How much jazz was there in these classic rock artists?

Dreams is copped directly from All Blues? Maybe the "feel" but the vamp in Dreams is pretty much a suspension deal.......very different from the vamp in All Blues. Maybe the sharp 9 chord in the turnaround?
The drumming of course is.
I know you have written extensively and your writings are very informative and the ABB guys have said how they were influenced by KOB but IMO the influence is in a very broad sense. To me there is just as much T. Bone in their jazz blues tunes as there is Miles.
I agree Dreams is one of their most jazz influenced songs however.

 

I guess it's too much to ask for members to read the OP that contains the premise of the thread and not just react to the title.

 

I would like to read it. Where is it available?

 

There's lots of jazz without changes or blowing over changes. The whole universe of new thing jazz and so much of the post new thing jazz of the last 50 years has been about not blowing over changes, and avoiding harmony as structure.

That said, rock music that's jazzy isn't necessarily jazz music. I'm not always even sure that jazz music that rocks is jazz music (like, I think some of the Dead's performances are closer to jazz than, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra). The headline matter of the thread I think isn't whether or not these rock bands are jazz bands or are playing jazz, but how much jazz is in their music -- which can be measured myriad ways, for me one of the biggest ways has nothing to do with harmony or improvisation but swinging rhythm feel. The Dead sometime would swing. The Allmans would sometimes swing. Not much rock music swings.

That said, it can be interesting when these world's combine in ways less expected than what's found in the fusion music that brings rock rhythms and rhythm section feel into jazz. Maybe my favorite version of Dark Star is an unquestionably jazz version by David Murray. What makes it jazz, and the Dead's many renditions not? It's an existential question, but I think also central to the matter at hand. Not sure there's one answer, but I do thinking swinging rhythm and rhythmic elasticity play a part as does following an improvisation as a group in a form of group spontaneous composition. I'm not sure any of the difference has to do with blowing over changes or harmonic sophistication.

 

That entire David Murray album is very interesting for the issues we have been discussing\

 

I would love to know how many people in this thread are trained jazz musicians, and how many have also played the music of the bands listed in the original post.
Jazz isn't about the feel as much as it is the harmony involved, and how the improvisation happens.
The song Red Clay, for instance, is most definitely jazz, yet it is not swing. There is also no walking bass either, yet it is a jazz standard.
To say Cream had no jazz is just crazy. Two thirds of the band were highly respected jazz musicians.

 

You're saying the Dead's renditions don't have those features? That is not correct.

 

Lots of jazz influence, whether you hear it or not is one of the joys of music. The entire Dreams arrangement is based on All Blues, yes. Gregg brought it as a 4/4-ish ballad to the band.

 

Next year probably. University Press of Florida. Just finished the manuscript yesterday. It ain’t about the ABB and jazz but I heard that so much I had to try and make sense of it

 

This is something I really struggled to articulate, how psychedelic rock and jazz converge/diverge. I had a hard time expressing how they differ, b/c it’s the same aesthetic, though not all psychedelic rock bands were skilled musicians. I determined the difference is psychedelics and the demographics of the people making the music...young, (typically, though not always) white rock bands.

 

The Velvets could sound like the contemporary jazz of their time.

 

Which was:

And this post clarifies that:

I didn't want to bring it up unsolicited and be that guy, but since you've asked, I first began serious study of music in 1975 on clarinet. In 1977, I took up guitar and in 1980 I took up bass to play in our HS production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I have continued on guitar and bass since that time and in 1992, I purchased a double bass and woodshedded for some 3-4 years before playing jazz semi-professionally for some six years (I say semi-professionally because music was not my primary source of income, but I did play several hundred jazz gigs over that period). I've also spent a few years in a local symphony orchestra (the first small-town orchestra in the US, as a matter of fact - Reading, MA).

If Billy Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh don't have elasticity (especially in 1972-1974), then I don't know what the word means.

And yet Scotty LaFaro was a young, white kid who was, at the time of his tragic passing, one of the best bass players on the planet. Convergence and divergence are slippery targets indeed.

So anyway, my point is that, given the flexibility in the OP that has generally not been read or recognized by some posters here, Grateful Dead had huge jazz influences and even exhibited traits associated with jazz music, even if the music itself cannot be considered jazz. To wit:

• Modal improvisation - many Grateful Dead tunes feature modal improvisation. For example, Playing in the Band is written in D Major, but the middle jam segment typically utilizes a D dorian scale over a D minor tonic.
• Modal composition - there are dozens of examples, which is actually less rare than one might think in rock as a whole (Mixolydian probably being the most common basis). Dark Star clearly has A as a tonal center, but the chords are borrowed from D Major - so it's V ii (A Emin) as based on D Major.
• Free jazz - someone mentioned chord changes earlier. What are the chord changes to Ornette's Free Jazz? The infamous (some would say insufferable, which is fine; we aren't value-judging here) Grateful Dead meltdowns exhibit many of the free jazz and/or atonal (not the same thing, necessarily) elements espoused by the likes of Ornette, Sun Ra, Miles and 'Trane, but they are uniquely their own.

