Dude, where is a good GG Alin thread when you need one. ?Originally Posted by trurl
Dude, where is a good GG Alin thread when you need one. ?
That's why I say that IaSW and Bitches Brew sit outside the development line of fusion. There's a pretty clear and straight line from the soul jazz of Jimmy Smith and Grant Green --> Cannonball Adderley's "Mercy Mercy" --> "Emergency!" (and Larry Coryell's "Spaces") in the late '60s --> then into more chops-heavy stuff like Mahavishnu and RTF in the '70s. A parallel track led from soul jazz into jazz-funk like "Head Hunters" and all the Mizell Brothers productions for Blue Note in the '70s for artists like Donald Byrd.
Bitches Brew obviously influenced fusion--hell, almost everyone who founded a great fusion band played on it. However, I don't see the album itself as characteristically "fusion."
IaSW and Bitches Brew did lead to the wonderful KosmiGroov style--notably Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band and early Weather Report. However, that style was too avant-garde and subtle to last very long. Both "Head Hunters" and the later, funkier Weather Report lineups resulted largely from a need to sell more records.
It's interesting that Miles himself started making more direct, aggressive music as the '70s went on. Personally, I enjoy albums like "Jack Johnson" and "Agharta" more than I do "Bitches Brew."
I love both but prefer Bitches Brew. However, his numerous live recordings from '69-75 are really where it's at.
That's true at a basic level, but Miles was, I think, trying to create something more far complex and out-there than a simple fusion of two existing music styles. It always amuses me when I read the old criticisms of Miles having "sold out" when he made Bitches Brew. Have those critics actually *listened* to Bitches Brew or On The Corner??? That's some of the least commercial music ever released by anyone. It's like Miles was intentionally trying to antagonize EVERYONE by making those albums. Which is one reason I worship the guy.
Last edited by profusion; 12-31-2013 at 07:51 PM.
Funk wasn't necessarily an element. Mahavishnu Orchestra's early records could hardly be called funky,nor could Gary Burton's early fusion records like the aforementioned Duster...or, for the most part, Fourth Way, either. No, originally fusion was about fusing the language of jazz with the energy (and volume) of rock...
With Miles, yes, to be sure...but Miles neither invented nor defined fusion.
Oh, I meant to add a few other fusion bands that were before or concurrent with Miles: Nucleus, Soft Machine (specifically Third through Fifth....even though later albums were considered more fusion, they were in the sense of the already cementing definition of fusion rather than fusion in a broader sense). John Surman's Morning Glory is a sadly unavailable early fusion classic, but Way Back When, a tremendous 1969 date, was rescued by our man Steve at Cuneiform, and demonstrates links between the British jazz scene and what Soft Machine would become....
I agree with you John that "for the most part, Fourth Way, either" was not *that* funky--after all, how funky could a band be with a violinist and a Kiwi keyboardist--but when they were funky they were QUITE funky, especially for an early fusion band from the late-sixties. Certainly *funkier* than other proto-fusion records.
The rhythm section of Ron McClure & Eddie Marshall definitely knew how to lock into a tight funky groove when it was needed. The opening bars from the first track, Everyman's Your Brother, from their first self-titled album in '69 has been sampled by various rappers (or so i've read!
"Wouldn't it be odd, if there really was a God, and he looked down on Earth and saw what we've done to her?" -- Adrian Belew ('Men In Helicopters')
The Fourth Way... now theres another innovative band that gets overlooked when discussing early artists doing Progressive things using Rock music elements.
kudos for bringing them in the conversation
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
Funk music was also in its infancy at the same time that fusion was starting to develop, so it's not hard to understand why the earliest fusion efforts weren't very funky.
For me, "Head Hunters" is the first out-and-out jazz-funk record, even if there were jazz records incorporating some funk influences before that. "Head Hunters" opened a floodgate of jazz-funk releases in the mid '70s that I've found to be less familiar to a lot of fusion fans, particularly albums on Blue Note by people like Donald Byrd, Bobbi Humphrey and Gary Bartz. Some of these leaned closer to R&B than jazz, but there seemed to be less of a genre distinction among the black audiences for this music at the time.
Not to nitpick, but I'd say funk was more a toddler than an infant by the time fusion began to develop. James Brown's music could safely be called funk by the mid '60s.
I do agree that Herbie Hancock's Headhunters was at least amongst the first real jazz-funk records to come out as far as I can recall. The follow-up album, "Thrust" pushed the boundaries of that hybrid even further, allowing the funk aspect to be more elastic and interactive than it had been previously.
For me, The Brecker Brothers' s/t debut from 1975 was a real groundbreaker in the realm of jazz-funk fusion; the compositions and "blowing" sections were harmonically complex and very much within the modern jazz realm, but the grooves were super funky. I get the impression that album is very underrated, at least here at PE.
definitely by 1967 anyway
also we should note that Funk is a style of Rock music
Rock music was born in the African American community and then by the end of the 50s black artists were promptly banned from the radio by bigoted radio programmers who dubbed it "nigger music" but then Elvis made it acceptable for them and all of the sudden Rock was now white music and the Rock that blacks played was called other names like "Rhythm and Blues", "Motown" etc.
Last edited by MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER; 01-02-2014 at 01:41 PM.
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
"Pappa's Got a Brand New Bag" came out in '64. That groove is practically the template on which all funk music stems from.
I prefer to think of Bitches Brew as "New Dimensions in Music," as it said on the cover.
