Fusion I R & B, Singers, And Latin Jazz

Chapter 16: Fusion I: R & B, Singers, And Latin Jazz I. A. New Idioms The late 1960s saw the rise of a fusion between jazz and the rhythms, instrumentation, and repertory of rock. But fusions have always played a role in jazz history (e.g., among African, European, and Latin American musics). B. All musics take from other genres and styles, and jazz is no exception. Third Stream, discussed earlier, was one example. In the next two chapters, different kinds of fusions of jazz and popular music are explored, beginning in this chapter with the 1940s. C. Up to this point the authors have discussed jazz as a series of chronologically ordered creative leaps D. A “fusion” approach provides an alternative approach to the history of jazz in that it looks beyond jazz that are born out of the previous style and reflect their own times. at the parallel changes in pop culture, including dance styles and the uses of technology, and their interactions with jazz. E. Early jazz musicians played music and entertained audiences and employers in various kinds of F. Although jazz was always played for dancers, a gap grew between those who wanted to play jazz for its commercial venues. own sake and those who focused on prevailing public tastes, so that by the 1930s jazz (solos and hot rhythms) was part of a broader pop music phenomenon of ballroom dance bands. G. By the 1930s, perceived dichotomies of hot versus sweet and art versus commerce were in place, and yet bands on each side borrowed from each other (sweet bands played some jazz; hot bands hired pop singers and played ballads and novelty tunes). H. Earlier chapters have detailed the ways in which bebop prevailed as post-swing jazz, but as it fractured the pop-jazz connection, other, more accessible musics became increasingly popular. As swing faded, it became clear that there were three additional stylistic successors aside from bebop: 1. rhythm and blues (R&B) 2. mainstream pop vocals 3. I. Latin jazz The R&B Connection 1. 1940s: An offshoot of swing called “jump” focused on blues, fast tempos, brash, humorous lyrics, and ensemble riffs. This music eventually came to be known as rhythm and blues (R&B), as the former term for this market—“race records,” popular music by black artists intended for black audiences—began to lose cachet in popular trade magazines such as Billboard. 2. Jazzers, including beboppers, played some of this music alongside R&B musicians. Numerous big-band leaders put it into the repertoire. It reached the white mainstream through Louis Jordan. J. Louis Jordan (1908–1975) 1. Alto saxophonist, singer, songwriter, bandleader. He had 60 hits on both the R&B charts and the predominantly white, mainstream pop charts. In 1936, he joined Chick Webb in New York. By 1938, 2. he had formed his own band, Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five. Sounding like a big band, it proved that a small ensemble could be successful; as a result, small bands became popular in jazz and pop after World War II. Much of Jordan’s success was due to his use of a 3. southern black cultural humor that blacks related to and whites could decode well enough. He emphasized the humanity of being black (a lesson learned from his early experience in minstrelsy), creating new black archetypes. K. Ray Charles (1930–2004) 1. Ray Charles was born poor in Georgia and raised in Florida. He represented a fusion of swing, bop, R&B, gospel, and rock, using gospel techniques in secular music. African American church music had always been connected to jazz, and complaints about using church music in a secular setting were not new. However, Charles took it much further in terms of his singing and piano style and use of a choir of women singers, the Raelettes. 2. He had an R&B hit in 1954 (“I Got A Woman”). In 1959, he grabbed the white audience with “What I Say.” Later he had a huge hit with “Georgia on My Mind” and sang country and western songs. 3. Charles and other vocalists reached a larger audience than jazz musicians leading their own groups. For jazz musicians wanting to reach a mainstream audience, the way to go was through soul jazz. 4. Soul jazz is based on the hard bop of Blakey, Silver, and Adderley, with a strong backbeat, an aggressive urban sound, gospel-style chords, simplified basic harmonies (compared to bop), short solos, clear dance rhythms, an emphasis on ethnic language, and cultural references such as food, church, and parties. 1960s: The venerable jazz label Blue Note had a series 5. of hard bop hits. Soul jazz musicians made their own three-minute singles suitable for pop radio. L. Jimmy Smith (1925–2005) 1. Popular and influential as a jazz and R&B fusion artist in the black community during the 1950s and 1960s, usually in the context of a trio that included a Hammond B3 organ with drums and guitar or saxophone. Born in Pennsylvania, he studied piano with his 2. parents and with pointers from Bud Powell. After playing piano for years in local R&B bands, he heard Wild Bill Davis on organ in 1953 and decided to switch. 