How much jazz was there in these classic rock artists?

It's not purely subjective. There are many objective factors that we can talk about in terms of the music, and I said that a couple of days ago in the thread.

 

And I discussed them in detail about an hour and a half ago. See above. Jazz influence does not equal jazz (this was the original question asked). This ain't rocket surgery.

 

Ok, but you'd make an excellent captain aboard that rocket because the thread is about quantification, i.e., HOW MUCH.

 

chris hillman would play coltrane riffs on his mandolin. back in '65.

 

Joni Mitchell (a lot in her "Jaco" era)
Cream (quite a bit, mostly courtesy of Ginger)
Doors (a little, in the feel that John D. had)
Grateful Dead (didn't ever SOUND like jazz in the idiom sense, but essentially they WERE a jazz band)
The Band (not very much at all)
Byrds (a little around the time of the 3rd and 4th albums and with "Untitled")
Rolling Stones (Charlie) (I know that's his influence, but to me he NEVER sounds like a jazz drummer in the Stones)
Fleetwood Mac (very little if any at all)
Bob Dylan (very little)
ZZ Top (almost none)
Genesis (Phil Collins only) (he certainly brought a fusion vibe in his drumming from the mid/late 70s)
Pink Floyd (Syd era only) (not much, even though they jammed. Roger not a good enough player to do jazz)
Led Zeppelin (John Paul Jones and some syncopation, so maybe) (I don't hear it at all)
Neil Young (zero, and again not a good enough player to bring that)
Beatles (marginal) (nope)
Who (very little) (nope although the level of improv Keith did is perhaps something like jazz)
Deep Purple (zero) (I hear a little jazz come through Jon Lord and later from Tommy Bolin)
Metallica (zero) (none)

 

Especially Crimson in the touring behind Islands through Red. Those groups didn't play in the jazz idiom, but essentially they WERE playing jazz on the group improv pieces.

 

Steely Dan's main influences come FAR before the fusion era.

 

Don't particularly want to wade in here and sling more mud or whatnot, as frankly I don't consider myself an expert on enough to weigh in definitively. But think I should add a point of clarification RE: The Dead points made upstream.

I would wager most people who would put The Dead forth (or at the very least, certain key members) as having been heavily influenced by jazz in the way they approached their instrument and the way they improvised together would say that it was something that permeated their entire existence.

However, these people would probably also say that such musical leanings were most prominent and enacted most successfully in the group's late 1960s - mid 1970s performances. This a period that is basically considered the golden age for the band with regard to composition & functionality/interplay of the group.

Of course, YMMV, every Deadfan has different tastes/eras they prefer - some love every note they played. But this is the period in which I think general consensus finds them at their improvisational peak.

As a result, I think there has been issue taken with the dismissive statements about the band, as follows.

First, we have the claim that they were not "about the music" because they were one of the highest grossing touring acts with the implication that real musicians, real jazz artists, only play in tiny clubs and languish in obscurity and have more cred or something. I'm not going to even address the latter part because it's just patently ridiculous (nevermind the fact that Garcia did his own jazz fusion sets with Howard Wales in dingy San Fransisco nightclubs on random weeknights). The first part is just flat out false though. Even if being the #1 touring act in the country negated musical chops (it doesn't), The Grateful Dead were not that sort of band in their early career. As somebody said earlier, they basically played any place that would take them. It was only into the late 80s and early 90s that the Deadhead thing went totally bananas and they became the mammoth touring act with a traveling town to boot that outgrossed everyone else on the road. They had a very rapid ascension to the top during this time - I want to say maybe early 90s, (1991 or 1992?) they finally topped Boxscore's year end touring gross lists.

Secondly, there's the whole "the GD's whole improv/jamming thing was just an excuse for band members to leave stage and get high" claim (paraphrasing here). This is 99.99% pure poppycock. However, yes, sadly there probably is a small kernel of truth to this - albeit not in relation any of the band's prime years. There were likely some instances where Garcia, particularly 1994 - 1995, left the stage during the nightly "Drums -> Space" segment (a staple of 80s and 90s shows that was built into the setlist and acted as a showcase for the two-drummer setup of that period to do their own solo freeform improvisations), used heroin, and then came back. However, this was not a regular occurrence in the slightest in the overall career of the band. Garcia was very obviously in the throes of addiction and nearing death - even ardent fans of the band often find this era of performances hard to stomach. Frankly, if/when he was using hard drugs at all using during performances, it most likely was either before the show entirely or during set break - not just walking off in the middle of playing to get his fix.

My overall point here is that both of these claims seem more like conjecture than anything. Sure, they were not explicitly made "specific to the band's early years", but rather indiscriminately to the band's entire existence, which by extension includes that peak era. This is why people are taking specific issue with those statements. Despite being blindly applied to the group as a whole, these non-sequitur criticisms are ones that could only really be applied to The Grateful Dead in that last chapter of their existence when they were a more rigid, lumbering, creatively strained heritage act whose leader was in a very bad state - not quite the unpredictable group whose freeform lysergic rave-ups of a Fillmore show in '69 or spacey voyages of '73, etc. that had cemented the band's live reputation in the first place.

