How much jazz was there in these classic rock artists?

Yes!

 

Again... I have said TIME AND TIME AGAIN that I understand jazz may have influenced any particular artist, and I haven't disagreed that it affected any specific artist, ABB included. You keep making that crap up.

How many times do I have to say it for cripes sake?!?!?!
The influence is there, in improv and in playing longer songs. Okay? Geez.

If your going to argue, at least argue with what I am saying, not what I'm not!

Okay... so even if we accept that ABB was influenced to play a 20 minute Whipping Post, they're still playing a blues song with blues notes and blues beats and a blues construct with a blues chord progression. So they had a long improv in the middle of that... that's the jazz influence... but it's still a blues or blues-rock song. All that changed in delivering all those blues elements was the part of the compositional method, but the composition, even if improvised, is still blues!

 

Using this comment is only a Springboard to my point, not engaging with this particular poster, but ...

I like Steely Dan a lot (at least up to Aja), but I always have a hard time ascribing Jazz to the Dan.
(I know this isn't a familiar take on the band, but it's very sincere.)
Sure, I think the only album song that wasn't original was a nod to Duke Ellington, and I'm sure it was heartfelt and played straight, i.e., the talk box effect mimicking Louis, or whoever did the original muted trumpet solo?
But very little of the Dan makes me think these guys are playing jazz.
Nice comfortable rhythms maybe, nice chord voiceings, but it all sounded too Pop or Rock to me to sound like Jazz.
It's extremely Controlled, there isn't much Adventure to it, Clever and Inventive as it may be.

Yes, there is Louis Armstrong jazz, Art Tatum jazz, Coltrane and Ornette jazz, ECM jazz, we can go on-and-on.
But Steely Dan only barely hinted around the corners of Jazz, as far as my dumb mind is concerned, so I always wonder why everyone mentions them as having a huge Jazz influenced sound. Yes, it's influenced a bit, but not enough for me to consider them obvious.

 

What did I make up? I don't want to anyway.

Jazz players don't even like to describe themselves as playing jazz as opposed to something else. I don't understand the impulse to autopsy and dissect genres.

Jazz is what is on a jazz album, by the reckoning of the musician and the company. That's I think all we know. Because jazz has been so many things for 100 years. But the music on it will not be only jazz and it can't be seperated into not jazz and jazz. It's one piece of art. It is not called jazz because it fulfills a musicological function, but because we agree it is jazz, unless we don't. There is no musical test for a jazz tune or LP that is stronger than the record company saying so. If a rock album has jazz on it it's still a rock album, regardless of musicology.

 

Absolutely was not directed at you specifically. Apologies if it came across that way, just an observation and response not an accusation.

 

Man, I made it crystal clear... what you made up wad the allegation that I was ignoring 100 years of jazz improv when in post after post I had acknowledged it.

There is no "impulse to dissect genres." I was just responding to a question about genres. You can't address what rock bands were most influenced by jazz without addressing genres... its at the heart of the OPs question.

As for a piece of music being one piece of art, sure. But that piece is composed of stuff... what that stuff is crucial to what the final piece is. We need not categorize those compositional elements at all to enjoy the art. But if you're going to answer the question of how much of one is in the other, you have to address those categories.

Here's a thought..... If you don't like discussing genres, or think it's a foolish pursuit..... don't jump into a thread that by its very title and description is all about analyzing genres.

 

Let them speak then:

Bill Ward: From Jazz to Black Sabbath, Part 1-2 article @ All About Jazz

Tony Iommi interview part two: 'Paranoid', jazz and bassists | MusicRadar

 

My olde brain often gets tired of people linking what Other People think rather than what You think. I don't think TS Jenkin bothered to post here, but I guess he has a presence, right? And (sarcasm alert) I can't quite put into words my own thoughts so I'll link somebody else to do my talking for me.

Yes there are good reasons to link trusted sources, but I do get fatigued by "I have nothing to say but LINK"

 

And as a total aside from the topic at hand, I've been experimenting with using CAPS or Caps as a way to emphasize, and I'm starting to think it's a Fool's Errand. (haha)

 

What do you think about the Eagles covering Midnight Rider?
Sorry I know this is olde knews, but I loved the country feel of it back then, but a purist might scoff.
My opinion is it has a lot of energy.

 

Not sure b/c I've never heard that Eagles song which is an Allmans cover? Country and Rock blend together rather seamlessly in many cases (rock played on a Tele with a singer using a sometimes affected vocal).

 

Thread needs a mood uplift. Time to take the quiz:

Are You A Big Jazz Boy Or A Little Jazz Boy?

 

As for jazzier elements seeping in to rock music, Tommy Bolin's "Savannah Woman" is incredibly jazzy, especially the lead work.



Even Jimi's solo on "Freedom" has a jazzy vibe to it.

