Jazz Fusion & Progressive Rock

[Shawn]

Not yet.

.

I got a chance to see them quite a few times during SXSW and was able to meet and talk to a couple of the band members. When I asked the drummer who is biggest influence is he said "Elvin Jones". When I asked the guitarist the same question he said "Billy Gibbons".

[JSngry]

On the other hand, the Miles Davis albums of 1970-75 were often, on the surface, dark, gloomy and unpleasant, and no matter how hard you listened with a deeply furrowed brow, you could not figure them out. So they made you feel lousy, and gave you negative reinforcement.

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.

[Shawn]

I think being in music school helped, you already knew the "vocabulary" so the language that Miles was speaking on those electric albums wasn't completely alien.

A non-musician who was listening to Chicago, Yes or Jethro Tull would most likely be utterly confused by Live Evil.

[Joe G]

I came to all this stuff in the early 90's, when I was leaving my metalhead high-school phase behind. I thought electric Miles (specifically Bitches Brew and Pangea) was more immediately comprehensible than, say, Larks Tongue In Aspic.

[JSngry]

I think being in music school helped, you already knew the "vocabulary" so the language that Miles was speaking on those electric albums wasn't completely alien.

A non-musician who was listening to Chicago, Yes or Jethro Tull would most likely be utterly confused by Live Evil.

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.

[A Lark Ascending]

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.

[Jim R]

Well, I just lost a long post... didn't follow my own advice and compose (and periodically save) it in a word processing doc. Oh well, it wasn't very well composed anyway.

Shawn said two things in one of his early posts here, both of which I thought were insightful and important. First, the idea that the gap between rock and jazz musicians was narrower (I think musicianship across the stylistic board was higher then); and the idea that music was less (able to be) compartmentalized. I always refer to the early 70's as a marvelous melting pot era of music. The scope of it encompassed so many mixes of so many genres. People are still doing that, of course, but back then it was newer and more widely practiced. Anyway, the point is that it's hard for me to focus on the notion of two styles (jazz fusion and prog rock) as being distinct and understandable, especially with the backdrop of so many artists and bands who were doing those things while blending in other things (soul, western swing, blues, gospel, funk, country, r&b, etc etc). Not only was there an incredible amount of fusion of styles going on, there was just an incredible amount of MUSIC going on for those of us who basically wanted to hear everything people were talking about, in addition to what we heard passively on AM, FM, tv, records, etc. Looking back, I have a really hard time understanding how much music I managed to absorb between 1964 (when I got my first Beatles album) and 1974 (and beyond, of course, but that decade is a good measuring stick, because I started to get serious about blues and jazz around '74).

Not necessarily all that relevant to the thread topic and discussion, but just for fun, some random (band) names that come to mind when I think of the variety of what I was listening to in the early 70's (with an emphasis on things that included elements of rock and/or jazz)...

The Sons Of Champlin

The Crusaders

Santana

Return To Forever

Tower Of Power

Brian Auger's Oblivion Express

Larry Coryell (mentioned already)

The Allman Brothers

Traffic

WAR

Focus

I know there had to be many, many more...

[Niko]

I agree that jazz lyrics are often no more meaningful than rock lyrics. In their different kind of meaninglessness, jazz lyrics in the 1970s managed to alienate rock listeners, who were happy with a certain kind of meaninglessness, but not the jazz lyric kind of meaninglessness.

what's a typical example of good seventies jazz lyrics? i must admit i don't know the mainstream of prog rock (yes, genesis, jethro tull... played magma for the first time two weeks ago but i guess that's another case lyricswise)

but funnily, when i feel like i want to listen to some real good english lyrics, fifty percent of the time i play canterbury stuff like caravan, early soft machine, robert wyatt or kevin ayers...

[A Lark Ascending]

Shawn said two things in one of his early posts here, both of which I thought were insightful and important. First, the idea that the gap between rock and jazz musicians was narrower (I think musicianship across the stylistic board was higher then); and the idea that music was less (able to be) compartmentalized. I always refer to the early 70's as a marvelous melting pot era of music. The scope of it encompassed so many mixes of so many genres. People are still doing that, of course, but back then it was newer and more widely practiced. Anyway, the point is that it's hard for me to focus on the notion of two styles (jazz fusion and prog rock) as being distinct and understandable, especially with the backdrop of so many artists and bands who were doing those things while blending in other things (soul, western swing, blues, gospel, funk, country, r&b, etc etc). Not only was there an incredible amount of fusion of styles going on, there was just an incredible amount of MUSIC going on for those of us who basically wanted to hear everything people were talking about, in addition to what we heard passively on AM, FM, tv, records, etc. Looking back, I have a really hard time understanding how much music I managed to absorb between 1964 (when I got my first Beatles album) and 1974 (and beyond, of course, but that decade is a good measuring stick, because I started to get serious about blues and jazz around '74).