Retroactively negating a band in their prime because of perceptions/assumptions of them decades later when they were in nadir of their career is just silly. That's all I'm gonna say.

 

And FWIW, I don't want to offend any seasoned Heads with what seems like a dismissive take on the band's second half of existence (I do love me some of the Brent years and they certainly had some serious performative re-envigoration throughout '89 - '90, and even shows onwards into the 90s where I hear if not, occasional magic, at least some stuff of interest).

I think it just goes without saying that many Deadheads had/have a cutoff point with the group in terms of when they felt the magic was either starting to fade or had just become full-on diminishing returns. Some won't listen past '93 because it's too depressing, others won't do much after Brent's death in '90 save for a few Hornsby shows because of the lack of chemistry/spark that followed, some are strictly Keith era and won't go past '79, some think the band were never the same when they came back from hiatus in '76 (Phil Lesh himself has said this). The golden age (somewhere in the realm of '68 - '77) is simply held to a much higher stature, the pinnacle of their craft.

 

Sure I know
I was talking on the whole, as they developed in context with the thread idea

 

I don't know. I'm asking the question. I think the Dead could swing and play with rhythmic elasticity. But I don't think they were a jazz band, or that them performing "Dark Star" is an example of jazz music (and, in fact, I think most of the performances of "Dark Star" aren't necessarily the band at its swingingest, which is where I think the band seems most jazzy, playing something like "The Eleven," more than "Dark Star," or the fusiony stuff of the '70s like "Slipknot"). But wrapped up in that is the old existential question, "What is jazz?" a question that has brought people to blows and ended friendships so, a fraught one that's not proven so easy to answer.

FWIW, I think there are other jazz borrowings in the music of the Dead too. When I hear the intertwining melody variations of Garcia, Weir and Lesh, it reminds me very much of the old polyphonic improvised clarinet, trumpet, trombone New Orleans front line jazzing a melody.

 

Not that much. They may have been influenced by some of the new thing jazz, and I know Lou Reed had a radio show named after an early Cecil Taylor piece at Syracuse U, but they really weren't sailing in the same waters and really didn't sound at all like and weren't using the many of the same ideas to be found in Coltrane or Ayler or Coleman or Taylor or Roscoe Mitchell or Sun Ra's music of the time other than maybe extended instrumental technics to produce tones outside the even tempered scale. The band's music wasn't rhythmically or formally music like say Coleman's trio or Taylor's Conquistador or Mitchell's Sound or Sun Ra's Magic City, to pick a couple of contemporaneous jazz recordings. They had more in common with the noisy art music of the downtown scene from which they descended, like the music of LaMonte Young.

 

It is. It's also an album that kind of reminds us, or at least me, that jazz was once, among other things, a verb -- you could jazz a melody, like you could jazz the classics, and bring music from outside the world of jazz into jazz by giving it a swinging rhythm and a frontline polyphonic melodic group improvisation.

 

Fwiw re the attitudes of some jazz fans and musicians, I went to a music school that had a conspicuous subculture of jazz majors who were so purist/elitist/closed-minded that they had difficulty accepting electric instruments in jazz/as jazz period. All of those folks would balk at the idea of any rock band having any recognizable jazz influences. I'm not saying that anyone here is that purist/elitist/biased, but there's a continuum of different views, obviously.

Needless to say I didn't get along with that subculture, but other jazz majors at that school were far more open-minded, and ironically the classical or "legit" department, which is where I started and remained for the most part even though I wound up getting a dual classical/jazz degree, had a reputation for being extremely freewheeling/cutting edge and avant-garde embracing (even though they had a good grounding in the whole history of classical . . . but I could have suggested doing a string quartet + amplified queefing--all run through a bunch of Big Muff pedals--arrangement of "Cat Scratch Fever" and my professors would not only have encouraged it, they would have helped me figure out how to best mic the queefing--that's the sort of department of was). And heck, even the jazz department produced a number of well-known fusion and smooth jazz musicians. Still that purist subculture was a good half of the jazz department and they were a pain in the butt.

 

Something else that's often being overlooked is how, in the 1960s, multiple genres of music were all converging on similar ideals/sounds/organizing principles. For example, the "one-chord piece/one-chord jam" concept was arising in all kinds of contexts -- from Stockhausen to Terry Riley, from Coltrane to the Beatles to Cannonball Adderley to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to Pink Floyd.

(Of course it was hardly a new concept -- one can look back not just to Beethoven and Wagner, who both used single-harmony paradigms for extended passages of music, but to centuries of Indian classical music, which gained tremendous visibility in those years.)