So, if that isn't enough to suggest that Grateful Dead had a significant amount of jazz influence (which was the premise of this thread per the OP), I don't know what is. Perhaps Bob Weir stating that he tried to voice his chords in such a way as to try to mimic McCoy Tyner in the classic Coltrane quartet? Who cares if he succeeded? That's jazz influence.

 

That's a point that can reasonably be argued on the basis of the known facts- that Jerry Garcia did not get involved with regularly using opioids until 1975 or 1976 at the earliest, and he didn't show signs of going all in with heroin use until around 1978. Most fans agree that the years when the Grateful Dead were playing their best- and certainly their jazziest- music preceded that era. It's also worth noting that Garcia had some cleaned-up years between 1985 and 1995.

As for Garcia "shooting up" anything, be it heroin or the cocaine/heroin mix known as a speedball: I admit that I haven't read Kreutzmann's book. But the impression I've gotten from several other books and accounts is that Garcia's mode of ingestion was almost always smoking (more accurately vaping), not injection. (As for Clapton, he snorted his powder drugs.) I don't doubt that Garcia sometimes did drugs onstage and during set breaks, but you're making it sound as if ever since 1965, Grateful Dead shows were periodically interrupted for Garcia to go shoot up dope offstage on a regular basis. That's a false account of the the actual history.

In 1973, the Dead were playing two sets, four hours with a 30 minute break, a book of 80 or so songs per tour, average of something like 25 songs a night, with very few songs repeated from night to night. And Garcia was onstage for practically the entirety of both sets, remembering practically all of the words, every night. Nobody is shooting up backstage and doing that.

 

The Dead spent their first seven years playing anywhere that would have them. They played 1000-seat theaters and college campuses, sometimes in the lunchroom. The band played many of their longest sets in that era. It took them more than 20 years to become one of the "highest grossing rock acts on tour".

Yes, I'm not discussing the music itself- that's a pointless exercise, no one can talk someone into thinking that a form of music is legit if they've already convinced themselves otherwise. If someone is ever going to change their opinion in that regard, it isn't going to be done on the basis of a verbal argument. (Or a perfunctory audition of a Youtube clip heard over their laptop, either.)

But you could at least get your facts straight.

 

most of J. S. Bach's musical compositions were originally drawn from his improvisations. Facts About Improvisation

I heard Garrick Ohlsson practicing piano in the room upstairs from the gift shop at Tanglewood once. He can improvise. lol, he ought to do more of it onstage. Especially given Keith Jarrett's recent medical issues.

 

David Crosby is a McCoy Tyner acolyte too.

 

no chord changes = it sucked

(kidding!)

 

The points I made about the Dead were never stated as specific to the band's early years. Not once. You even quoted what I said--it clearly referred to them being a high grossing act. I stopped replying to @Dahabenzapple because he did the exact same thing in replying about drug use to avoid my valid points.

As for the music--hey, you want to pretend The Dead tapped into jazz, be my guest. You'd be wrong, though. It was more like boogie woogie with a couple raised and syncopated notes in each bar. That ain't jazz.

 

Hey, once you have the imprimatur of Jazz Artist, you can shoehorn Jug Ammons' "Jungle Song" into a French nursery rhyme, and call the result "Jean-Pierre" after you're done with it.

"I'll play it first, and tell you what it's called later." Miles D. Davis, who knew his way around a passacaglia (but no Sophistication! Where are all the Changes!?!)

As for the argument on whether the Dead's jamming on "The Other One" constitutes awesome group improvisation or incoherent incompetence, that's nothing compared to the debates I've encountered as to the Jazz Realness of Ascension or Free Jazz. Still no winner in those disputes, either...

 

"The points I made about the Dead were never stated as specific to the band's early years. Not once."

As if that hokey excuse of a climb-down exonerates you. I think the term of art is "weaseling."

I note a marked resemblance in your evasions to earlier exchanges that we had late last spring on an entirely different topic.

Those threads are now locked (but readable.)

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...at-all-time-high.900264/page-45#post-23622274
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...read-version-9y.964465/page-100#post-24136667
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...read-version-9y.964465/page-108#post-24139359
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...read-version-9y.964465/page-110#post-24139464
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...read-version-9y.964465/page-114#post-24140098

I'm now going to lay out of this discussion.

You can leave your cap on if you want. It doesn't say what you think it does, though.

 

Of course it ain't jazz. We're not claiming that. Tapped into is the key and speaks to the question that was asked in the OP. I made this point over an hour ago. I do find it telling that in matters of subjectivity, you proclaim wrong.

 

Yes - standing alone on the mountaintop spouting stuff that only he believes.

 

Count me as another one who thinks it's completely absurd to maintain that none of the artists/bands mentioned in the OP have any jazz influence. Obviously a reasonable listener wouldn't categorize these as Jazz, but seriously, no influence at all???

And since when does something need to be as technical or complex to be influenced by something else?

 

Never backed down from my points in this thread or any other, and I stand by all my comments so read away. By all means, feel free to take a shot, badly miss, and duck out of the discussion if that's your game.

 

If it were only he that believes it.