jazz-rock

jazz-rock, popular musical form in which modern jazz improvisation is accompanied by the bass lines, drumming styles, and instrumentation of rock music, with a strong emphasis on electronic instruments and dance rhythms.

Since the recordings of 1920s bands, notably Paul Whiteman’s, there have been fusions of jazz and popular music, usually presenting jazz’s “hot,” swinging, staccato qualities in contrast to “sweet,” legato popular music characteristics. With the slow development of a unique identity in rock music, occasional jazz tunes also began including rock rhythms in the 1960s. Beginning in 1969, trumpeter Miles Davis and associates such as drummer Tony Williams, guitarist John McLaughlin, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and electric keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Larry Young, and Chick Corea broke through to distinctive fusion musics. Jazz and rock elements contrasted, even competed with or enhanced each other, in bands of the early 1970s such as Davis’s increasingly African-music-oriented groups, Williams’s Lifetime quartet, McLaughlin’s fiercely loud and energetic Mahavishnu Orchestra, the light, danceable music of Hancock’s Headhunters and Corea’s Return to Forever, and the mobile sound and rhythmic colours of Zawinul’s and Shorter’s Weather Report.

The most important work by these musicians dates from the early 1970s; since then, most have alternated between periods of playing fusion music and playing mainstream jazz. The jazz-rock idiom gained one of the largest jazz audiences since the swing era ended in the mid-1940s. The style was also known as crossover because sales of the music crossed over from the jazz market to the popular music market. Guitarist Larry Coryell was popular in the early years of jazz-rock fusion; guitarist Pat Metheny, with his pastoral harmonies, has been a star since the late 1970s.

Meanwhile, two other kinds of fusion music were also current. The most popular jazz-rock strain grew out of hard bop: the funky 1960s jazz of musicians such as flutist Herbie Mann, alto saxophonist Hank Crawford, and the Crusaders. Their repertoires included original and standard rock tunes over which they improvised jazz. In the 1970s the CTI record label in particular offered this kind of fusion music on albums by Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, and others. Less commercially successful was the free jazz fusion of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time group (beginning in 1973) and his associates, guitarist James Blood Ulmer, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, though all led valuable bands in the 1980s. One problem was that the recurring rhythmic-harmonic patterns of rock tended to dominate, reducing jazz improvisation to mere decoration.

A later development of jazz-rock—contemporary jazz, or light jazz—appeared on the radio in the 1980s and ’90s. The most popular kind of fusion music, it abandoned jazz elements almost completely and frequently used a minimum of improvisation. Stars of contemporary jazz included saxophonist Kenny G and the group Spyro Gyra. Two jazz-rock fashions of the 1990s were acid jazz, a catchall term for bop and free jazz improvising over funk and hip-hop rhythms; and neo-swing, which revived the shuffle rhythms of small 1940s swing (“jump”) bands.