JSngry

I think that over here it was the Iranian hostage crisis, which was when, 1979? That & the first "energy crisis" & the double digit interest rates that ensued. All of a sudden the ugly side of reality took center stage. Before then there was still an overall optimsim, although there was no longer the sense of inevitability about it that first accompanied that initial rush of the 1960s. It was obvious that in order to holding on to good feelings was going to take a bit of a fight, and that soon became blatant self-indulgence. Talk about the "swinging sixties", hell overall there was probably more overall "wildness" in the 70s than ever happened in the 60s, just because now thre wasn't anywhere you could go where you didn't find some people practicing the "if it feels good, do it" philosophy. But on the other side, there were a still a lot of optimistic things here. Especially racially. The 70s was when the old ways ended once and for all. Yeah, the revolution happend in the 50s & 60s, but the 70s was when the rubber hit the raod, so to spek, and we had to find out whether or not it was just a blip on the radar or the real deal. It ended up beoing the real deal, even if things never got as "color-blind" as hoped for (or needed), bu tthings had blown open to the point that to go back to a rigidly segregated society would prove to be impossible. And to get a real sense of that optimism, you could just listen to the black pop of the day - Stevie Wonder, EW&F, P-Funk, Rufus, lord, I could go on. This music was based on the assumption that it was a new day, and that as one of the later, more uplifting songs of the time said, "ain't no stoppin' us now". Inter-racial relations also took on this tone of optimism too, hardly unanimously, but far more widespread and opemnly than at any point in our nation's history, at least up to the election/inauguration of Obama. Race being such a key definer of American life (even today, although in a many regards in a much different, more nuanced way), this was a "big deal" culturally. Which, I think, goes a long way towards explaining "what happened" to at least some of the offshoots of "fusion" as the 70s wore on, notably to more poppy/funky/"commercial variants thereof. This was yet another "new frontier" of optimism and "blending" and the music reflected that in how R&B + Jazz had a bit of a family reunion, and how somebody like Larry Carlton could play with both Joni Mitchell & The Crusaders with equal aplomb, how George Duke could likewise make commercial R&B records and play with Frank Zappa, how many jazz musicians could relate to Stevie Wonder tunes, how so many white guys ended up as regular members in so many black bands nationally, regionally & locally, etc etc etc. I guess in the UK "class" would be the equivalent of "race" here? And I can't comment on that, nor can I claim full success for the American racial revolution. It was permanent but it is also incomplete. I'm just saying that a lot of conventional wisdom about fusion is that after its initial flash of brilliance that it devolved into either masturbational chopfests or bubbleheaded discodrivel, and although overall that is not a wholly misinformed notion, the reality, as it always is, is much more complex. a movement towards "pop" is often enough based in "populism" as it is in "commercialism", and in many cases, what was going on in American fusion as the 70s progressed, was indeed based on populist impulses, just as was some of the music of Woody Shaw & many other nowadays so-called "spiritual" jazz artists of the 70s, where the attempt was to bring "the movement" to "the people", meaning that we're gonna try to get to you whether than waiting for you to come to us. It was far from a perfect time, but damn, it wa a grand time, a time when people still dreamed (even if those dreams now involved fighting to get over a hump instead of the hump just magically flattening out out of it's own sense of decency...). I sense there might be a coming back to that today, but it's still very embryonic, perhaps, so we'll see. Ther could certainly be worse things to have happen.

Why Don't More Middle-Aged White Men Dig Jazz?

Doesn't he play alto in some of the ensembles?

I know that Al Kooper in The Blues Project was trying to find a way to mix jazz and rock. This would've been 65-66, iirc.I'm barely familiar with that band's output, but he went straight from there to forming BS&T in mid-1967. so it was in the air in several differnet places, but Coryell, Kooper, the BN stuff, that's all pretty much East Coast. Out West, I don't know. Don Ellis' 1st electric album was came out in 1968, and there was a whole sub-scene going on around him and that. But '66? Hmmmm...I don't know. But it was L.A., the studios, and all that. They certainly had access to the gear... Back to the east, Chico & Coryell did The Dealer in 1966, but that's not a "jazz rock" album per se, even though Coryell don't sound like no Kenny Burrell if you know what I mean. For those who weren't around then, it's really hard to describe how the run from 65-67 just seemed to be one big trip, with things getting different seeming every minute. I was just a kid then, so no doubt I had an exaggerated sense of wonderment. But there was just some sort of cultural Big Bang going on, and you know how quickly things expand in the immediate aftermath of an explosion, only to slow down as the diffuse more. That's what rock/pop seemed to me to be doing at the time, and coming to jazz in the early 70s and getting hip to what had just happened, it seems the same there as well. I just think it was one of those times in hman history when thing happen in such a way that there is a metaphorical explosion, and thing merge becuase there's really no way for them not to. Now, as for Prog rock, I can't say anything, because I never got too much off into that. But you gotta figure that a lot of the same thing was going on, that whole explosion and the rapid expansion/intermingling of various debris in the immediate aftermath. What was the explosion? Maybe the Kennedy assassination, maybe The Beatles, maybe it was just time for one way of life to blow up from all the pent-up pressure. That I do not know.