3. The Hammond B3 1. Smith’s interest in the organ coincided with the development of the Hammond B3 organ in 1955. This was a tidier version of the A model from 1935, which never caught on. 2. Smith’s knowledge of bass and mastery of the B3’s foot pedals allowed him to play complete bass lines, setting a precedent for jazz organists. He also combined the virtuosity of bop, R&B rhythms, and gospel, which was commonly played on the organ. b. Smith introduced the trio in 1955 in Atlantic City. He recorded prolifically, emphasizing the same themes as Louis Jordan: leisure time, church, and food. B. “O.G.D.” a. Few record-producer-encouraged pairings worked as well as this 1966 session by Smith b. This version is the alternate take; the original album has a longer, less compelling and Wes Montgomery. performance. Many of the details that make this one so absorbing, including Smith’s piercing chords in the second A section, Montgomery’s elegant triplets, and much of the interaction, came to fruition in this take, which was released a few years later on an anthology. II. A. Singers in the Mainstream The 1950s are often referred to as the golden age for singers of the American songbook. Four factors account for this: a. Returning soldiers were used to singers with big bands, which made for a built-in audience for the large number of vocalists who had graduated from big bands and were looking for solo careers. b. Many songs from theater, movies, and record sessions were still being written, in addition to the standard repertory from the 1920s–1950s, with many of the composers still alive and promoting their catalogs. c. The 45-rpm record (introduced in the 1940s) was good for single hits while the 33-rpm d. The rise of television during the 1950s provided exposure for famous wartime singers on B. Singers from this period grew up with swing and maintained this connection. LP attracted more mature audiences for singers. variety shows, which were a staple of early television. C. Rosemary Clooney’s novelty hit of the early 1950s, “Come On-a My House,” allowed her to record LPs with Ellington and other jazz musicians for much of the rest of her career. D. Nat King Cole was a good jazz pianist who became a very successful pop singer. He had a hit with a E. After the war Cole became wildly popular with songs like “Mona Lisa.” He was the first African F. Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) novelty song in 1943 but still was known as a pianist who occasionally sang R&B. American to be offered his own TV show, but it was canceled because of lack of advertising support. a. Respected by jazz musicians old and new, Sinatra started out imitating his idol, Bing b. Sinatra believed that phrasing should emphasize the lyric. Between 1939 and 1942, he Crosby, but developed his own style by listening to singers like Billie Holiday. became popular as a big-band singer under Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Female fans screamed and fainted at his live performances. c. In the 1940s, he earned his own radio show and started a film career. After the war, his career fell apart because of resentment on the part of returning servicemen for Sinatra’s lack of contribution to the war effort and the popularity of newer singers such as Clooney and Cole. His personal life started to fall apart. d. Soon afterward, Sinatra reinvented himself as a hipster, restarted his film career with award-winning performances, and started to focus more on up-tempo swing numbers accompanied by large ensembles arranged by well-respected arrangers such as Nelson Riddle. e. He did not improvise but rather phrased well and embellished melodies, all with a rhythmic “businessman’s bounce.” Ellington admired him for making songs believable. f. Sinatra was one of the first artists to think of an LP as a nontheatrical opera wherein all the songs reflect a theme—otherwise known as a “concept album.” He was also known as the anti-Presley during Elvis Presley’s rise to fame on 45s. G. Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) a. Sinatra emerged from Tin Pan Alley and swing; Vaughan came from the heart of jazz: bop harmonies, rhythms, and improvisation. She made jazz accessible as no other singer did, although many tried. b. Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, and learned piano from her church organist mother. She won the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night when she was eighteen. Earl Hines heard her there and offered her a job in his band, sharing piano and singing duties with Billy Eckstine. c. In 1946, she headlined New York’s Café Society. She was signed by Columbia Records in d. Vaughan explored harmony through her piano and applied this to her singing. She had a 1949. range exceeding four octaves and precise intonation, a feeling for the blues from her gospel roots, and an excellent sense of swing, all of which allowed her to explore a tune like an instrumentalist. e. Columbia wanted her to sing with a less creative touch, but, even accompanied by a large f. By the time she signed with Mercury Records in 1954, she was recording both pop hits g. Like Fitzgerald, who was singing American songbook classics and scatting, Vaughn fused h. During the 1960s, a new crop of recording executives tried to rein in her improvisatory orchestra, she still played with the melody. like “Make Yourself Comfortable” and jazz classics with Clifford Brown. pop and jazz. She was happy to work in both fields as long as the music was good. approach to singing. By 1967, she had had enough and quit singing for four years, after which she reinvented herself by working major concert venues with just a trio and occasionally a big band with the occasional guest star. Only