A Lark Ascending

In the eyes of those who like to defer to a particular strand of 'expert' opinion, perhaps.

ELO were big in the late 70s in the UK - in some respects they were a bit like Genesis. Some of the colour and grandiosity of prog but in a more bite-size, song format. I had 'A New World Record' (which I liked) and, very briefly, the double LP follow up with the flying saucer (which I didn't - few of the songs imprinted themselves on my memory). Queen were huge, especially after Live Aid - they remain iconic to British teenagers even today. A strange success of that time were Dire Straits who seemed to belong to an earlier age - I had a record by them but found their songs all a bit samey. The rest of that list were known about here but not wildly popular. I don't think they got much radio play - pop radio (this was a time when local radio was really kicking into gear) was mainly mainstream pop with some programmes following the officially sanctioned leaner punk derived approach. John Peel - the great BBC DJ who had given so much air space to the alternative music of the 60s and 70s, embraced the punk ethos in total. I didn't care for his musical choices and gave up on his programme - but retained a huge respect for him.

Interesting. 1976-7 was definitely 'Year Zero' over here. I recall reading an interview with one of the members of Caravan how virtually overnight they lost a livelihood on the college circuit. Something similar happened to many jazz musicians who could get gigs in colleges in the 70s but were suddenly out in the cold. I certainly had to look elsewhere for musical interest - fortunately seeds had already been laid in jazz, classical, folk music. The big bands of that era either folded, shifted their field of operations elsewhere (Yes had little profile here during those years when their line-up changed weekly...I lost complete touch with them) or adapted (Genesis being the best example turning into a more conventional synth-based love-song band). A handful of behemoths - Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd kept going for a while. It wasn't all punk or electro-New Romantic bands. I gave up on rock around that time but I shared a house with a young chap for a while who was heavily into heavy metal - Rainbow, AC/DC, Iron Maiden etc. Seemed to have a big following in the working class North but did not get the approval of the taste-makers at the NME. The irony was that within a decade many of the punk or New Wave bands were filling the new stadiums with a style of rock that, to my ears, was as ponderous as what the critics of the 70s had claimed prog to be...U2, The Police being the most famous examples.

That's very much what I remember - the catholicity. Not everyone liked everything but there was a sense that you could follow any one of a large number of paths. A question. I've mentioned the way that the 70s have been demonised by the punk/new wave biases of rock journalism, asserting that rock music must confine itself to narrow limits or it will slip into pretension. Is this a strictly British phenomena? I'm actually amazed how often I read comment in magazines and on bulletin boards by people who were too young to be around in the 70s yet who accept the idea that it was all bloated self-indulgence as gospel.

Though he doesn't mention the BBC specifically, he does have a real go at the Arts Council with its emphasis on upholding 'artistic standards' (i.e. Covent Garden, the big galleries etc) rather than promoting active involvement in music, painting etc. Cultural elitism is very much his target - he seems to have it in for Jeanette Winterson big time! I first came across him in a TV documentary based on an earlier book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' where he charts how the cultural elite strove to distance itself from the growing literacy of the mass population by creating an increasingly obscure art world. Must read the book now.

Just read this very quickly. Had me punching the air again and again. An ultra-relativist stance that takes many of the claims of the world of 'the arts' - that they are good for you, elevate you, make you morally better, help you reach spiritual perfection - and skewers them. Carey has no beef with the products of artists of any type (and is very much in favour of practical engagement in 'the arts')- merely with the grandiose claims made by those who set themselves up as the arts establishment. He doesn't mention jazz at all - but it isn't hard to relate his questioning of the arts establishment in general with the jazz critical establishment. In the end it's a plea to accept that people are going to navigate their own way through what are termed the arts, rather than directing towards particularly hierarchies of importance. Will delight anyone who gets irritated by the certainties of musical (or other) criticism; an interesting challenge to anyone who believes that there are absolute values in art by which it can be evaluated.

Good to hear you came through OK, Victor.