 

Not surprising, as he was able to hang quite nicely with Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer on the Spectrum album.
And parenthetically I'm sure he's been mentioned in this thread somewhere, but it surprises me that Jeff Beck isn't on that list, or Carlos Santana. Maybe because they played 'fusion' and not 'genu-ine Jazz'? I saw an early fusion-oid performance by Jeff in the 70's. He managed to hook up with an bonafide dyed in the wool jazzer Jan Hammer for a while, and though I thought Blow By Blow did a credible Mahavishnu-esque take on the music I preferred Max Middleton (who's darn good on Blow By Blow) as a foil in that band with Cozy Powell. Speaking of musicians crossing over my main man is probably Phillip Wilson, who along with Sanborn and Dinwiddie brought some AACM credentials to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band before he went back to his old friend Lester Bowie. Santana, is an interesting case. He had some quality jazz luminaries on his albums, dedicated an album to Coltrane, and was good friends with Miles but I don't think that chops-wise he could really and truly hang. An argument for the fanboys perhaps, but not for me.

 

Harmonic approach is the only defining factor to me, and that changes with each era of jazz, but it is more constant than swing.

 

Well OK.

My feeling is that you are making distinctions where they don't exist. When one says Jazz it's never a fixed quantity or a fixed personnel. Jazz musicans don't stay within jazz because they are called by that name, or because of harmonies. They never did. Similarly non jazz musicians were not always "non jazz musicians" when they played on jazz records or with jazzers. Jazz was part of the evolution of other music by the fact that it was popular music at one time, fluid, and about people playing music for audiences as opposed to musicological factors, and improvisers gravitated to it as a form of expression. Over 100 years of activity and interplay of "jazz improv" and innovation (coinciding with life of the recording industry itself) was clearly not isolated to jazz concerts and records. It was a part of the whole music industry. By trying to identify who and what is Jazz musicology and what is not it creates what I feel is an artifical distinction. I can't get into a musicans mind to tease out jazz and non jazz. Let me give on anecdote: In the 1950s Bebop music and abstract expressionism were promoted as symbols of American individualism for the world. Bebop was called "Chinese" music just a couple years previously. I thnk that is due to the power of improvisation, and not necessarily jazz harmonies.

 

Re: the importance (or not) of being jazzy.

For what I have read and for what I think I hear : wasn't jazz itself in the sixties (the time frame most relevant to our discussion), broadly speaking, at its less archetypally jazzy anyway? i.e. at the final stages of a process of de-emphasizing harmonic complexity that started as a reaction to bebop's almost impenetrable chordal tangle, going from the frenetic crosstown traffic feel of that style to the intimacy of Kind Of Blue, or the spiritual trance of A Love Supreme. Meanwhile the more avant-garde streams challlenged any traditional concept of swing and dispensed to a great extent or totally with harmony, in a way that crowned improvisation, already one of the flagships of the genre, as the most relevant feature unifying this diversity of styles.

 

I don't think Eagles ever did that song. Midnight Flyer?

 

Bela Fleck! ?

Hey ! Watch your language ! This is a family friendly forum !
At least keep it down to a mild Miroslav Vitous !

(god, I gotta quit drinking one of these years, haha)

 

Not boosting the Jazz cred by assuming any old timey trumpet is likely Satchmo...

Steely Dan is, indeed, free of the genres specified - even as Fagen & Becker revered and borrowed from their Jazz favorites (eventually even having to share compositional credit with Keith Jarrett for a tune they swiped). But factor in all the Jazz guys they hired to play on their albums. And their sound in general, esp mid-70s on, was often located dead in the Jazz genres of Fusion (the lite stuff like Steps Ahead, Spyro Gyra, etc), CTI Jazz - the same area as the dreaded Smooth Jazz. Scrub the smart vocals off those Dan records and you could spin 'em on Smooth Jazz Radio, not FM rock. More than a hint of Jazz.

 

They swiped Horace Silver’s “Song for my Father” via “Ricki Don’t Lose My Number”

 

Interesting stuff. I understand what you are saying.
What do we call this piece? It is more of a straight blues than Whipping post as far as the chords go. If we say All Blues is a jazz song, why can't we say the same for Whipping Post as far as the chord progression goes?

 

Well to start with, there's a huge difference in how those chords are deployed. Also the way the notes are used within those chords. The biggest key is that the notes played in those chords are in standard minor blues mode, where the miles tune is in mixolydian mode and is considered a prime example of modal jazz. Even with that in mind, the melodies, especially in the improvisation, employ yet other notes not strictly associated with any mode, while the ABB song stays within the standard blues scale. The entire sound and feel are completely different because of the way the chords and the melodies associated with those chords (and in the case of the jazz tune, notes beyond those chords and scales) are expressed. The underlying chords are just a small slice of the overall result. Also the rhythm of each is distinctly different, each residing with it's nominal genre.

 

One can play Whipping Post with an acoustic riff in A minor, iow, Am and then move your hands up and around and back. I think it's the same as the intro riff of Neil Young's Country Girl too, and is in Crosbys I See You. It's more folky than jazzy to me, but it has chromaticism.

 

I am not sure what you mean by how the chords are deployed.
I guess you can argue that All Blues has a modal approach harmonically but that is a slippery slope since the term modal can be ambiguous. Is modal jazz defined by looking at the improvisation and what that is based on or do you look at the harmonic construction to see if it is not straightforwardly diatonic? In either case, it gets confusing because of how the blues is so connected at the hip with "modal jazz" both improvisationally and harmonic construction wise since it can be argued that most blues songs are not strictly diatonic.
Regardless, if you listen to the guitar solos in live versions of Whipping Post, Duane plays notes outside the blues scale and tonic. He does not stay strictly with the blues scale.