The History of Jazz (75 page)

Like Metheny, the Brecker Brothers established themselves as fusion masters without first passing through a period of apprenticeship with Miles Davis. Yet these talented siblings—saxophonist Michael born in 1949 and trumpeter Randy born in 1945—were already journeyman players with deep jazz and rock roots by the time they released
The Brecker Brothers
on the Arista label in 1975. Michael had worked with Horace Silver and Billy Cobham, while Randy had played on the first Blood, Sweat and Tears album as well as with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Larry Coryell’s The Eleventh House. Even after they had become marquee artists, both brothers continued to supplement their leader dates with frequent sideman appearances and were in great demand as session players—in time their instrumental work would be featured alongside a veritable who’s who of late twentieth-century popular music stars, including Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and James Taylor. But the Brecker Brothers were jazz musicians first and foremost, and their most characteristic work mixed large doses of hard bop and modal music with rock and funk elements in an appealing hybrid. Michael Brecker would emerge as an especially influential post-Trane stylist. His rapidfire technique and mastery of a seemingly endless array of patterns and licks, married to a hard, cutting tone, made him the perfect saxophonist to survive in an age of guitarists, a flamboyant soloist who could rise to the occasion, whether he was working with an intimate jazz combo or on a festival stage surrounded by mountains of amplification and thousands of fans. While other fusion stars struggled to maintain their audience when the new traditionalists emerged on the scene in the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Brecker didn’t miss a beat. His post–Brecker Brothers leader dates often took on a more mainstream guise, with fewer rock-funk elements, yet he was just as prepossessing flying over the changes of the old standards as grooving over a funky backbeat.

Most historical surveys of the fusion movement have focused on bands with deep jazz roots such as Weather Report and Return to Forever. Yet many of the most creative efforts in the fusion idiom came from rock musicians who borrowed and adapted the techniques of jazz. Even before
Bitches Brew
, the rock bands Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears had successfully married a jazz horn section to a rock rhythm section. The latter’s recording of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” from their 1968 debut album was as creative as any of the efforts coming from the jazz side of the fence during fusion’s heyday. Woody Herman alumnus Bill Chase took a similar approach with his invigorating early 1970s band Chase, which matched four trumpets with a rock rhythm section and vocalist. Rock guitarists were also expanding their use of jazz techniques with great success during this period. Jimi Hendrix’s efforts in this regard were so successful that they in turn influenced jazz musicians such as Davis and McLaughlin. The more soul-oriented recordings of Sly Stone and James Brown were also acknowledged as important precedents by many jazz fusion players. During this period, the group Steely Dan was proving that pop-rock could equally benefit from a healthy dose of jazz. On projects such as
Pretzel Logic
,
Katy Lied
,
Aja
, and Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen’s solo project
The Nightfly
, the results were quirky yet appealing, delighting fans with a new type of electrified art song suitable for FM airplay. The presence of jazz icons as guest artists—Wayne Shorter and Phil Woods made cameo appearances with the band—no doubt raised the level of Steely Dan’s sessions, but even the lowliest accompanists on these projects were studio demigods with serious jazz chops. Recordings of this caliber proved that fusion was a two-way street, and that for every hard bopper who went electric, there were creative pop acts raising the level of their music through a judicious borrowing of jazz stylings.

In contrast, Frank Zappa’s connections to the jazz idiom were mostly hidden behind an outlandish onstage persona, yet his projects from the late 1960s and early 1970s such as
Hot Rats
,
Uncle Meat, Waka/Jawaka
, and
The Grand Wazoo
represent, on the whole, some of that period’s most ambitious and effective examples of the integration of jazz (as well as many other) techniques into a rock setting. Zappa always chose to distance himself from jazz—it was, he joked, the “music of unemployment.” On other occasions, he would announce: “Jazz is not dead. … It just smells funny.” Yet his music during the period 1969–72 was so permeated by the jazz fusion vocabulary that it sometimes seemed as if Zappa were on the verge of abandoning his rock roots. His choice of sidemen (including prominent up-and-coming fusion bandleaders George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty) furthered this stylistic shift, while the demands of his intricate writing ensured that Zappa’s groups, perhaps alone among the rock bands of the day, could match many major jazz combos in terms of breadth and depth of musicianship. As the 1970s progressed, Zappa cut back on the jazz trappings of his music—and sold more records as a result. The mass audience clearly preferred Zappa engaging in novelty songs such as “Valley Girl” and “Dancin’ Fool” rather than as a competitor to Miles or The Mahavishnu Orchestra, yet his music from this period of flirtation with fusion deserves more respect from the jazz world.