History tends to smooth things out into easy to summarise periods, eras, genres. So the early 70s was the prog/fusion era, the late 70s punk/new wave (in the UK at least!), the early 80s the Young Lions etc etc. What you see in this discussion is how many varied strands were going on simultaneously - sometimes attaining a wide reach, sometimes affecting only part of the audience. My perception of the 70s (a very UK based perception) is clearly very different from that of a black college kid in the States at that time. Why it's even different to the perceptions of my sister for whom the first half of the 70s mean T. Rex, The Carpenters and Gilbert o'Sullivan! The only generalisations I'd make is that: a) It was an exciting time to discover music if you were coming of age at that time. b) It's unusual in that that whole era, after undergoing the inevitable critical backlash, has never been properly rehabilitated. The 70s - not just in music but in general fashion, politics (this was the time when the post war economic boom hit the skids) etc - generally get portrayed as the overindulgent tag end of the much more worthy 60s. That's not how I remember it.

You might want to go completely geekish on her and tell her 'Something' came off their last recorded album (though penultimate released!). So they were already weird! I recall that Sinatra version in the charts over here along with a version by, I think, Shirley Bassey! My dad hated pop music but he had time for the Beatles. Much of their music had an immediate melodic hook that linked with non-soul/r'n'b music. Whereas the Stones never made any sense to him.

Interesting point. And given that from Romanticism onwards, western culture has given a higher rating to music that is dark and gloomy ('deep', addressing an artist's 'pain' etc) over that which is bright and optimistic ('childish', 'naive') it's not hard to see why those Miles records have cultural currency where much rock doesn't. Though there was plenty of gloomy prog...Van Der Graaf Generator, anyone?

Most jazz songs were standards based. And those standards were not just sung by jazz singers. In fact I associated them with cabaret/MOR/supper club singers. They had no appeal at all, seeming to be Mum and Dad music. I know that when I took a shine to Ella's voice I had to suspend my disbelief listening to the lyrics. And that was the 'Rogers and Hart Songbook' - Hart is normally held up as an exemplar sophisticated song writer. But to a 19 year old the lyrics sounded Tin Pan Alley and irrelevant to my world. I like them now - but I wonder how much that is because they 'are' sophisticated, how much to me buying into the jazz view of the world.

'Bitches Brew' was my first Miles album and nearly stopped my bothering with Miles. I hated it. It took over 15 years to click! I think you are right in pointing out how little that era of Miles impacted on the average rock listener. In the UK I'm not sure how available they were in the 70s but by the 80s only BB seemed to be easy to find. I waited a long time to get a copy of Live Evil - mid 90s, I think. In the neo-classical era of the 80s it was hard to find much enthusiasm for it - I recall being quite surprised to read Ian Carr's bio in the 80s and see it so highly praised. And Miles was still playing a variant of that music then. There's been something of a reappraisal of that period in the last ten years or so. For me the real problem with that music - and, I suspect a real problem with many rock listeners tackling jazz in general - was they way it often sat on a single chord for a long time or alternated between two. The one track that did make a big impact on me was 'Spanish Key' but that has a point where the minor key mood spectacularly changes into a bright major passage. An awful lot of prog music was built on the colouristic effects of frequent key changes - think of all those multi-part tunes which changed key (and often instrumentation...electric bit...acoustic bit...back to electric bit) several times. Attuning yourself to what initially sounded like a long drone with the same instrumentation throughout took some doing. And, thinking about it, maybe that's where Mahavishnu could break through. Not only did the look like a rock band with the guitar at centre, but many of their pieces were segmented that way. Think of 'Meeting of the Spirits' with its dark, energetic main passage and then the ecstatic, slowed down release.

There's also an interesting class battle at work in the criticism of prog-rock lyrics. The dominant critical voices in rock writing view rock as essentially working class (even though, I suspect, most of those critics are wannabee working class rather than real working class). Prog rock was essentially a middle class music by musicians who had stayed on at school after 15 and often attended public schools - the lyrics are full of literary allusions. Genesis lyrics reek of classical mythology and TS Elliot. Which, of course, is anathema to the standard rock critic. Which is not an attempt to say there was anything wonderful in those lyrics - merely that they were no worse than other lyrics in popular music (and an awful lot of opera!). They just presented themselves as perfect targets to a particular critical mindset.

