awful hippy silhouette.

[Big Beat Steve]

Well put, Art. If you had to "go casual" or don some garb that was supposed to make you look younger, then the period of c.1970 was about the very worst period you could have selected, sartorially speaking.

[Shawn]

No room for squares. In 1968 if you were wearing a suit, you were.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

It all went bell-bottomed and psychedelic, contrast this with the cool of the Ivy League look and you see how much was lost, sartorially speaking.

Ivy League no loss. THIS was the great sartorial loss:

MG

[A Lark Ascending]

One of the advantages of not owing top of the range audio equipment is that once the record starts playing you can't hear what the musicians are wearing.

[ArtSalt]

It all went bell-bottomed and psychedelic, contrast this with the cool of the Ivy League look and you see how much was lost, sartorially speaking.

Ivy League no loss. THIS was the great sartorial loss:

MG

Believe it or not, there are still a great many living the zoot suit riots over on the Fedora Lounge. There’s also a dude who stalks night clubs dressed like an extra in Bugsy Malone. I find the 40s style a little bit too cubist for my liking, too many angles, and then there's the ties, albeit I will sport a garish painted tie on the odd occasion, but they were exactly right for the large ballrooms of the swing and big band era. Get you noticed in a crowd of a couple of thousand.

Once the bebop era starts, you see a more relaxed style coming in, berets and soft shoulders, ideal for the intimacy of small, smokey jazz club.

[ArtSalt]

When I first started listening to jazz 15 years ago I knew next to nothing, but one thing I knew for damned sure was that I didn't want to hear anything recorded after the mid 1960s or so for precisely this reason. I knew I might be depriving myself of some good music, but the idea of jazz musicians with mutton-chop sideburns in flare-legged leisure suits is just too depressing to bear. It's only recently that I lifted my self-imposed moratorium in order to purchase some of Stan Getz's CDs from the 1980s.

I can relate to that. The album that got me into exploring jazz was The Style Council’s Café Bleu – that brief moment when the potential of Paul Weller and Mick Talbot was fully realised, not only musically in the many jazz infused tracks on the album, but in their image too: the expatriate Cappucino Kid in his neat French inspired jackets and American repp ties, wearing long rain coats down near the Seine. How much of this was contrived and created by a Polydor company stylist, we may never know, but it was dead right for the time, and offered something more than the modism that Weller represented before in his Jam incarnation. In fact, they were more closely allied to the original UK modernists of the 1950s who were into modern jazz and American style, brought back by the Johnny Dankworth’s and the Cunard Yanks of the era.

It was about this time I caught Paris Blues on the television and the style of Sydney Poitier and Paul Newman and the whole modern jazz aesthetic had me hooked (albeit the music in the film harked back to the earlier periods of Ellington and Armstrong) – here was a different way of being, an alternative to the football focused youth cults around me.

The stage was set: it was not only the music I wanted to mine, but the whole aesthetic of the modern jazz being. There’s no room for hippy flares in this! So clearly, it took me some time to even contemplate listening to jazz beyond the early 60s. And if you look at the uber-cool vision of Bill Evans in the late 50s and early 60s and compare this with his bearded and bouffant coke inspired 70s look, the prejudice is not so difficult to understand.

[Big Beat Steve]

Thanks, ArtSalt and Captain Howdy, for reminding me that I am not the only one who does pay some attention to the style, looks and "attitude" of the era. I, too, find it fairly depressing, when I purchase music (reissues) from the 50s, for example, and the "art(??)"work directors saw fit to slap some 70s picture of the featured musican on the sleeve.

The 70s therefore were a pretty depressing period when it came to buying reissues.

That thing about late 60s and 70s hippy flares, etc. and utterly badly fitting jackets and shirts seen on musicians who had already been around and made a (visual) name for themselves made matters even worse. That era just WAS bad, even when it wasn't about casual attire at all (and even if you DID wear a casual outfit then that T-shirt likely looked like it was 3 sizes too small on you) ...

Some may call all this superficial, but hey, if you have a choice between the visual impact of some really sharply dressed zoot suiter or mid-century cool musician who LIVES and RADIATES the music he plays (if only to bring up an image of the setting where that music thrived - e.g. Harlem ballrooms or Westcoast beach clubs, to name just some examples) and then compare this to garish 70s garb that would be more at home in a funk or disco setting while the music played by the musician in question hasn't changed all that much towards that direction at all then is it really that difficult to understand this indifferency to those attempts to (awkwardly) stay with the times?

I'd make an exception e.g. for the outfits Miles wore during his "Electric" period and beyond (ín a way all this WAS in tune too), but apart from that??

Edited July 30, 2014 by Big Beat Steve

[xybert]

I'm somewhere in between: the more obviously fashion victim late sixties onwards stuff was obviously unfortunate but i'm not all that in love with the uniform fifties suit look either, although it's obviously the lesser of the two evils. Neither love nor hate the suit. It just has a bit of an homogenising effect for me, probably more pronounced as it's mostly viewed in black and white. I guess, if i had to choose, i'd err on the side of suits.

Nowadays i think it's just a matter of wearing what suits you. I freaking love the music on these two Jeremy Pelt albums, but i honestly think the covers make him look like a total knob:

[king ubu]

Speaking of too-small t-shirts and dog turd browns...

for the turd, blame the CD reissue producers (who destroyed many a glossy Pablo cover with their silly colouration):

[Big Beat Steve]

Speaking of too-small t-shirts and dog turd browns...

In fact that Basie shirt should pass. I remember a couple of latter-day Art Pepper pics, for example, that just made you feel uncomfortable just by looking at that shirt. Signs of the times ...

As for Zoot, he was one of those who came to mind when I wrote my earlier post. A CD of a German concert recording of his dating back to 1958 recently released for the first time contains some mighty fine music. But why oh why did they have to chose a fairly puffy 70s image of his for the cover? Where's the visual link to the music? Why couldn't they have selected an on-stage shot from that very concert?

[A Lark Ascending]

As a kid I hated any kind of dressing up in bands. I came of age with the tea shirt and jeans 'we only care about the music' type of rock band. The whole glam thing was a real turn-off. In fact I remember being really miffed when Peter Gabriel started dressing up as flowers in Genesis.

I've carried that aversion to all fields of music - when I become world dictator it will be a capital offence for orchestral musicians to wear formal dress.

Needless to say, I have never been known for my sartorial elegance.

Edited July 30, 2014 by A Lark Ascending

[Big Beat Steve]

Maybe it all is a question of whether you embrace what is perceived as a "mainstream trend" or whether you reject it just because it is "mainstream".

It evidently was "mainstream" to dress up casually in the 70s (I'd date my musical awareness to age 14 in 1974 ) but pretty soon I found sharp stage dresses to be totally cool (probably because it was "anti-mainstream" then but most definitely because I HATED whatever casual dresses were en vogue in that period - including those around me ... yes, finding casual stuff I really liked to wear wasn't easy for me then ... ).

Though I never saw much in "formal dresses" or even tuxedos on stage, band uniforms like they used to have all through the 30s to the early 60s (either Harlem big band outfitss or loud Bill Haley-type jackets) were totally cool to me. Quite a difference to the stage optics of other (usually much longer-haired ) rock musicians who'd obviously looked like they'd been dragged straight out of a trash can (not hygiene-wise but with such an utter lack of taste in what even FIT them ... talk about those shrunk-size T-shirts and lower abdomen-strangulating trousers to begin with, etc. ).

[king ubu]

Art liked the sensation of the fabric rubbing his nipples.