As the 1970s were wrapping up, the golden age of fusion was coming to a mostly unhappy ending. Weather Report continued to record new albums until 1986, but the later installments of the band matched neither the commercial success nor critical esteem it had achieved a decade earlier. The following year Jaco Pastorius, who had left the band in 1981, died as the result of a beating at the hands of a nightclub doorman, but substance abuse problems and mental instability had already effectively ended his brief reign as a fusion star. Return to Forever had split up even earlier, disbanding after the 1977
Musicmagic
release. Except for a brief get-together in 1983, the group would not reassemble until its 2008 reunion tour. Mahavishnu Orchestra also disbanded in 1976 (although it too attempted a 1980s reunion). Even Miles Davis took an extended break from the scene, all but disappearing from 1975 to 1981. By the time he returned, the fusion movement he had set in motion was clearly in decline.

Did this signal that the integration of electronic sounds into jazz had been a failed experiment? Hardly. If the heroic age of fusion had ended, a new era of electronica had begun. Jazz artists continued to experiment with technological tools after the 1970s, but now they were just as likely to involve a laptop computer or piece of studio equipment as a synthesizer or electric guitar in the center of the stage. Sometime even low-tech devices managed to shake up the proceedings. Herbie Hancock’s successful single “Rockit” from his 1983 album
Future Shock
surprised many listeners at the time by featuring Grand Mixer DXT “scratching” records—in essence, moving them back and forth by hand on a turntable to create various patterns of sound, usually highly rhythmic in nature. Even openminded jazz fans may have had a hard time accepting a turntable as a musical instrument, yet resistance would gradually soften as scratches, loops, and samples, as well as programming tools of various sorts, found their place in the jazz world.

The rise of “acid jazz” a few years later, with its borrowings from soul, jazz, rap, house music, and other sources, made increasingly clear the old roots that often served as fuel for these new sounds. Acid jazz, despite the U.S. origins of its various musical ingredients, was a distinctly international movement from the start. It first gained widespread popularity in London at the close of the 1980s—where Gilles Peterson, credited with coining the term “acid jazz,” and other disc jockeys experimented by combining classic jazz recordings with percussion tracks and electronic dance beats. The sound quickly gained an enthusiastic following in Japan, Germany, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other locales, as well as in the United States. The band Us3, which also came out of the London music scene, followed a similar borrow-from-the-classics formula, underscoring their rap lines with hard-bop elements sampled from the Blue Note catalog. Anyone who had doubts about the potential listener appeal of these mix-and-match styles need only look at the sales figures to understand the commercial potential of sampling jazz recordings. Us3’s debut recording quickly became the fastest selling jazz-rap effort to date, attracting many buyers who neither hung out at dance halls nor went to jazz clubs. The band became the first Blue Note recording act to go platinum, selling a million copies in the United States—an ironic turn of events given how much of the creative energy on this CD resulted from appropriating the work of jazz legends who had never enjoyed much financial success.

Around this same time, A Tribe Called Quest borrowed samples from a host of jazz sources—Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard, Jack DeJohnette—for its pioneering 1991 release
The Low End Theory
. This disk went platinum and was selected by
Time
magazine in 2006 as one of the one hundred best albums of all time. Yet with A Tribe Called Quest, Us3, and many of the other first-generation bands drawing on jazz material in the rap/acid jazz community, the music stopped short of a true fusion, settling instead for a parasitical relationship in which tasty licks and grooves were plundered from old hard-bop, soul jazz, and fusion records and made subservient to the intentions of their new young masters. Input from the jazz side was usually secondhand, a matter of drawing on the archives as needed. However, by the mid-1990s, more ambitious efforts to combine original jazz and contemporary black popular music were underway, many of them involving respected jazz players, such as Max Roach, Branford Marsalis, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, and Donald Byrd. Rapper Guru (born Keith Edward Elam in 1966) collaborated with a number of seasoned jazz artists in crafting an appealing hybrid of hip-hop and jazz for a series of albums released under the name
Jazzmatazz
. These projects sold well in the United States and overseas, proving again that a jazz musician could play a role in this music as more than just a source for a sample. One suspects that such participation by first-rate jazz talent—not just through digital borrowings but in the flesh—will prove critical if this hybrid style is to become an influential part of the jazz tradition. Certainly a rapprochement of this sort between hip-hoppers and instrumental improvisers must be seen as a promising development by those who feel that jazz needs periodically to renew its ties to current popular music and dance styles.