then did she return to recording, this time on her own terms. i. “All of Me” 1. A casual listener is likely to get caught up in Vaughan’s virtuosity, humor, inventiveness, and rhythmic aplomb. She lets you hear the song pretty much as written, in the first and third choruses, anyway—although even in them, she alters every phrase and, in some passages, every syllable. The more closely you listen, the more rewarding her alchemy becomes. She changes her vocal mask from bluesy to operatic, with several variations in between; revises the chords and melody; and adds intervals of an octave or more that the songwriters never imagined. II. A. Latin Jazz: Cuba Dance beats from the Caribbean have had a long relationship with jazz (Morton’s “Spanish tinge”). Postwar jazz was especially influenced by Cuban music (salsa) and Brazilian music (bossa nova). B. Cuban influence includes the rumba of the 1930s, the mambo of the 1940s, and the cha-cha-cha of the 1950s. Cuban bands in the United States offered little jazz but considerable rhythmic vitality and great showmanship—a taste of what American tourists found in Cuba. C. Violinist, and Latin music’s most famous bandleader, Xavier Cugat grew up in Cuba. His fame peaked in 1940 with hit records and frequent appearances in movies. He did not play jazz as such but furthered the vogue for Latin music. D. The United States’ Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America helped promote his success during the 1930s. a. Latin leading men started to appear in films, but the most prominent Latin artist featured in Hollywood films was singer Carmen Miranda, who popularized samba in her own country (Brazil). E. Mario Bauzá (1911–1993), Machito (1908–1984), and the Dizzy Factor a. Jazz and Cuban music started to develop a close relationship during the war, a relationship that became visible only in the late 1940s. The emergence of Cubop, an AfroCuban style of jazz, was instigated by big-band trumpeter and arranger Mario Bauzá, who, in 1939, started an Afro-Cuban band with bandleader, singer, and maracas player Machito (Frank Grillo). b. Machito was raised in Havana and moved to the United States in 1937, where he worked in a number of Latin bands before joining Bauzá in 1939. This band folded for lack of work. Bauzá joined Cab Calloway, and Machito joined Cugat before forming his own Afro-Cuban band in 1940 and hiring Bauzá as director. Bauzá, in turn, hired young arrangers to achieve the jazz sound. c. After Machito returned from the army, the ensemble created significant interest among d. The basis of Cuban music and Cubop is the underlying rhythmic ostinato, which is quite modern jazz musicians—Stan Kenton even recorded a tribute to Machito. different from the backbeat-accented forward momentum of swing rhythm. The rhythm section also has more percussion instruments, including timbales, congas, bongos, maracas, claves, and guiros. e. The real breakthrough for Afro-Cuban jazz came when Dizzy Gillespie started working toward a Latin jazz fusion with his 1946 big band. He hired conga player Chano Pozo and bongo player Chiquitico for a concert at Carnegie Hall. Dizzy learned about this music from Bauzá when they were both in the Calloway band. f. Although Gillespie had already shown interest in Afro rhythms (e.g., “A Night in Tunisia”), he knew little about Cuban music until Bauzá started teaching him. He gave Pozo free rein in the band from 1947 to the end of 1948. During this time the band recorded “Cubana Be / Cubana Bop” (an early example of modal jazz arranged by George Russell), and the highly influential “Manteca.” F. “Manteca” a. Manteca means “lard” or “grease,” and is also slang for marijuana. The piece was Pozo’s idea and starts with interlocking congas and a bass ostinato much different from the usual walking bass. The piece is built up from staggered riff entries. b. Pozo originally wanted to keep the music completely Afro-Cuban by stretching out the groove, but Gillespie added some jazz content through a written, harmonically hip bridge underpinned by a walking-bass line. G. Bossa Nova: Jobim, Gilberto, and Getz a. Samba originated in nineteenth-century Brazil as an amalgam of march rhythms and African dance music. It does not use clave but rather is characterized by two beats per measure with an accent on the second beat. There were a number of samba hits during the 1930s and 1940s, which is also when Carmen Miranda was a hit in Hollywood. b. In 1958, Brazilian singer and actress Elizete Cardoso released an album based on the songwriting of Antônio Carlos Jobim. Cardoso is accompanied on several tracks by guitarist João Gilberto. The music was known as bossa nova (“new flair”). c. Jobim insisted that bossa nova was not just another form of samba but a radical break from it. Like bop, bossa nova broke with the past in terms of melodic and lyrical sophistication. It represented a young, new attitude. d. Before 1960, bossa nova was mainly a Brazilian phenomenon, but with the Cuban revolution (1959) cutting Cuba off from the mainland and the discovery of Jobim by touring jazz musicians, bossa nova became known in the United States. e. Dizzy Gillespie was the first off the mark in 1961 when he added some bossa standards to f. Additionally, acoustic guitarist Charlie Byrd recruited “Four Brothers” reed player Stan his repertoire, recording them shortly thereafter. Getz to record. Getz ranked