An Introduction to America’s Music

482 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II

At the time, though, any such comparison would have been hotly contested.

Many rock fans—both mainstream and punk—detested disco, as evidenced by

the Disco Demolition Night, a promotional event at a Chicago W hite Sox baseball

game in 1979 in which a local radio DJ blew up a crate of disco records in the out-

fi eld while near-rioting fans threw LPs as if they were Frisbees. The controversy

around disco shows, once again, that genre distinctions often had more to do

with the listeners’ group affi liations than with the music itself.

JAZZ-ROCK FUSION

With the development of rock virtuosity in the late 1960s, rock albums by groups

such as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience came to share features with

jazz albums: namely, an emphasis on tracks longer than the typical three to four

minutes, with much of that space devoted to lengthy solos. Some rock musicians

looked to jazz instrumentalists such as John Coltrane as models who brought a

high level of artistry to improvised performance. As early as 1967 the rock band

Blood, Sweat, and Tears recorded a cover version of Billie Holiday’s classic “God

Bless the Child” in an eclectic arrangement that blended rock, jazz, and Latin

rhythms.

At the same time, some jazz artists recognized in rock a kindred aesthetic. In

a little more than a decade, rock had evolved from a brash, simplistic alternative

to jazz into a style of musical expression that had the potential to match jazz’s

serious artistic intent. A pioneer in combining elements of both styles into a jazz-

rock fusion, or simply fusion, was trumpeter Miles Davis, who had remained

in the forefront of jazz developments since he arrived on the modern jazz scene in

the 1940s. His 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro included an original tune based in

part on a Jimi Hendrix composition, and the next year’s In a Silent Way went even

further in the direction of fusion by including the sounds of electric keyboards

and distorted, rock-style electric guitar. But Davis’s big breakthrough came with

1970’s Bitches Brew, one of the era’s best-selling jazz albums, perhaps because it

was often the only jazz record in a rock fan’s collection.

Davis’s foray into fusion brought a degree of commercial success rare among

jazz artists circa 1970, the year Davis’s band performed before 600,000 people

at the Isle of Wight rock festival—a crowd

unthinkable for most jazz acts, which

typically played in nightclubs or small

concert venues. Some musicians and crit-

ics in the jazz community accused Davis

of selling out, but the music itself argues

otherwise. Apart from the use of electric

instruments, Davis’s fusion resembles

conventional rock less than it does the

free jazz of such avant-garde musicians

as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor,

among the least commercial jazz musi-

cians of the previous decade. Free jazz

was one movement within jazz in which

Guitarist Larry Coryell on Rock’s Appeal

to Late-1960s Jazz Musicians

E

verybody was dropping acid and the prevailing attitude

was “Let’s do something different.” We were saying, “We

love [ jazz guitarist] Wes [Montgomery], but we also love Bob

Dylan. We love Coltrane but we also love the Beatles. We

love Miles but we also love the Rolling Stones. ”

In their own words

Miles Davis

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