Customer Reviews

JAZZ ROCK a History

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This is the first substantial book known to me that deals with jazz-rock, which later became known as fusion. In the '60's, jazz seemed to have ground to a halt. Free jazz was so structureless that there wasn't much to be done with it, once the novelty wore off. Black militancy in the form of Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders was attempting to hijack the whole music for political ends (which some prominent jazz figures today still hope to do). Pioneers of the previous generations were just re-working their catalogs. And upstart rock and roll was suddenly assuming an artistic identity in its own right. The energy of rock, as well as the unexpected sophistication of some of its performers--The Beatles, Cream, Jimi Hendrix--prodded many younger jazz artists to attempt to attached the punch of rock to the fluidity of jazz. This book is about these artists and their successors. Some are familiar, like John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, who are rightly given pride of place. Some are less so, like Larry Coryell, who never could quite get the business end of his career together. And some had been almost forgotten, like Jeremy Steig and Peter Nock, whose existences the reader is glad to learn of. The book consists mostly of brief considerations of artists' careers and catalogs, along with the author's judgment of their worth and influence. There's always room to quibble with these, and it's part of the book's enjoyability. One can also always argue about the cutoff point as to who belongs in this book. For example, Steely Dan and Cream are discussed, while Traffic and Spirit are not. There are a number of great jazz anecdotes (search amazon for _Jazz Anecdotes_, btw), like one instance when the rash young Coryell tries to cut Jimi Hendrix onstage, and Hendrix blows him out of the song with a single massive wail of feedback. The index is excellent, and there's a lengthy discography. This is a treat for music-lovers!

If you want to know when why who and how this is the book that you've gotta have. There are other books that give more in depth on specifics or give a song analysis or two but no book is as comprehensive on the subject of jazz rock as this one.

While the late sixties is generally thought of as the flowering of psychedelic and progressive rock, equally important and contemporary to these was the birth of jazz rock. Stuart Nicholson's important new book covers the meeting of these two genres of music, jazz and rock, mainly from the jazz side. It begins with a survey of the impact of rock on the commercial music scene, and then shows how various jazz musicians reacted to and adapted to it. This varied from the still surviving big bands incorporating some popular rock tunes in their sets, pop groups such as Blood, Sweat & Tears using a brass section, to the likes of Miles Davis, who was already one of the top jazz stars and went on to produce probably the most advanced music of the psychedelic era. Nicholson does an excellent job of showing how the music fit into the time period, and while he only gives passing mention to most rock bands, he shows their relationship to the jazz musicians as part of the overall music and cultural scene. For instance, he argues that Chick Corea's "Romantic Warrior" was in answer to Rick Wakeman's medieval theme discs of the time.

In Nicholson's view, from the 30's till the mid-50's, jazz was an essential flavor in pop music. Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra were originally jazz oriented singers. Starting with be-bop in the mid-40's, the leading edge of jazz began to loose its popular audience as the music became more and more complex. With the advent of rock and roll in the 50's, the youth dominated music audience turned their backs on jazz and embraced the new more basic electrified blues based sound coming out on 45's. By the mid-60's, rock ruled the music scene and jazz was largely a specialist genera, which consisted on one hand of traditional swing and Dixieland oldies, and on the other of the more extreme free jazz players, which was too experimental for the general audience. In the middle were the bop and cool jazz players, who while being somewhat accessible to the mainstream, by `66 were not exactly the latest thing.

For some, incorporating rock elements was merely a way to keep making music for a living. On the artistic side, jazz had the essential component of improvisation, which appeared to be one direction for rock to go as it mutated from pop to more a serious art form. As rock musicians began to experiment with mind expanding drugs, they attempted to create a music which was inspired by their experiences, and would be listened to by other psychic explorers. One of the principal forms of extending the blues based pop format is through improvisation on a catchy riff, much of classic jazz is basically improvisations on blues themes. Since rock is also generally blues based, it seems like an obvious evolution in retrospect. Nicholson goes into some detail showing how bands such as Cream, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and the Grateful Dead incorporated aspects of improvisation without ever really being considered jazz.

