A musician doesn’t owe eternal allegiance to any style of genre of music any more than a listener is required to pay lifelong obeisance to any artist. This tends to generate cantankerous outrage among fans who accuse musicians of “selling out” when the fact is they simply wanted to do something different. It’s one thing for a fan to fall so head-over-heels for an album that they listen to almost nothing else for weeks on end, but it’s quite another to be that musician who has to eat, sleep, breathe and dream those same songs for months or years on end.
As such, I’d love to say I listen to every album put out by the
musicians I’ve written about here, but by the 1970s they had moved on to things
that are not of huge interest to me. By the mid-1960s, the leaders of jazz were
starting to get bored. Wayne and
Herbie separately describe how by that point, while they were still touring
with the Miles Davis quintet, the musicians were not feeling challenged, even though
fans loved the music and shows were packed. The improvisation seemed
predictable and scripted, almost too easy. Drummer Tony Williams in the middle
of one tour proposed a plan to break things up. He suggested going against the
grain by doing exactly the opposite of what they were expected to do, an idea
he called “anti-music.” They never told Miles, who supported this type of
subversion, but he quickly realized something was up. The result was an album
called Live at the Plugged Nickel, recorded
at the now-defunct Chicago venue of the same name but not released in full until 30
years later. Listening to it at times sounds like a group of musicians playing
practical jokes on the audience. Decades later Wayne would listen to the album
with jaw-dropped surprise at the kinds of stunts they were pulling. The album
is a signal that jazz’s most talented musicians were looking for new places to
go.
As jazz musicians grew up and evolved, it got harder for them to keep pleasing audiences who wanted them to stay in the comfortable zone of the music everybody always knew. When they played their classic tunes, musicians couldn't make them sound like the original versions no matter how hard they tried. Wayne sums it up nicely in an interview done as part of a program called Wayne's World done with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra that featured big-band arrangements of some of his classic recordings:
There was another dynamic at play: jazz was getting its
clock cleaned by an unstoppable global movement called rock’n roll. It’s easy
to forget that before rock, the hippest kids on the block were beret-toting
jazz-humming beatnik “daddy-os” – the same ones who brought us the term “cool.”
In the 1950s, the clove-smoking hipsters dismissed rhythm and blues numbers as
vapid tunes for teenagers. It got much harder to do so once the world had been
captivated by the likes of The Beatles, Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix. Jazz
musicians tried to keep up with the times by growing long hair and shaggy
beards, but were realizing that jazz was turning into music for old men. Miles,
always ahead of his time, was the first to make this leap in his “electric
years” of the late 1960s that broke away from traditional jazz rhythms and
began incorporating electric guitar and an intensive use of effects like
reverb. This era produced seminal albums like The Jack Johnson Sessions or the
better-known Bitches Brew. From the track Pharaoh's Dance:
I find that I genuinely enjoy this overall sound, but
struggle to be captivated by the music because it doesn’t seem to “go anywhere”
in the ways I’m accustomed to in any style of music. This was in part the
point, but also one of the challenges of appreciating it.
This was the backdrop to Wayne’s creation of Weather Report,
possibly the best-known band of the jazz-fusion era. Now, I love Wayne’s music.
But, frankly, I do not love Weather Report. Its reliance on synthesizers makes
it hard for me to separate it from the waffly sound of “Lite Jazz,” the segue between
bebop and the widely reviled elevatoresque sounds of Kenny G. I’ve listened to quite a few Weather Report
albums in the hopes of being able to overcome what I acknowledge to be my own
prejudice against this sound. I really love a track called Eurydice
on the first Weather Report album, which combines an experimental jazz feel
with a creepy walking bass.
But then again I’m a sucker for walking bass. Put the sound
of a chicken squawking over top a walking bass and you’ll have me happily
walkin’ and squawkin’. The band's best-known song is called Birdland, which exemplifies the sound kind of fusion sound that I've never been particularly fond of.
This might qualify me as a jazz snob, the term that Herbie Hancock
now uses to describe himself in the late 1960s when he looked down on the sort
of experimentation that he would go on to do. Like Wayne, Herbie moved from the
jazz world into pop music, launching funk-disco outfit called the Headhunters
in 1973, and had turned himself into a chart-topping pop artist by the time I
was an elementary school kid. This type of jazz is now accepted as a legitimate
part of the genre, even if it often sounds poppy and synthy to me. This type of
prejudice would leave me seen as a jazz Neanderthal. I’m fine with that
moniker, as long as it doesn’t imply that other people can’t or shouldn’t enjoy
this music. But fusion would
ultimately divide the jazz community and create a backlash among musicians –
led most vocally by a young trumpet player would soon take on the role of
the New Sherriff in Town.
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