with Gordon, Rollins, and Coltrane as one of the most influential tenor saxophonists of the 1950s. g. The Getz-Byrd collaboration interested American labels in bossa nova. They released the album Jazz Samba in 1962, and an edited version of “Desafinado” featuring Getz from that album became a number one hit. Other jazzers jumped on the bandwagon. h. In 1963, Getz recorded Getz/Gilberto with the Brazilian originators of the music. Gilberto’s wife, Astrud, who had never sung professionally before, sang the worldwide hit “The Girl from Ipanema” at Getz’s request. i. “Só danço Samba” 1. Although Getz was an inspired accompanist, the performance is essentially bifurcated between Gilberto’s presentation of the song and Getz’s longer improvisation, with little if any interaction between them. 2. One of Jobim’s lighter compositions, “Só danço Samba” comments on bossa nova’s position within the latest dance crazes. His Portuguese is colloquial and elliptical, and thus sometimes hard to translate. Few musicians understood the songs of Jobim better than Getz, who realized that their music gave new life to melody at a time when hard bop and avantgardism favored jazz’s rougher edges. B. a. Salsa Latin influence on jazz was widespread by 1950. Parker recorded with Machito, Bud Powell used clave in “Un Poco Loco.” Cuban style became part of a broader Latin scene that included the Brazilian bossa nova, the Argentine tango, and the Mexican mariachi. b. Still, dance music in New York was governed by the basic Cuban song structure, the son, which consists of two sections: the canta, with a melody sung by the vocalist, followed by the montuno, named for a short repeating passage. c. Afro-Cuban musics fused with those of other Caribbean areas such as Puerto Rico to d. Eddie Palmieri (b. 1936), pianist and leader of the group La Perfecta, took his musical produce salsa, a major urban music by the 1970s. direction not only from Latin music but also from a panoply of jazz greats, including Horace Silver, Bud Powell, and McCoy Tyner. e. La Perfecta also featured a jazz-savvy trombonist named Barry Rogers. f. “Un día bonito” 1. Like most of salsa, this tune is in the form of a Cuban son: the canta, or basic melody, alternates with intense montunos that give ample solo space to the singer—Palmieri’s sixteen-year-old discovery Lalo Rodriguez—who improvises both words and music in a practice known as soneo. 2. The album The Sun of Latin Music, mixing elements from jazz and salsa, spurred the Grammy Award committee, which had never recognized Latin music, to create a new category to honor it—Best Latin Performance. II. A. Mass Media Jazz As jazz grew farther from the mainstream public, it began to embody four basic cultural clichés. Jazz on 1950s and early-1960s television tells the story. a. Cliché 1: jazzers as urban, slow-witted outsiders and jive-talking beatniks with “crazy” b. Cliché 2: the sound of jazz, especially the saxophone, associated with easy women or a head and facial hair, singing aimless scat. They were treated with comical disdain. bad part of town. Many detective shows and films featured jazz scores, some by jazz musicians such as Count Basie and Benny Carter. c. Cliché 3: jazz as adult, sexy, super-hip, and not for squares. Hip comedians such as Lenny Bruce and writers such as Norman Mailer pondered jazz. This positive but tiresome image disappeared in the 1960s as rock grew up. d. Cliché 4: jazz musicians on variety, talk, and educational shows, and specials on jazz (e.g., The Sound of Jazz). Although jazz was featured on television at this time more often than in the 40 years since, the representation of jazz was circumscribed by public taste (singers were favored and modernists were rarely invited) and ideas about race (African American appearances were limited). Chapter 17: Fusion II: Jazz, Rock, And Beyond I. Barbarians at the Gate A. During the 1950s, rock and roll—a mix of the rhythms of R&B with the sound of hillbilly and country music—led by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and others, started drawing large audiences of white teenagers. B. Jazz musicians considered it immature and a fad, unlike jazz, which had a history and an adult C. By the 1960s, rock overwhelmed popular music, resulting in much less work for jazz musicians. sensibility. Fusion—a pop-jazz mixture—was viewed as one answer and was assumed to be the next phase of jazz. The term was replaced by “smooth” or “contemporary” jazz by the 1980s. II. Jazz-Rock Background A. Rock and roll was a new source of popular songs, many of them written by a coterie of New York songwriters who aimed for the teenage market. They were characterized by puerile lyrics and relatively unsophisticated harmonies. B. The late 1950s also saw a folk revival that brought a simpler, moralistic aesthetic to popular music, C. In 1964, British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones revived pop styles of the 1950s, part of which was to eschew “commercial” music. including urban blues, along with an antiestablishment attitude. They also established the singersongwriter as a mainstay of pop music, leaving jazz musicians out in the cold, although they did try to play some of this music with a jazz approach. D. Still, the business model did not shift overnight: songwriters still wrote pop “standards” and Broadway supplied hit songs, which jazz musicians continued to mine. But even this source dried up by end of the 1960s as record sales in rock grew astronomically. II. The Challenge to Jazz A. By the late 1960s, album-oriented, loose, improvisational, blues-based rock became popular; some people compared it to a kind of electrified jazz. Jimi Hendrix exemplifies this trend. B. The resulting obstacles for jazz musicians can be classified into five categories: 1. Youth: The young, relatively well-off baby boomer generation wanted to listen to musicians who were also young, not older jazz musicians who had been honing their art for decades. 