Or take the "no-chord piece/no-chord jam". Again, an old concept in a dozen ways -- i.e. playing without changes or a tonal center, with or without pre-composed material (and don't let's argue about whether all music has harmonic implications/changes).

Ornette, who wasn't the first jazz musician to play in that vein, clearly pointed to things that the Dead did (in terms of improvisations that sometimes took a purely melodic approach without harmonic referents). Cecil Taylor's percussive use of the piano was, alongside Stockhausen, an explicit and documented influence on Rick Wright of Pink Floyd.

My point is, trying to track jazz influence in terms of (for example) functional harmony would risk applying an anachronistic lens: jazz was rapidly becoming something very different from what it had been, and it's those newer styles that a lot of the influence came from.

Coltrane wasn't playing "Giant Steps" any more, and Miles was gradually abandoning his old rep. Cannonball Adderley's group was jamming for 15 minutes on a single mode (or at least over a single pedal point). And rockers weren't looking to jazz for guidance on how to play ii > V > I progressions, or to steal hard-bop licks and clichés.

What happened seems to have been something like a collective effort to explore new, shared directions. And boundaries between genres became less and less relevant because, for musicians in the vanguards of their respective fields, in many ways the differences grew smaller.

 

Yes, there is a little swing in Dark Star in the cymbals especially in the early statement of the theme. But definitely rhythmic elasticity and group improv creating new music on the spot (particularly in 1972). I agree that doesn't make it jazz.

 

Indeed. And if we consider early 70s "The Crusaders" albums fusion, those seem to have certainly had a deep impact on how Steely Dan's sound developed through the mid/later 70s. And in a good way.

Oh how I love The Crusaders, especially when they still had trombone in the group.

 

100%

 

Always an interesting discussion. Of course, Wynton Marsalis has a lot of opinions on this. From what I can gather, he sees jazz as BOTH something that has polyphonic improvisation (not just one player blowing over through-composed stuff) and it also has to do with idiomatic jazz things that have developed over 100 years or so, which include swing and particular types of chord work.

I'm not so sure the jazz idiom should really define it as a genre. To me, it's the polyphonic improvisation part that makes it jazz. In that sense, the Grateful Dead were VERY jazz. And something like Steely Dan or even Joni Mitchell's 70s work is influenced by jazz but is most decidedly NOT jazz. Others may disagree.

I love love LOVE the impact of jazz idiom chords when used in popular music, though. That's really what I love in Steely Dan.

 

Yeah, I mean I think there's a case for that, but I am trying to be minimalist here and focus on what to me is undeniable--definite, discernible jazz elements/influence.

 

Well said, I think so much of this discussion centers around one’s answer to “What is jazz?” and also “What does jazz *influence* sound like for non-jazz artists?”

The Dead didn’t play jazz music, but they damn sure had a HUGE jazz influence from my ears. Same with the Allman Brothers Band, who learned from their records.

I’m glad you highlighted Lesh, in particular...he and Berry Oakley (who loved Phil) are incredibly intuitive bass players who kept their bands simultaneously grounded AND moving forward at the same time.

To me, that’s what jazz influence *sounds* like...but neither the Dead nor the ABB play jazz in the strictest sense of the word.

YMMV, natch.

 

What is the meaning of saying "Free jazz" then? If jazz and rock were "converging" then the emphasis was on the freedom in sound and not the formalities, and the velvets were right there doing that, while their jazz counterparts were getting free too. Influence is about intentions and not just fulfilling formal requirements. Rock bands played rock, but the sounds could converge.

 

Steely Dan to me are the exact polar opposite of fusion. Not loose, solos and no jamming, strong melodic motives. I'm with you that the improv is the main identifier for jazz. Also that the Dan are great.

Improv means you're going to go somewhere else. It is a little strange to say that jazz bands go to jazz but others can't, when each improv is supposed to be a new thing in the world.

 

The new thing in jazz at least at that point in the early and mid 60s was focused largely on finding ways to structure jazz composition and improvisation around something other than harmony -- the cycle of chord changes, stacked harmony substitution for improvisation, aaba song form, those things that had been central to bebop. That wasn't the Velvets' concern so much. They were working largely in song form, especially after Cale was gone, with steady rock rhythms, regular repeating chord changes. There were areas of convergence and cross fertilization sometimes because as @ostrichfarm noted a lot of approaches were converging across genres, but I don't think the fundamental concerns or approaches were all that similar.

 

It's weird for me to see My Chem amongst all the classic rock bands.

The reason you hear zero jazz influence in My Chem (and to a lesser extent, in Metallica) is because My Chem is drawing on the punk tradition, as opposed to the blues tradition which most classic rock bands drew on and which allowed for at least some crossover with jazz. Early punk pretty much abandoned any attempts at swinging in favor of fast, straight-ahead rhythms. So the guitar stylings of bands like Nirvana, My Chem, blink-182, or Jimmy Eat World are going to be far more influenced by bands like, e.g. Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Ramones, The Cure than amything close to blues or jazz.