Long stretches of prog were vocal free - after Wyatt left the Soft Machine were totally vocal-less. Large stretches of King Crimson are also vocal free, certainly the 72-74 band where the few songs acted as islands to launch the (often improvised) instrumentals. The Pink Floyd of Umma Gumma, Atom Heart Mother and Meddle were a mainly instrumental band (Dark Side changed that and returned them to their earlier song based style). I disagree that jazz lyrics are any better than rock lyrics - most vocal jazz is based on pretty trite lovey-dovey lyrics, no more sophisticated than the pseudo-Romanticism (large R) of prog-rock lyrics. There's a real danger of running into the 'jazz is for sophisticates, rock is for the undiscriminating/immature riff-raff' simplicities there. Are the lyrics of Escalator Over the Hill really any better than those of Genesis? Maybe the difference is that jazz singers often pay scant attention to the lyrics meaning, just using them as vehicles to sing off (think Billie Holiday and those daft songs she recorded in the 30s); whereas prog-rockers often seemed to want to invest the (admittedly frequently daft) lyrics with some sort of portentous meaning. But then Jon Anderson's lyrics for Yes were totally meaningless (except perhaps in his brain) - he seemed to just like the sound of the words, regardless of meaning.

MG is not posting lately due to computer/ISP problems. Yes, I read his post about that. I'm not suggesting that any have left in a huff. Merely that I particularly enjoyed their posts - they each have a very distinctive take on music that they are able to express with humility. Anyway, Kenny is around as he's mentioned above; and I've noticed Jim R reappear more recently. Seeline pops in every now and then when a world or Latin thread goes active.

I think that's true - though the influences did go the other way. I can recall the impact Mahavishnu had on the existing prog-rockers. I remember Phil Collins being interviewed around '72 and saying he wanted 'more Mahavishnu' in Genesis (ironic given the later direction of his career) and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't influence Bruford's move from Yes to KC. Collins also played occasionally with a band called Brand X who were more in the American fusion mould. I don't think US jazz in general has ever been very open to being influenced by jazz beyond the US and Latin America. Yes, it has taken influences from other musics (Sketches of Spain etc) but rarely from non-US jazz. I get the feeling that there is such an idea of jazz as an American music that there's never been a sense that there's much of interest to absorb. Most non-American musicians who have gained a profile in the States and had an impact have had to move there and 'go native' (Holland, McLaughlin, Shearing etc). US rock or rock related music has always seemed more open to overseas influence. Not a complaint. A (possibly mistaken) observation.

Wouldn't Mahavishnu be better advertising herbal tea?

On the hosting side of things, I think you would find it hard to find a site as light-touch regulated as this one. The moderators give an awful lot of rope. I got a slap on the wrist once but it was done via PM and very politely. I must have used three or four different jazz bulletin boards (and one folky one). This one has by far the most consistent and (to my mind) fairest approach to moderation. The flip side of that is that you do have to tolerate some very loud personalities, utterly convinced that they are bringing truths inscribed on tablets of stone down the mountain.

Thanks, Serioza. I just point the camera...nature does the rest! I hope this thread keeps going now that Chris has gone - I loved his shots of NY from his window! I really like looking at the views of the world from other posters' locations - the States, Japan, Russia. Very different from what you get in the papers/magazines!

