Jazz Inquest

blissblogger

Well-known member
you can dance to free jazz. not so much for Euro free improv.

Did people really dance to free jazz?

It seems more like an inward, cerebral kind of music - as fierce and blasting as it could be, and physically strenuous for its players

I wonder if people danced to fusion? That was jazz embracing - and trying to siphon renewed currency and popular appeal from - dance forms of the time such as funk and disco

But it's hard to picture people cutting a rug to Weather Report or Herbie Hancock, let alone Miles in On The Corner onwards mode.

As fantastic as the grooves and the drumming etc are in a lot of that music
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Did people really dance to free jazz?

It seems more like an inward, cerebral kind of music - as fierce and blasting as it could be, and physically strenuous for its players

I wonder if people danced to fusion? That was jazz embracing - and trying to siphon renewed currency and popular appeal from - dance forms of the time such as funk and disco

But it's hard to picture people cutting a rug to Weather Report or Herbie Hancock, let alone Miles in On The Corner onwards mode.

As fantastic as the grooves and the drumming etc are in a lot of that music

yeh, jazz funk and rare groove was huge in london. according to greg wilson the top dogs in that scene didn't want to play the electro tunes coming out from 82 into 83!
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Gilles Petersonn definitely had people dancing to some far out shit in the 80s. There's a podcast of him talking to one of his main dj peers from back then (maybe snowboy) and they're talking about how it got to the point where there were no women dancing and just a few really serious heads and how this was a bad thing. Kinda wish I could hear recordings.

Theo Parrish also plays some heavy fusion and definitely gets people moving with it. He used to do it all the time at plastic people.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
well that's a moot point innit - it's innovative in a certain sense where the assumption is that innovation = difficulty, harshness, emotional opacity, extremism

i was talking about the 10 years from roughly 1955-65 where you get hard bop/soul jazz, modal jazz and then (as you mention) free jazz being birthed.

hard bop and soul jazz were very much a populist undertakings.

modal jazz, despite it's conception in dry music theory, produced the best selling jazz album of all time. it went on to influence (or at the very least pre-empt) ragga/acid rock, psychadelic folk and minimalist classical music.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
modal jazz, despite it's conception in dry music theory, produced the best selling jazz album of all time. it went on to influence (or at the very least pre-empt) ragga/acid rock, psychadelic folk and minimalist classical music.

and funk by way of james brown's 'cold sweat' lifting heavily from 'so what'
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
There's several points of dissolution in Jazz as such a singular moment but easily the first and most important is the beginning of Bebop which both legitimizes Jazz musically and also defeats itself.

Bebop is incredibly important because it frees Jazz from the dancefloor and prevents Jazz from being 'dance music'. Jazz was and remained dance music even after the arrival of bebop, because obviously your Armstrongs, Calloways, Basies, etc. still remained but as a result the music that succeeded in it's wake was more redundant and straight-forward; one could argue that R&B/Rock n' Roll/whatever other titles were a 'dumbing down' but I think if anything they were done with a sense of functionality.

In another thread somebody invoked the infamous Adorno criticism of jazz and my interpretation is that he seized on it as a rejection of its obvious sense of Utility and Function. That the music was always going to be the soundtrack of dance-halls and meant to service people having a celebration, not be recognized for itself like so called Art Music was done in Europe. You could argue this role would later be played by discoteque musicians or DJs and we know that line is much more easy to blur but certainly there's a logic that this music positioned itself in a devalued state. It kind of works in opposition to the Eno/Satie theorem that music that serves an environment in functionality for a greater hosting purpose is good to become art music that's celebrated for it's development and virtuosity, but it's an inevitable aspect of such a competitive musician culture and when quality of the musicality becomes a selling point to the connoisseur.

(Luka's gonna see this and bitch about "fucking Marxism again!" but like, that's the thing, it isn't like say Gospel where it's an inner community competitive circuit, it becomes the fact that people are going to Hire The Best Musician, seek The Best Solos, the whole emergence of Down Beat critic culture, these external forces beyond just the music for it's own sake both defeat the mere functionality and also introduce their own sort of aggendaist elitism)
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
yeah the Headhunters sound funky as fuck

however - scanning through a bunch of live clips of fusion bands playing in the first half of the 70s, hoping for a cut away to the audience - you see the audience at this Weather Report concert determinedly staying sat in their seats, even though Jaco & Co are cooking


so i think it was probably received - despite the furious funk energy of the grooves - in the same way that prog rock was (which could also be rhythmically dynamic and near-funky) ie as head music

i'm talking about fusion, rather than jazz-funk which was more or less a side-stream to disco
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
the very fact that jazz-rock / fusion was conceived and promoted as music for concert halls, rather than clubs or ball rooms (as i think it would have been with the swing bands) shows something about jazz's evolution to that point i.e. away from the original audience and its original function

more white people determinedly sitting on their asses while Weather Report smoke!


i don't know enough about hard bop, but i find it hard to imagine it had the mass black audience that was looking to go out and have a good time at the weekend - not at a time when there was things like Louis Jordan or Ray Charles on offer
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
i think Weather Report and the others definitely wanted a dancing audience and the black popular audience - and a young audience too

this is them virtually going disco (the critics hated it, i love it)

 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
Did people really dance to free jazz?

It seems more like an inward, cerebral kind of music - as fierce and blasting as it could be, and physically strenuous for its players

I wonder if people danced to fusion? That was jazz embracing - and trying to siphon renewed currency and popular appeal from - dance forms of the time such as funk and disco

But it's hard to picture people cutting a rug to Weather Report or Herbie Hancock, let alone Miles in On The Corner onwards mode.

As fantastic as the grooves and the drumming etc are in a lot of that music

The was a strong jazz dance scene, with crews from all over the UK competing hard. Brothers In Jazz (Leeds), Foot Patrol (MCR), IDJ (London) plus many others I can't remember.


This clip shows BIJ but not the crew they were dancing against the full session is on Youtube somewhere.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
i think Weather Report and the others definitely wanted a dancing audience and the black popular audience - and a young audience too

this is them virtually going disco (the critics hated it, i love it)


This sounds exactly like Drexciya.

Weird how ‘rare groove’ and ‘jazz funk’ sounded so toxic in the 90s and yet now we are all turning into Giles Peterson and Kirk Degiorgio
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Latter being the foundation post of ‘Blissblog’ therefore our blogosphere, therefore Dissensus, therefore this.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
This sounds exactly like Drexciya.

Weird how ‘rare groove’ and ‘jazz funk’ sounded so toxic in the 90s and yet now we are all turning into Giles Peterson and Kirk Degiorgio

there's a detroit connection -
hidden agenda sampled it for a metalheadz record too
 
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