Miles Davis is the central star of the book, and there probably is no other person who embodied the world of jazz-rock fusion as Miles did. With his breakthru groups from `69 through '75 and his re-emergence in the early `80s till he died in '91 at the age of 65, Miles is the father of electric jazz. The book also covers in length the works of Hendrix, Santana and Zappa from the rock side, and Ornette, McLaughlin, Corea, Hancock and Weather Report from the jazz side. Also included are such almost forgotten early jazz-rock pioneers as Charles Lloyd, Larry Coryell & the Eleventh House, Gary Burton, the Free Spirits, the Fourth Way and Cannonball Adderley. There is also an interesting chapter on the rock influence on the big bands of the day, including Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Gil Evans and Don Ellis.

Nicholson comes up to the mid-90's, covering such people as John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Machine Gun, Naked City, James Blood Ulmer and Steve Coleman. He does an excellent job of covering the 80's, usually thought of a dry time in fusion, after splintering into either mindless pop pap, new age environments or musso noodling. While the mainstream jazz world was taken over by young traditionalists in smart suits, he shows that that the lower east side NYC scene was a fertile grown which kept the cutting edge alive with people such as John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Fred Frith, and the M-Base collective.

While charting the evolution of artistic expression throughout the book, Nicholson never loses sight of the commercial aspect of things - what it would take to get major labels to put out a product, and how they reacted when their stars started mutating to something unknown and potentially unsellable. There is also the undeniable fact that some of the musicians wanted to be stars and make lots of money, though they put it in the more hip terminology of "reaching out to the people".

Overall, this is one of the best books I've read on any musical movement, and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the music. Not just a fan's raving, this is a well researched and documented book which covers a much broader spectrum than what is popularly remembered now as fusion. Nicholson is highly critical of the excesses some of the musicians went to at the time, without dismissing the whole genera, as is often done. My only complaint is that though the author is apparently English, he makes the movement to be largely an American phenomena, almost completely excluding bands such as Traffic, the European RIO groups, the Canterbury groups and the Germans. He also fails to cover the non-major label fusion bands of today such as Boud Deun, who obviously grew up listening to the main heroes of this book. However, this may be because they are too new for when the book was completed.

There is an introduction by Bill Laswell and an extensive discography up through 1997 at the end. While going somewhat in depth discussing technical aspects of the music, such as time signatures and tone colors, it is not so much as to overwhelm the non-musician reader.

David J Batten -

If your interested in the "extremely broad" and compressed history of jazz-rock, this book will interest you. There was lots of stuff in this book that I had absolutely no interest in reading (Kenny G, Sting?) while the few artists I had most anticipated were given meager half page biography's (Herbie Hancock!). I guess that's the problem with a book that attempts to include so much, avoid bias, and leave the reader with nothing but facts. Unfortuanately, intense research can't solve everything, and a huge jazz-rock fan like me can't find anything else on the subject to read...

Especially considering the paucity of work on the jazz rock/fusion genre, I think this is a great resource and a fun read for those of us into all that stuff. I was most annoyed, however, at the number of name errors: Shaun Lane was referred to as Shaun Lake, Gordon Sumner was Gordon Summer, and Leni Stern was Lennie Stern. Shoot the editor and fact checker! I was also annoyed that he mentioned Miles Davis' solo work on a Scritti Politti single, but didn't relate that to Miles' previous cover of a Scritti Politti single "Perfect Way." Otherwise, I recommend it.

Anyone interested in the 500,000 mini-genres and sub-groups which have developed since the 1960s or so whose focus has been 'fusing' 'jazz', 'rock' and whatever else (in the case of John Zorn, everything else) ought to seek out this book (which reads like a college thesis by the way). Nicholson goes on at length about obscure British 'progressive' rock bands from the 1960s and writes little about Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, and some other 'jazz' folk, and some 'jazz-funk/funk-jazz' bands, which is a task most other writers wouldn't bother to take on, either because they didn't know these bands existed or that they weren't worth mentioning. But the best part, the part Nicholson DOESN'T write, is a great discography of just about every known 'official' LP and CD release by every known 'jazz-rock' band - and a few interesting import (usually Japanese)-only and darker-market releases, too. Use it as a sort of record guide; do I mean the text or the discography?