Certainly, it "fused" a lot of "non-jazz" elements....to my mind, most importantly, the idea of using the studio as an instrument, in a much bigger way than had been done previously by so-called "Jazz" artists. Yeah, there had been some "manipulated" jazz recordings, Tristano, Bill Evans, etc., prior to this, but Jazz was more about live recordings in the studio...maybe some double tracking or whatnot, but not the collage that Bitches Brew was...though I know this also wasn't Miles (and Teo's) earliest use of the technique, it was by far the biggest up to then.
With regard to "Funk," I think James Brown was the fountainhead, as has been implied here....--though you can find elements in the Soul Jazz of the period as well. But I do hear BB as the start of the Kozmicgroov thing which many jazzers did, post-BB....
I also think Gary Burton's "Duster" strikes me as a better example of "Fusion" as we have come to know it today, in many ways...and Herbie's Headhunters was the first truly "Jazz-Funk" record, I'd agree.
Definitely, although I still hear JB's pre-1970 grooves as being more "proto-funk." For me, it was Sly Stone who took JB's approach and turned it into the deeper grooves that we think of as funk today. And that was more like 1968-70. This was all happening at the same time as jazz was starting to go electric. What an amazing period. There weren't any rules and no one was arguing about music industry semantics.
Popcorn is about as Funky as it gets, don't you think?
Didn't Miles claim Sly Stone as an influence during his electric period from '69-'74? Also, some funk bands like Kool & The Gang started out playing jazz.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off
the first true Funk tune to the ears of this fanatical Funk enthusiast is Cold Sweat by JB
not a fan of Wiki but heres what some guy wrote over there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Sweat
Building on the innovations of Brown's earlier songs "Out of Sight" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "Cold Sweat" was a watershed event in the evolution of funk music. While those songs were both based on a conventional twelve bar blues chord progression, "Cold Sweat" has only one definite chord change, a move to the subtonic at the bridge. As in the earlier songs, all the band's instruments (horns, guitars, etc.) are used percussively in "Cold Sweat", and overwhelming emphasis is put on the first beat of each measure ("on the one"). The main drum part is a two-bar pattern with a snare hit on the two and four beats (a standard 4/4 rock pattern) with a simple variation:
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
Yeah, I've heard that Miles was influenced by Sly. There was one story I heard that, at a certain point, the organizers of the Newport Jazz Festival decided that for the fest to survive that had to start booking "non-jazz" artists, to draw a bigger crowd. And Sly And The Family Stone were apparently one of the first. And Miles was the fest the same year, and when he saw the crowd react to The Family Stone, Miles decided he "wanted a piece of that".
It's been said that Miles wanted to "sell out", in so much that he wanted a bigger, younger audience than what was available by playing to the jazz snobs and purists. The funny thing is, the way he went about "selling out", ie recording albums with long, extended tracks that were most definitely not "radio friendly" seemed to be counter-intuitive to the whole concept of "selling out". But it did kind of work, Miles was playing to larger audiences, it brought Miles more fame and helped cement his position as a pop culture icon for those who were "too young" to remember Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain.
Definitely. Sly, and Hendrix.
Columbia was threatening to drop Davis if he didn't start selling more albums--and he had a lifestyle to maintain--but there's no reason to believe he was making musical choices contrary to his aesthetic preferences for those reasons.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
Well, Miles certainly "sold out" in the most uncompromising way possible.
Except that the music he made was still what he wanted to do. Sure, the '80s stuff, especially after You're Under Arrest (though that album had three great Scofield/Miles compositions) - what came before, especially Star People and We Want Miles, were still very strong electric records - we're slick and poppy, but later albums like Tutu and especially Amandla, had plenty to recommend them...and live, while there was a glossy sheen that didn't exist before, Miles still had kick-ass bands that included everyone from Scofieod, Mike Stern and Robben Ford to Bob Berg, Darryl Jones, Adam Holzmann and Kenny Garrett. the Montreux box shows that some of his albums were inconsistent, but live he still more than delivered the goods.
People accused Miles of selling out throughout his career, even in the IaSW Abd BB days....but the question us: to whom? His '70s era was too ick for jazz, and way too dense and oblique for most rockers. His '80s days were, admittedly, more accessible, but if you ever captured him live (or heard the Montreux box) you might take another stance,
Actually, there was also an issue of royalties and ownership, which is why, when Miles moved to Warner's he contributed no new material of his own....but that was fine, as Marcus Miller and George Duke did just fine....
Not sure what he "claimed," but it's clear that not only his music but sense of fashion was quite heavily influenced by Stone during this period.
Hendrix too.
The 40th. Anniversary Collector's Edition 6-disc Bitches Brew box is still over a hundred bucks on amazon and I've never quite been tempted enough to pull the trigger. I just don't know how often I would listen to the extra discs after a few initial spins. Does anyone here have that? Is it worth a bill? My fifteen-year-old CDs are still in mint condition despite a great many plays over the years.
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
*** Join me in the Garden of Delights for 3 hours of tune-spinning... every Saturday at 5pm EST on Deep Nuggets radio! www.deepnuggets.com ***
I have it. Not worth it. 2 CD original is fine.
Thank you, that's exactly the honest answer I was looking for, and my wallet and my wife can both breathe a sigh of relief.
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
*** Join me in the Garden of Delights for 3 hours of tune-spinning... every Saturday at 5pm EST on Deep Nuggets radio! www.deepnuggets.com ***
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