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.

[Hot Ptah]

Shawn said two things in one of his early posts here, both of which I thought were insightful and important. First, the idea that the gap between rock and jazz musicians was narrower (I think musicianship across the stylistic board was higher then); and the idea that music was less (able to be) compartmentalized. I always refer to the early 70's as a marvelous melting pot era of music. The scope of it encompassed so many mixes of so many genres. People are still doing that, of course, but back then it was newer and more widely practiced. Anyway, the point is that it's hard for me to focus on the notion of two styles (jazz fusion and prog rock) as being distinct and understandable, especially with the backdrop of so many artists and bands who were doing those things while blending in other things (soul, western swing, blues, gospel, funk, country, r&b, etc etc). Not only was there an incredible amount of fusion of styles going on, there was just an incredible amount of MUSIC going on for those of us who basically wanted to hear everything people were talking about, in addition to what we heard passively on AM, FM, tv, records, etc. Looking back, I have a really hard time understanding how much music I managed to absorb between 1964 (when I got my first Beatles album) and 1974 (and beyond, of course, but that decade is a good measuring stick, because I started to get serious about blues and jazz around '74).

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.

I think that this was more of a British phenomena. Punk/new wave was not that popular in America among college students when it first came out. I remember going to the Ann Arbor Independent Film Festival in 1979 (a leading national indie film fest at the time) and the college age crowd booed and laughed in ridicule when a film about the Ramones at CBGB's was shown. There were certainly some younger Americans into punk, but not that many. There was not a widespread feeling in America that punk was the only way to go.

I do know Americans who missed that era by about 10 years, and came of age in the mid-1980s, who mouthed the party line that prog rock was pretentious trash and that punk was the only thing. They still tell me that now that they are about 45 years old. They have never listened to the prog rock of the early to mid 1970s, but just "know" that it is bad. It is all stuff they read in the mid-1980s, when Husker Du and the Replacements were popular.

In 1976--80, the many music lovers I knew had only a slight acquaintance with punk, and certainly did not feel that they "needed" to confine themselves to punk. There was no leading music publication in America at that time which influenced large numbers of people to believe that punk was the only answer.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Hot Ptah

[A Lark Ascending]

In 1976--80, the many music lovers I knew had only a slight acquaintance with punk, and certainly did not feel that they "needed" to confine themselves to punk. There was no leading music publication in America at that time which influenced large numbers of people to believe that punk was the only answer.

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.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[Shawn]

I mostly lived in rural areas during the late 70's, early 80's...never even heard punk until it was already over. If you were listening to mainstream American rock radio during that time you primarily heard bands like Foreigner, Styx, Journey, Heart, Boston, Queen, E.L.O., Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Kiss, Van Halen, etc.

The UK stuff from the same era that made an impact on me were the NWOBHM bands. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Venom, Witchfinder General, Tygers Of Pan Tang. Basically all the stuff that inspired the underground thrash movement that exploded in the U.S. in 1983.

The post-punk college radio stuff from the 80's left me fairly cold at the time, as did the new wave thing. It seemed to have very little relevant connection to the people I hung around with.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Shawn

[A Lark Ascending]

Foreigner, Styx, Journey, Heart, Boston, Queen, E.L.O., Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Kiss, Van Halen, etc.

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.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[Shawn]

E.L.O. was always an odd duck band, but endearing in their own way. I know many of the bands I listed in that previous thread were mostly successful in the U.S. I remember reading that Van Halen would be playing arena shows here in States and small clubs when they went to Europe.

How about Rush? Did they get any attention in Europe at the time?

Queen is still fairly iconic here as well, they played so many different styles of music in their career that they cast a fairly wide net.

[A Lark Ascending]

How about Rush? Did they get any attention in Europe at the time?

I was out of the loop by the time they appeared. They were known and their records came out here but I don't think they had a big following. The only commentary I recall about them was negative - but the UK music press was generally very negative about US AOR.

'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[Tom Storer]

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?

I can't say I know the lyrics of either EOTH or Genesis off the top of my head, but I doubt that one is better than the other. But "jazz lyrics" are a tiny fraction of what gets song by jazz singers, compared to the Great American Songbook. The thing about all those songs from musicals is that they are, by and large, more sophisticated in terms of rhyme and rhythm, and also less pretentious. In my humble opinion.

As for the "jazz is for sophisticates, rock is for the riff-raff" thing, I think the flaw in that is not seeing that one can be both. Personally, I might risk saying "jazz standard lyrics are for the sophisticate in us, rock lyrics are for the riff-raff in us" (with riff-raff meant in a good way).