I think the music magazine coverage had a big influence in enabling us to cross genres in the 60s/70s. I used to religiously read Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. They had dedicated folk and jazz sections. I think I must have absorbed them without acting until about '75. I do recall very specifically buying records by Jarrett, Mike Westbrook, SOS (Surman-Osborne-Skidmore) and Stan Tracey after reading rave reviews in one or other of those. I'm not sure how that works today - the only rock orientated magazine I read is Mojo and that is designed for greyhairs so does feature jazz reviews and articles. There must be some sort of mentioning - there are a wave of jazz bands in the UK like Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland who have a strong audience on the indie-rock scene as well as playing jazz gigs. If contemporary culture could escape from the tyrrany of niche-marketing and target audiences there would be more scope for all of this. There is an interest in crossing genres today - think of they way bits of jazz or classical are sampled - but I'm not sure it leads to a fuller exploration. Kids I teach often tell me they like all kinds of music and show me their ipods with a bit of Mozart or Nick Drake or Ella. But I don't get a sense that most go beyond that. The difference is those who either grow up in homes where alternative music is played or who learn an instrument and come into contact with other types of music that way. There's a wonderful group in the East Midlands of the UK who play big band (in its broadest sense) jazz, made up of school kids - I think it's run by a relative of Brian Eno. They did a concert of one of Graham Collier's pieces a while back with Collier conducting or supervising. They never-ending stream of young jazz musicians in the UK must be coming from somewhere!

I think if you are distinguishing jazz-rock from fusion you are right. Both prog and jazz-rock were largely white musics and appealled to kids like me who had virtually no cultural reference to black music. I can recally actively disliking soul music and not being very keen on blues rock. In American fusion you had a more pronounced funk element - Weather Report, Stanley Clarke etc. I had an album by Clarke - 'Children of Forever' or something similar - for about five minutes. Could not cope with it. My education in black music came via jazz. I think that in the English version there was very much a case of independence-declaring. A group like Fairport were actively trying to create a music that was different to American rock. You see that at its most extreme in the Canterbury scene where the music very definitely aims for an ironic take on Englishness to set it apart from American rock. Henry Cow had virtually nothing of the black element in their music, substituting European avant classical. In all of this McLaughlin was - or became - quite unusual. He was there at the heart of the Miles bands who upped the funk elements in fusion and has frequently expressed his love of that side of things. Unfortunately (to my ears anyway), by the late 70s the jazz-rock movement in the UK had become more homogenised, becoming absorbed into the wider funk-based fusion movement. You see this in Soft Machine in particular whose last albums are almost by a different band (well they were a different band!) from even the SM of Third, let alone the SM of 1 and 2.

The Blue Note twofers I remember were beige with orange writing on. The Mingus/Farlow was actually a Savoy twofer reissue - another series of that time. I had a Charlie Parker double in that same series. I recall those A&M albums - only lasted a short time. I had 'Closeness' and one that I don't think has ever been reissued - a marvellous Jim Hall record called 'Commitment'. Very much a studio record with each track quite different to the next - duets, trios, full band etc. Would probably have seemed to much of a 'concept' in later times but I still play it and love it. A beautiful version of the Albinoni Adagio (a track that has been cross-overed to death) with Art Farmer playing exquisitely.

My favourite place on earth...Cornwall, the furthest point west in England...over a glorious Easter weekend...

Absolutely right on all counts. It was actually the tunes that I later learnt were from 'Crescent' that grabbed me off the Pablo album. I had many of the Prestige Miles albums, and the Bill Evans Riversides along with Monk albums and other things on those twofers. There were also a number of twofers from a reactivated Blue Note around that time - I had things by Gil Evans and the Tal Farlow/Mingus trio as well as a Konitz/Mulligan set that I've only recently acquired in original album form via various CDs.

I suspect this was a very British/European student experience. They were never wildly popular even here. One marvellous band who somehow started up and kept going for a couple of years during the punk years was National Health - essentially built around Dave Stewart, the keyboard player from Egg and Hatfield and the North. I went to their first concert at the London School of Economics where Bill Bruford played drums - I think alongside Pip Pyle...not sure there. There's a 2CD box of the three National Health albums that I'd strongly recommend. Stewart is insistent he doesn't play jazz but rock but there's plenty in the music to interest a jazz fan. More melodic and 'straight' than Henry Cow but with the whimsy of Caravan or early Soft Machine. There was a more funk based jazz rock in the UK too that seemed to relate to Nucleus - Morrissey-Mullen, for example or Barbara Thompson's Paraphenalia. That had a livespan well into the 80s but never interested me that much. I think I'd convinced myself I liked 'authentic' jazz by that stage!!!!