2. Electronics and recordings: Amplifications and electronic manipulation of sound produced a whole new range of timbres with which jazz musicians found it difficult to keep pace. Rock depended on studio production techniques, something that many jazz musicians disdained, believing that recordings should re-create the live sound of a band. 3. Rhythm: By the 1960s, rock was played in an even-eighths groove as opposed to a swing groove. Many jazz musicians refused to adjust on aesthetic grounds, or found it difficult to adjust even if they wanted to. 4. Groups: Rock focused on the group in contrast to jazz, which focused more on each contributing musician. Jazz eventually developed a group-oriented creative process. 5. Virtuosity: Since the time of bebop, jazz musicians had been expected to have a high level of virtuosity. Earlier rock musicians disdained this capability in favor of a “do-ityourself” ethic of folk and blues, which shifted focus from the individual musicians to the band, song, and songwriter. II. The Renewal of Funk A. Fusion eventually met each one of these obstacles, thanks to the contemporary version of “race music” known as soul and funk. B. Soul music dates from the 1950s, when Ray Charles used religious grooves in secular music and soul-jazz artists such as Horace Silver and Jimmy Smith emphasized backbeats. The new funk was exemplified by James Brown’s rhythmic, crossover arrangements. C. In funk, layering is more independent than in rock, allowing each player to play more inventively: drummers had to switch to a funk groove from swing; bassists could play more syncopated lines; and soloists played lines that fit into the overall texture. D. Funk allowed for both more sophisticated, chromatically colored harmony and modal playing, E. Funk was dance music, allowing young musicians to explore sophisticated jazz harmony while the F. 1967: Jazz was in crisis; Coltrane died, clubs were closing, concerts were drying up, and the press since it often featured long stretches of one chord. dance beat held the audience’s attention. was starting to take rock more seriously. Young jazz musicians needed to adjust to the change: something needed to be done to bridge the gap between jazz and pop. G. One of the first groups to bridge the gap was led by saxophonist Charles Lloyd, featuring a young Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette playing within the loose cultural boundaries of the San Francisco performance scene, in which jazz intermingled with other popular music genres like rock. In 1968, Miles’s drummer Tony Williams started a group with British guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young called Emergency, which revived the organ trio setting—this time including more of a harmonic, improvisatory, and timbral edge that pointed the way to the basis for fusion. II. Miles Ahead: The Breakthrough A. 1968: Miles had grown tired of postbop jazz. He was looking for a simpler, less abstract style, which he heard in the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters. B. Davis electrified his rhythm section by bringing in Dave Holland on electric bass (Ron Carter didn’t like electric bass) and Chick Corea on electric piano. He also renewed his off-and-on collaboration with Gil Evans. C. The results can be heard on Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968), which is characterized by a combination of bass ostinatos, modal jazz, and floating harmonies over a steady beat. In his promotion of the album, Davis was careful to claim that referring to his music as jazz was old-fashioned. D. After Davis added the electric guitar of John McLaughlin, In a Silent Way was made partially over a surreptitiously recorded E major chord (a simplification of Joe Zawinul’s original chord progression), catching the spontaneous interaction of a group who thought they were in rehearsal. E. Davis came increasingly to rely upon post-production to effect his later albums. He edited what he saw as the raw material produced in the studio. Producer Teo Macero was Davis’s partner in this regard. Much like the Beatles’ George Martin, Macero was given a free hand to edit and recombine the hours of recording made in the studio to make two long tracks for In a Silent Way that established a satisfying, persistent groove. F. Bitches Brew 1. Davis liked to leave lots of room for his band to improvise textures in a context of “controlled freedom.” By the end of the 1960s, Davis was playing with large ensembles of young musicians and with doubled or even tripled rhythm-section instruments to create a dense but light texture in a style he insisted was “black” more than rock. 2. Bitches Brew (1969) proved Miles’s claim to Columbia record executives that he would sell more if they stopped marketing him as a jazz man. Although it could never be