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.

I think that's what I meant by "pretentious" above. Portentous meaning--I prefer trite lovey-dovey lyrics!

[7/4]

'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.

I wouldn't say UK "survived". They did one American tour when Bruford and Holdsworth were in the group. I don't know of any other American tours.

[Shawn]

I'm so tired of hearing that jazz is "high-brow", progressive music is for "artsy-types", rock is "blue collar" and metal is for "morons".

I like all those styles of music and I don't like to be pigeonholed.

[7/4]

I'm so tired of hearing that jazz is "high-brow", progressive music is for "artsy-types", rock is "blue collar" and metal is for "morons".

I like all those styles of music and I don't like to be pigeonholed.

Oh...

So you're one of those high brow artsy blue collar morons. I am too.

[A Lark Ascending]

The thing about all those songs from musicals is that they are, by and large, more sophisticated in terms of rhyme and rhythm, and also less pretentious. In my humble opinion.

I think you need to define pretentious - this is a frequently levelled assertion at the music (and lyrics) of the early 70s (much of which falls outside the label prog.) Would Fairport Convention singing traditional lyrics to rock beats (or in some cases, contemporary lyrics written like traditional lyrics) be pretentious? Is an ambiguous lyric like John Martyn's 'Solid Air' pretentious? Should rock musicians confine themselves to 'My baby done left me' ?

I'd also question how important the sophistication in rhythm and rhyme is to most listeners who are not going to subject them to critical analysis. I'd imagine that the lyrics of Lorenz Hart are pretty unsophisticated when compared to T.S. Elliot or Wordsworth (I'm no expert there). Doesn't stop a listener accepting them on their own terms.

As for the "jazz is for sophisticates, rock is for the riff-raff" thing, I think the flaw in that is not seeing that one can be both. Personally, I might risk saying "jazz standard lyrics are for the sophisticate in us, rock lyrics are for the riff-raff in us" (with riff-raff meant in a good way).

While I'd agree completely that we can all enjoy music on many levels, I'd not accept the jazz lyrics = sophisticated; rock lyrics = riff-raff division. I think you'd find both in both musics.

Perhaps the real difference between rock lyrics and American songbook lyrics lies in the fact that the latter had evolved over many decades, often written by professional lyricists; the former were a part of a culture that was barely ten years old and generally written by youths who were also writing and/or playing the music. That whole genre had more or less died before it got the chance to evolve. They were also being written in the wake of Bob Dylan!

'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.

I wouldn't say UK "survived". They did one American tour when Bruford and Holdsworth were in the group. I don't know of any other American tours.

I'll defer to you there - I don't think I ever heard Asia or UK.

I'm so tired of hearing that jazz is "high-brow", progressive music is for "artsy-types", rock is "blue collar" and metal is for "morons".

I like all those styles of music and I don't like to be pigeonholed.

Oh...

So you're one of those high brow artsy blue collar morons. I am too.

I suspect I'm one of those nasty middlebrows!

[7/4]

'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.

I wouldn't say UK "survived". They did one American tour when Bruford and Holdsworth were in the group. I don't know of any other American tours.

I'll defer to you there - I don't think I ever heard Asia or UK.

UK was a super group without a hit. Asia was a pop group providing employment for former progrockers without a band.

[Hot Ptah]

Shawn, I went back and read your first post on the thread. Do you have any questions there, which you think weren't fully answered?

[7/4]

'Supergroups' like Asia and UK had very little support here - I think they relied on the States to survive. It might also explain why King Crimson have played so rarely over here since the early 70s.

I wouldn't say UK "survived". They did one American tour when Bruford and Holdsworth were in the group. I don't know of any other American tours.

According to Wikipedia, they did three tours.

[Shawn]

Shawn, I went back and read your first post on the thread. Do you have any questions there, which you think weren't fully answered?

I'm still a little fuzzy on where people think these 2 genres started (pre-Mahavishnu). There were a lot of experimental albums coming out in 1967 on both sides of the Atlantic. Can it be traced back pre-1967?

[7/4]

Shawn, I went back and read your first post on the thread. Do you have any questions there, which you think weren't fully answered?

I'm still a little fuzzy on where people think these 2 genres started (pre-Mahavishnu). There were a lot of experimental albums coming out in 1967 on both sides of the Atlantic. Can it be traced back pre-1967?

I think progrock started with the Beatles or the Moody Blues.

Larry Coryell always takes credit for starting Jazz Rock fusion. I don't know where or when, ask Larry.

There are other kinds of fusion too, of course.