When did smooth jazz start?

It was the era just after the jazz-rock-age when Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever made bestselling albums...when Dave Grusin, Earl Klugh, Bob James and similar musicians made jazzy, bluesy sounds. That the GRP-label started around the same time (1975) can't be a coincidence!

 

When will it end, that's what I wanna know.

 

The main ingredient in Ambien.

 

THIS. You can appreciate and enjoy "smooth" and "real/authentic" jazz equally. Turning your nose up at "smooth jazz" is pretentious, IMO.

 

There is excellent music made in both genres, to be sure. Although the proportion of it seems to be roughly inverse to the sales figures for those categories.

 

I think Creed Taylor kind of introduced the idea of jazz for the Easy Listening market--although maybe all jazz + strings was meant to cross over to that audience. Bill Evans made a few of those for Taylor (Plays the Theme for V.I.P.'s and Others, Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra, From Left to Right), but I don't really hear Intuition in that vein. Maybe there's a fine line between "cool" and "smooth," though.

But to me, "smooth jazz" is Easy Listening Jazz + some elements of R&B. And a lot of artists recording for Taylor in the late '60s and '70s were at the forefront of that development, too. Maybe Wes Montgomery or Ramsey Lewis started things in that direction, but Hubert Laws, Grover Washington, Hank Crawford, George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Don Sebesky, and Bob James also deserve a lot of the credit or blame.

 

The Time Out album, which put him over the top, featured tunes in odd time signatures that were difficult if not impossible to dance to. Brubeck was popular, but regardless of whether you like him or not, he is not a precursor to smooth jazz.

I do think that a case can be made for Creed Taylor being an early key figure in creating what might be viewed as proto-smooth jazz.

 

No edge, harmonically safe, all smoove edges, very commercial, definitely a precursor.

 

I disagree with virtually everything you wrote.

 

Nonsense. Brubeck's quartet was a legit pioneer in time signatures/rhythms as stated above. It's not their fault that Columbia chose to market Brubeck for the college and Dave Digs Disney Crowd. The real issue is normalization of electric instruments that was the beginning of the end for jazz after the brit invasion. You may as well attribute it to Miles as he legitimized fusion. It was a foregone conclusion this would lead to shlock, although much valid jazz came, too.

 

I would make a distinction between the earlier West coast "cool jazz" genre, and "smooth jazz", they're not the same thing in my opinion.
Wikipedia has a not terrible definition:

"Smooth jazz is music that evolved from a blend of jazz fusion and easy listening pop music, featuring a polished pop feel with little to no jazz improvisation."
The earliest smooth jazz music appearing in the 1970s includes the 1975 album Touch by saxophonist John Klemmer, the song "Breezin'" as performed by guitarist George Benson in 1976, the 1977 instrumental composition "Feels So Good" by flugelhorn player Chuck Mangione, and jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra's instrumental "Morning Dance", released in 1979.[2] Smooth jazz grew in popularity in the 1980s as Anita Baker, Sade, Al Jarreau and Grover Washington released multiple hit songs.[3] The smooth jazz genre began to decline at the end of the 1980s in a backlash exemplified by critical complaints about what many critics saw as the "bland" sound of top-selling saxophonist Kenny G, whose popularity peaked with his 1992 album Breathless.[2]

 

I am admittedly not a fan of smooth jazz. Still, I find it interesting that most jazz fans hate smooth jazz, yet it is the only sub-genre of jazz that is mildly popular; it attracts a largely African American audience; and people actually dance to it and get laid to it. In many ways, these factors bring smooth jazz closer to jazz's origins than any other jazz sub-genre.

 

Columbia marketed him because they could, there was nothing to upset, the odd time signatures where mild spice for safe jazz, for a crowd already prepared by Babatunde Olatunji and Latin jazz, the Davester simply rode the wave because he could.

 

I think of jazz meets quiet storm when I think of "smooth jazz".

Personally, I don't mind smooth jazz, but I understand why purists would dislike it.

 

Antonio Carlos Jobim did several albums which have "smooth jazz" sound such as "The Composer of Desifando plays" (1963) with his big hit "The Girl from Ipenema". Now if that ain't smooth jazz then what is?

His other two albums on A&M (CTI) Wave and Tide, not to mention his earlier albums, such as The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim are in this mold.

Scott

P.S. For those of you who mentioned Grover Washington, Jr. how about his album, Mr. Magic?

 

When you could bring a woman to a jazz concert and not explain things to her. My girlfriend in the 70’s dragged me to a Chuck Mangione concert and sat there crying the entire time.

 

Personally, I assumed the audience was mostly white and non-urban.

 

I think a lot of music went off the rails in the 70's and 80's, in a time when many genres became reshaped,
some for the better, others not so much.

 

You must be thinking of "Soul-Jazz". A different thing altogether.

 

So Tom Scott hamming his way through a rendition of Stella By Starlight is somehow more musically satisfying than John Coltrane doing it? Oh wait, that wouldn’t happen as Scott is too busy playing with The Blues Brothers and Coltrane already has done it masterfully. Now...I understand! Yeah, I’m one of those jazz snobs.

 

No, I'm thinking of smooth jazz, and I've seen the audiences.

 

That is bossa nova, and bossa nova in its purist form was not smooth jazz. Probably some watered-down bossa (played by non-Brasilians) played a role in creating smooth jazz.

 

You clearly have something against Brubeck, because you're way off...

 

I am willing to be wrong, but I think there is a generational revision afoot.

 

Have you listened to Desifando or Wave? I would hardly qualify those as purist. They are very American sounding and use mostly conventional, mainstream instrumentation. Look at the huge list of musicians used on those albums with all the horn and string players. You might be correct for other artists such as Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento but Jobim made very Americanized bossa nova.

Scott