considered a “commercial” album because of the length of each piece (even after postproduction editing), the considerable levels of harmonic dissonance, and dense textures, Bitches Brew found a niche on album-oriented rock stations and sold 500,000 copies in its first year. Bitches Brew heralded the arrival of “fusion.” II. Mahavishnu, Return to Forever, and Weather Report A. Bitches Brew launched fusion but could not act as a model for other musicians. It was the Mahavishnu Orchestra with its electric guitar focus that offered a workable fusion template. B. Mahavishnu was created by John McLaughlin (b. 1942), a British guitarist influenced by black bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter) as well as 1960s rock, among other music genres. C. He immersed himself in Indian classical music, with its sophisticated system of meters (tala) and improvisation. His first two commercially successful albums—The Inner Mounting Flame (1972) and Birds of Fire (1973)—proved that the music of a so-called jazz fusion musician could be commercially competitive with rock. D. The music was loud, fast, virtuosic (raising the bar for rock guitarists), intense, and distorted, E. It was also inventive, with complicated meters inspired by tala, often in odd-numbered meters and F. Corea’s Return to Forever was modeled on the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s style as a way of G. A Boston native, Corea learned jazz by transcribing the voicings of Horace Silver and the solos of much like concert rock and unlike club jazz. slash chords—triads over bass roots outside the chord, resulting in dissonant harmonies. discovering an artistically and commercially viable mode of fusion. Bud Powell. After leaving Davis in 1970, he joined Anthony Braxton for six albums, after which he began to find free improvisation alienating. He formed Return to Forever in 1972. H. After hearing Mahavishnu, Corea wanted to play and write more dramatic and intense music. He started playing synthesizers and hired guitarist Bill Connors and then Al DiMeola, a technically spectacular player. I. Lasting 15 years, Weather Report was the longest-lived fusion group as well as one of the most artistically and commercially successful. It also centered on Davis alumni, in this case Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. J. Shorter was with Davis during the 1960s, led his own postbop groups, recorded copiously, and wrote many compositions. K. An Austrian World War II survivor and the mainstay of the group, Joe Zawinul came to the United States in 1959. Most notably, he joined Cannonball Adderley’s 1960s soul jazz band as the only white musician. L. Zawinul started to use the electric piano in the mid-1960s after hearing Ray Charles. He used it to compose Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” He mastered the synthesizer and even created his own timbres, which he preferred to the instrument’s preset sounds. M. The band moved away from free-jazz improvisation and textures to African American pop (or “Afro-pop”) grooves during the mid-1970s when they hired a new bass player, Jaco Pastorius. He did not play acoustic bass, only electric bass. N. Pastorius removed the frets from the standard electric bass and created a singing sound on the instrument. He sealed his claim on the jazz tradition by playing an unaccompanied version of the notoriously difficult “Donna Lee” on his first album. O. After a few years with Weather Report, Pastorius started using drugs heavily. By 1982, he left the P. In Weather Report, Pastorius played melodic lines like a guitar player and attracted a young white band and died four years later. audience. The band’s 1976 recording Heavy Weather was a best-seller and featured “Birdland,” a Zawinul composition. Q. “Teen Town” 1. Named after a Miami neighborhood. Pastorius plays bass and drums over an ambiguous chord progression of major triads. It sounds improvised but is mostly composed. 2. Much of the performance is in the form of dialogues between Pastorius and Shorter and Pastorius and Zawinul. The dialogue opens up near the end of the piece, a section that is extended in live performance. II. Chameleons: Herbie Hancock (b. 1940) A. Hancock is a complex postbop pianist and composer who, in the 1970s, created a popular, relatively simple funk-jazz mixture that was held together by extended, syncopated bass lines. B. Pianist Keith Jarrett, who despised rock and its electronic accoutrements, made some popular recordings, including The Köln Concert, by also using extended repetitions of gospel grooves and ostinatos. C. Chameleon-like, Hancock keeps several careers going at once: postbop pianist, 1970s funk pop performer, 1980s hip-hop fusion artist, and duo pianist with Sting, Christina Aguilera, Josh Groban, and Nora Jones. In concert he is as likely to play acoustic jazz on a Steinway as he is contemporary R&B on the innovative “keytar.” His 2007 album River: The Joni Letters was the first jazz recording to win the Grammy Award as album of the year since Getz/Gilberto in 1965. D. Born in Chicago, he played classical music as well as R&B in his youth. He learned a bluesy jazz style by listening to Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans and developed a good ear for harmony. He had an early hit with “Watermelon Man,” which was recorded by Mongo Santamaria. In the 1960s, he composed and played modal pieces like “Maiden Voyage” and slash chord-based pieces such as “Dolphin Dance.” E. “Cantaloupe Island” 1. His much-covered “Cantaloupe Island” has a rollicking rhythm created by the contrast between the underlying four-beats-to-a-bar meter and the marvelously distinct piano vamp that was more difficult to execute than it sounds. This performance was the thirteenth take. 2. “Cantaloupe Island” makes for an interesting contrast with Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” also recorded for Blue Note in 1964 (four months later), though Hancock sounds more modern—in part because he uses advanced harmonies and a keyboard touch that suggests a cooler, clearer attack as compared with Silver’s aggressive style. F. Headhunters 1. After leaving Davis in 1970, he followed up on his fascination with synthesizers and formed an experimental group that played postbop music. When the band struggled, Hancock—inspired by James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Tower of Power— turned to funk. 2. His new band included funk musicians Harvy Mason (drums), Paul Jackson (bass), and percussionist Bill Summers, who played West African percussion. The 1974 album (named after the group) produced the hit “Chameleon,” consisting of a bass line, clave, a couple of chords, and layers of electric keyboard sounds. Some criticized the album for being neither jazz nor funk. Later, Hancock effectively combined the complexity of jazz with the simplicity of funk grooves on the albums Thrust (1974) and Man-Child(1975). 3. Then in the early 1980s he heard some hip-hop tapes by the group Material. He added a melody and released it as “Rockit” in 1983. It became an underground success, complete with a video on MTV. II. Keith Jarrett (b. 1945) A. An idiosyncratic performer, he vocalizes and gyrates while he plays, and is notoriously intolerant of distractions during performances. Nevertheless, he has a wide audience. B. Born in Pennsylvania, he was a classical music prodigy. He played with Art Blakey’s Messengers, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis. Even though he hated fusion, he liked what Miles was doing. C. The Köln Concert 1. Jarrett recorded a number of long solo piano concerts. The best known is The Köln Concert (1975), which is a double LP and is one of the best-selling jazz recordings of all time even though, according to Jarrett, the piano was wrong, the food was wrong, and he hadn’t slept in two days. 2. Inspiring a number of New Age pianists, this recording was noticed by non-jazz fans who were attracted by the mixes of jazz and gospel, folk, and other kinds of music. II. A. From Hard Fusion to Smooth Jazz Fusion entered a new stage with a new generation who had been brought up on pop and rock music. B. Pat Metheny originally studied Wes Montgomery’s techniques but was also influenced by the music of Dylan, the Beatles, the country music of Waylon Jennings, and bossa nova. C. He made his first recording in 1975 with Jaco Pastorius (Bright Size Life). His sound is warm and rich, with broad melodic lines, which he plays on original compositions. He composed with pianist Lyle Mays, with whom he started the Pat Metheny Group in 1977. D. For his generation, Metheny reclaimed the guitar for jazz. The sound is often electronic but also E. He also recorded free jazz in 1985 with Ornette Coleman (Song X), adding to its “harmolodic” texture. F. Fusion also uses music outside the United States, producing what is typically referred to as world G. Jan Garbarek is a good example. Growing up in Norway, he became fascinated with Coltrane’s use of melodic and informed by the jazz tradition. music. Third World music in the 1960s. Garbarek became a jazz ethnomusicologist, learning folk songs and using them in his music, which he refused to call jazz. H. A name evoking diversity, the Paul Winter Consort took on the entire earth as a resource. Winter soon began using wolf howls and the singing of humpbacked whales as sources on recordings such as Common Ground (1978). He has also recorded in sacred spaces and in the wilderness. I. Formed in 1970, Oregon is a breakaway group from the Winter Consort that includes composer Ralph Towner. Each musician plays a number of instruments: Towner mainly plays six- and 12-string guitar, but also performs on piano and even French horn. Bassist Glen Moore also plays violin and flute; Paul McCandless, oboe (rare in jazz); and percussionist Colin Walcott, tabla and sitar. Oregon exemplifies serene, intricate, and interactive New Age jazz. J. Smooth Jazz 1. One of Bill Clinton’s favorite saxophonists is Kenny G, an exemplar of smooth jazz. The term first appeared in the 1980s, but the style, consisting of an inoffensive blending of jazz and upbeat R&B and funk, dates back to the 1960s and 1970s with Wes Montgomery’s covers of Beatles songs, which were produced by Creed Taylor. Taylor’s CTI Records recorded George Benson, among others, in an easy-listening atmosphere. 2. The audience was affluent African American professionals. The music was driven by radio. By the late 1980s, a new category of radio emerged called “new adult contemporary,” “jazz lite,” “quiet storm,” or “smooth jazz.” The target audience was affluent twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds who wanted something less abrasive than rock but did not want to make the leap to jazz. In 1987, Billboardintroduced a “contemporary jazz” category for this music. 