MORE BOWELS PLEASE! (The Chitlin' Recipe Corner)

Yeah, but I think that a non-musician who was listening to some of the "black rock" of the time (pretty underground stuff, actually, strange as it seems now, Funkadelic was once a well-kept secret of a cult band, something that you really had to go to yourself to get to at all) probably wouldn't have been. The thing was, there was a black audience for this music. Very urban, very underground, very below the mainstream's radar, but it was thereBut Columbia continuously aimed its media towards the white jazz and rock audiences, who as you note, were pretty much by and large unprepared to get what was going on. But it was there -you trace the players who came out of the 50s & 60s bands, you got an all-star crew of 50s & 60s jazz. Same with the early electric bands, you get an all-star crew of fusion. But look at who all came out of the Agartha/Loved Him Madly bands, and you get guys like Michael Henderson, Mtume, Reggie Lucas, people who went on to no small success in urban black popular music. Which is not to say that that subsequent music had too much of anything to do with the music they made w/Miles, it didn't, just that you don't step straight out of the Miles thing and into R&B prominence w/o having forged some sort of audience recognition first. All of which to say, if anything, that there was also a "black" undercurrent to "fusion", one where Eddie Hazel might have been as much of an influence as John McLaughlin. That was part of the overall thing as well, and to see where Miles' work fit into it, I think it's beneficial to consider that side as well as the other, neither one at the expense of the other.

I had an opposite take. The only album from that period that it took me a looooooong time to crack was On The Corner, and then it was more like I knew something was going on, I just couldn't figure out what it was. Most all the others had at least a surface "I get it!" quality which in retrospect I see was not necessarily true at all, because the more I hear that stuff, the more I hear in it. But at the time, there was just something about the sound and the beat that said "yeah, you know me, you love me" & I never thought to argue. And the same was true for most of my peers who bothered to pay attention to it at all, which was by no means a majority of them. Many just heard a thing or two, didn't want to hear any more, usually because they were young and desperately wanting to be JAZZ MUSICIANS like the "old Miles, and just left it be. Granted, being in music school and all, I was not really in what you might call a "typical" environment as far as being able to assess general fan reaction., but that's my story.

They have extreme diggability IMO. I'll go along with that.

A pentatonic based/derived harmonic language seems to me to dictate a "straighter" eighth note, at least instinctually. But that's what was so beautiful about Joe Henderson - he'd play that newer language and still lean back into the older bebop bob & weave. Maybe he was retro that way, but hell, that's what made him so damn hip for me. The cat phrased like Bird or Rollins a lot of the time, but with a distinctly non-bebop sense of harmony. Not too many people have went there, then, or now. Then again, maybe it's all evolutional, so maybe the "straighter" eighth note/pentatonic connection is/was a result of cats not having it so fully absorbed so as to be able to reflexively play with those intervals in that phraseology. Wider intervals in the basic scalar constructs, wider spaces between changes, chromaticism often became applied to"episodes" of a solo more obviously than inside a single phrase, quite possibly because now there was the space to do so (no need to oodly-boppily-be-bop a bunch of passing tones and extensions in 3.5 beats when you got beaucoup bars. So maybe the need for a more even phraseological structure was needed to air it all out. All them relatively constant eight notes were there to allow the space to exist. Or maybe it was just the coke. Either way, the key word here is "intensity", which is what was the order of the day on and off the bandstand. I've said it before, but might as well say it again - the role model here was Trane/Elvin, and what too many people missed out on (but not cats like Woody, who swung no matter in what "manner") is that those guys weren't intense because they played that way, they played that way because they were intense.

A highlight of both men's careers, imo. I like The Long March well enough, but this one is so much better. Again, in my opinion.

I am so not hip to what this is supposed to mean... Kennegitme Sumhep?

So hell, I misguessed Joe Henderson as Junior Cook... Oh well, at least that's at least evolutionary sound...

http://nicealbumshameaboutthecover.blogspot.com/

That's the beer that made Mel Famey walk us! (and yeah, that's gotta be McLaughlin)

The problems in 2007, which came to a head in the last couple of months of that year, arose from personal attacks and indeed the different American and European interpretations of freedom of speech. They drove members like couw, deus62/neveronfriday and a few others away. I was also very upset and left the board for a while. I miss couw - the board was a better place with his contributions. You're right. Unfortunately, he has no intention to return. Please send my regrets about this to John, if possible. He was a good guy. (and hopefully still is...)

Read the label ... Yeah, I did, of course. It's just that when I see Roulette I think 'Teddy Reig' anyway - back to the late Ms C.. No Reig, but you gotcher Michael Zager of Ten Wheel Drive. So, let's see... Ravi Shankar to John Coltrane to Miles Davis to Dave Liebman to Michael Zager to Marilyn Chambers. Yeah, that sounds about right.

GMILF?

Just the sort of girl whom, at the age of 17, I would have THOUGHT about asking out, but would have been too scared to do so. Ah, high school... Just the sort of girl we didn't have in my semi-rural East Texas high school. Or if we did, it was a "country" version to which I was not attuned. Maybe I should have been... Oh well, all's well that ends well!