Had Miles Davis lived longer, he would no doubt have played a significant role in this process. At the end of his life, he made clear his interest in finding common ground between the two worlds of jazz and hip-hop. Then again, almost every shift in the jazz sensibility during the last half of the twentieth century had involved this mercurial artist, and the trumpeter revealed, if anything, even greater restlessness in seeking after new sounds in the final days of his career. In the 1980s, a new generation of traditionalists were embracing acoustic instruments and the old Tin Pan Alley songs, but Davis was becoming more overtly commercial than ever before. He returned to the recording studio and concert hall, released cover versions of pop songs by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson, and in general worked within tighter, more overtly arranged settings, which often reflected the influence of bassist Marcus Miller. Davis’s death, on September 28, 1991, at age sixty-five, came in the midst of another period of self-invention. The posthumously released
doo-bop
recording gives us an insight into the new direction the trumpeter was taking, relying on rapper Easy Mo Bee as producer and performer. The lyrics adopt various street-smart attitudes, ranging from praise of the trumpeter’s musicianship (“Miles Davis style is different, you can’t describe it as Pacific / He rip, rage and roar, no time for watchin’ Andy Griffith”) to even more vehement proclamations of Easy Mo Bee’s and the ailing Davis’s sexual prowess (“the notes from his horn make ladies get freaky like sex”). Many listeners and critics no doubt cringed at hearing this legendary artist in such a setting, yet Davis was simply following his accustomed script, and trying to anticipate the next stage of jazz fusion.

In an ironic twist, Davis himself would show up on the receiving end of this new mix-and-match sensibility when, after his death, bassist and studio visionary Bill Laswell tinkered with tapes from the trumpeter’s electric period to create new versions of the old music. Laswell is credited with “reconstruction & mix translation” on the resulting
Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969–1974
release—vague descriptors, but all too indicative of the new state of affairs in jazz in which the roles of musician, producer, and engineer are not nearly as distinct as they once were. Laswell’s reconfigurations of Davis were mesmerizing, and many fans no doubt preferred them to the original versions of this music. Yet they raised troubling ethical issues about whether canonical performances from the past should be expropriated in this way. Davis’s own practices made these questions all the more pointed, since his late career recordings were heavily dependent on the studio splicing and dicing of his producer Teo Macero, and the hip-hop sensibility he embraced at the end of his life was deeply aligned with the idea that earlier recordings exist to be pilfered, manipulated, and exploited in the interest of doing something new.

While Davis was making cover versions of pop hits, the M-Base Collective, a group of young New York players that included Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, and Cassandra Wilson, was taking a different approach to revitalizing funk-oriented playing in the jazz world. The M-Base crew articulated an ardent defense of the virtues of mixing jazz and popular dance-based idioms, meanwhile concocting a complex type of groove music, with a less stereotyped sense of time and a greater openness to shades of dissonance. Vocalist Wilson soon moved on to a more broad-based style that included jazz standards (most notably on 1988
Blue Skies
release), traditional blues (including cover versions of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters songs), unusual pop material (from Hank Williams to the Monkees), and her own compositions. In a series of albums—
Blue Light ‘til Dawn
(1993),
Blue Skies
(1988),
Glamoured
(2003),
Thunderbird
(2006)—she has asserted herself as a leading jazz diva. Pianist Geri Allen, another M-Base collaborator, also showed remarkable depth and breadth to her talent when in more mainstream settings, perhaps most notably in her trio work with Paul Motian and Charlie Haden. Steve Coleman’s work would stand out for its expansive metrical conception of groove music and its willingness to challenge the conventional—even the word
jazz
is strenuously avoided in his discourses—on both musical and economic fronts. Greg Osby, for his own part, would sign with the Blue Note label in 1991 and, over the course of more than a dozen recordings, showed his ability to integrate disparate influences—free, funky, traditional, inner-city—in a persuasive sax style. The marked affinities that once brought these artists under the same M-Base banner would lessen over time, but each worked to counter the complacency that often accompanied the so-called “new traditionalism” (a topic addressed in
chapter 9
) of this period.