3. Kenneth Gorelick, or Kenny G, is the best-selling maestro of smooth jazz, although some jazz musicians consider his music “lame noodling.” 4. Smooth jazz finally did away with the real-time interactivity of jazz by using popmusic recording techniques of overdubbing layers of music one at a time. II. Jam Bands A. Smooth jazz is consumed through recordings and radio play, but other kinds of fusion are not. The roots of jam band jazz lie in the 1960s, especially the long improvisations of the rock group the Grateful Dead. 1. Phish is a more contemporary version of a band devoted to open-ended improvisation, but it is not a jazz band. Publicized by Phish, Medeski, Martin and Wood (MMW) was started by classical pianist John Medeski. He eventually left classical music and went to the New England Conservatory of Music, where he met bassist Chris Wood and then drummer Billy Martin at a gig. 2. Starting out as a piano trio in New York, they started to tour in the early 1990s, playing on the same gigs as rock bands like Los Lobos and Dave Matthews. Medeski soon started playing an array of electronic keyboards, each with its own amplifier. 3. Medeski does not like the term “jam band,” but it fits his group’s music. It builds on grooves of earlier fusion groups. The group also places their recorded concerts on their website. Many of the recordings have been shaped by hip-hop artists. 4. “Chank” 1. In 1998, guitarist John Scofield, who played with Miles in the 1980s, asked MMW to play on his next recording. Scofield plays with a distorted blues sound and usually with a neo-funk groove. He came to MMW because he was “bebopped out.” 2. MMW played on Scofield’s A Go Go album, for which Scofield composed pieces as vehicles for improvisation. 3. “Chank” is a tribute to James Brown’s guitarist. Scofield’s part was a James Brown-like rhythm line. 4. The form is also derived from Brown’s practice: a modal A section followed by a bridge where each soloist can play as long as he or she wants. The album sold well, jump-starting Scofield’s career. II. Acid Jazz and Hip-hop A. The term “acid jazz” comes from the English “rave” scene. When DJ Chris Bangs decided to play an alternative to the usual repetitive, bass-oriented, hypnotic electronic music for dancers, he used soul jazz tracks. The rave’s “acid house” music suddenly became known as “acid jazz.” This was a pathway for young people into the jazz tradition. B. Acid jazz revivified soul jazz, which had been pushed to the fringes of critical attention during the period of Coltrane, Mingus, and Coleman. Though some viewed soul jazz as trivial and too commercial, it persevered. Later, when these DJs looked for music as a new source for acid jazz, they would find it in ample supply. C. Hip-hop is the latest music to inform fusion. Starting in Brooklyn during the 1970s and spreading worldwide in the 1980s, it did not have much impact on jazz musicians (Hancock’s “Rockit” is an exception) and, unlike jazz, was countercultural, youth-oriented, and in touch with black street life. D. Two things had to occur for this particular fusion to work: a. Hip-hop musicians had to start listening to jazz. Early examples include Digable Planets and A Tribe Called Quest, who started sampling their parents’ Blue Note recordings. In 1994, Us3 had a big hit with “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” a transformed version of Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.” Blue Notes’ sales rose. b. Jazz musicians had to find a way to use hip-hop. The financial incentive was very clear. Older jazz soloists were put together with hip-hop tracks. Branford Marsalis’s fusion group, Buckshot LeFonque, employs both a rapper and a turntablist. II. Fusion and Rock A. As early as the 1930s, jazz musicians showed that anything could be jazzed or swung, just as a few decades earlier ragtime pianists boasted that anything could be ragged. B. Rock arrived at the very moment when jazz pushed toward the seeming anarchy of the avant-garde. Rock fans dismissed the older style of pop song as arty, old-hat, and dull, while jazz musicians, already leaving Tin Pan Alley song behind, derided the new rock tunes as simplistic and childish. C. In 1973, the bop saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef made an album called Part of the Search, exploring his memories of black radio hits, from Billie Holiday and Jimmie Lunceford to Ray Charles and the Five Satins, replacing the silences between tracks with station-tuning static. D. “Why Do We Try” a. Before he recorded Black Radio, Glasper knew he would have to establish his jazz cred. In a sense, he purposely did what John Coltrane inadvertently did in proving himself a magnificent jazz saxophonist before embarking on the avant-garde. No one could say Coltrane played “out” because he couldn’t play “in.” No one can say that Glasper is a jazz dilettante or that his method is insincere. b. Other jazz musicians have adopted rock and R&B themes, but often press them into a conventional jazz setting, sometimes with new harmonies to facilitate improvisations. Glasper’s approach is more radical and more respectful; he tackles these pieces whole, savoring them while recasting them to suit his jazz sensibility. His piano girds and animates the entire performance, and his solo entails an almost casually virtuosic transformation of basic melodic modules.