How much jazz was there in these classic rock artists?

But st some point music is outside the big sphere.

 

Great thread.

 

On at least a couple of different levels - the detailed (this band did this) and the conceptual (what is jazz/what is influence/where I'm coming from).

 

Ed Cassidy was Randy California's father-in-law.

 

Clapton did not challenge himself to advance the music in novel ways and establish a conception rooted in the past that accommodates and defines the future. The problem with Clapton was that his conception of both past and the future had more to do with slavery than freedom, and that goes back to control. If the rhythm wasn't a clearly defined pattern with no room for improvisation, e.g., strict 12-bar blues, he was lost.

Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson or Elvis would never noodle around for 20 minutes because they knew the limits of their musicianship, and wouldn't disrespect the audience that way. It's fine to indulge in freer forms if you have the discipline and musicianship to back it up--or absent that, you're a musical genius. Despite their adoring fans, Clapton and company were most assuredly not geniuses. Someone like Bud Powell on the other hand could play circles around them no matter how drunk he was.

 

You agree with Siegmund, who says about the list: "apart from Joni Mitchell's Mingus album, zero for all"? How about these guys:

Roger McGuinn on Eight Miles High: “Been listening to a lot of Coltrane. Trying to interpret that in my own way on the twelve-string guitar.”

Jack Bruce: "I thought of Cream as sort of a Jazz band..."

Robbie Krieger: “It was definitely a factor in our music. Definitely.”

Phil Lesh: “What do I have to say about ’Trane? His music is very florid, convulsive, evocative, volcanic, and it all moves very steadily in its flow. It was a logical extension of what we wanted to do...”

 

I didn't actual make the case that they were any good at it (though I think they were great). You agree then they didn't get the idea from their Rock & Blues forbearers. Maybe...Jazz?

 

"I'm the Face" is kinda jazzy. ;-)

 

People can talk and say anything.
As someone who has attended hundreds of jazz concerts in the past 45 years and who owns over 15,000 jazz albums. I hear no jazz in the music of McGuinn, Bruce, Krieger or Lesh.

I mean, Mark Farner of Grand Funk could say,
“I love opera and it is a huge part of my music.” Because he said it, it is not necessarily true.

 

It is much more like PRACTICE or aimless noodling than jazz. The cynic in me would say that such long extended noodling was necessary because the band simply hadn't written, rehearsed or learned enough songs well enough to make more songs a part of the performance. Particularly, seeing The Dead, it was quite obvious that these jams were merely filler to allow extended soloing for the other artists to rotate off stage and get high. Beyond that, it was more about killing time than about jazz.

 

Not really, no.

 

As a fan I've got a few years on you, and can hear the Jazz.

No aimless noodling in Jazz? Lots of people think that's the definition. And I'm pretty sure The Dead didn't rotate on and off stage during the solos. They pretty much endured the whole ordeal.

 

I assume we are excluding rock instrumentalists who had some jazz chops or adopted fusion as a career direction and are looking instead at artists whose work has jazz running through it like a stick of rock. Music where it is in the writing as well as the grandstanding. Obviously there are jazz colours all over rock music but that is a different thing. Otherwise pretty much every session Bill Payne played on would automatically be a jazz record.

Any rock act that reproduces their records on stage (and especially their solos) is immediately disqualified.

Improvisation is as much a mark of the folk scene as it is of jazz and I assume the Dead's on stage skills in those areas are as much rooted in that as anything else. I don't hear it at all on their studio records. A chord choice here and there but it isn't deeply ingrained in the collective sound. They could flat out play though and were not afraid to take that music about as far out as it could go. However playing long doesn't make it jazz. Otherwise Swarb and RT era Fairports would be jazz too.

Same with the Allmans. Definitely a light Ole era Coltrane influence before the accident but there are not an awful lot of chord choices, modes and harmonies from outside of the country/blues playbook that really make you sit up and take notice.

I don't hear it in Cream either. Baker and Bruce certainly had a grounding in the clubs but Clapton didn't. By comparison a lot of British prog acts started out with jazz in their DNA. Bruford era Yes music (especially pre Wakeman), VdGG and Crimson for three. Not Floyd though. A lot of Jack Bruce's 70s solo work definitely qualifies. It's barely rock music at all at times.

I would also put Santana near the top of this kind of a list as he definitely took the harder path of trying to meet 'Trane and Tyner's innovations half way and bring them into more of a rock way of doing things. With a lot of success at times. Of course the close proximity and crossover between Latin music and both big band jazz and bebop would have gone a long way to seeding that.

Joni's entire period from 75-80 strikes me as being directly jazz-influenced and it produced some of the very few singer songwriter albums that qualify for me as jazz records without any need for apology or explanation. Both poetically and harmonically. Laura Nyro made a string of albums that led the way here. Tim Buckley's mid period also demonstrated an understanding both of modal jazz and of what it meant to be free of all restraints but still compositionally sound. These are the three people I think of first and who I believe are / were jazz artists in the true sense of the word.

And then there is Blackstar.

 

Ever hear Jack's Things We Like? It's jazz. McLaughlin, Jon Hiseman, Dick Heckstall-Smith...maybe it's jazz you don't like, but that doesn't really matter.

I don't really know enough of McGuinn, Krieger, or Lesh to discuss them with respect to jazz. In The Doors, Densmore always displayed overt jazz influences in his playing. Lots of '60s rock drummers did. There wasn't a history of rock drumming to draw from.

 

I have those Jack Bruce solo albums. Jack Bruce’s solo albums often included jazz elements, not very successfully in my opinion.

To me, Cream did not play jazz. They played some rock of great length with extended solos, which to me was not jazz.

 

I didn't say Cream played jazz, Ginger's protestations notwithstanding. I don't think they did.

Things We Like is a jazz album. Your opinion of how successful it was/is as jazz is completely meaningless.

 

Thank you for those illuminating insights. How could I have been so wrong?

 

I don't know. Don't much care, either.

 

Queen

 

Besides Joni, there is hardly any jazz in any of the others.

And even with Joni, it is more a 'jazz by association' due the great players she used for those couple of albums.

But, the others, no. Just because some of the others played some extended jams, does not put them in the same ballpark as jazz musicians. Hell, they're not even playing the same sport.

And just because jazz musicians might play long extended solos, does not mean they a 'noodling'. The depth and scope of the technique and musical language that good jazz players have, pretty much dwarfs most of the bands listed in th OP.

The members of Genesis had a pretty broad musical language, but it was not jazz based.

 

A friend of mine at the time swore to me that Bruce was just a Jazz musician ( see Brecker Brothers cameos??), in a rockers costume.

That is until Darkness came out.... LOL Then he gave up that ghost!

 

I think they missed the point. It is like saying there is no Warhol art in the Velvet Underground because they didn't make screen prints. Unfortunately, unless you put in bold capitals and over emphasise the meaning of 'influence' as opposed to generic similarity, a lot of people will continue to miss it.

As if I'd put the Doors on that list in that place, if I didn't already know that their members had acknowledged big jazz influence in their work!

 

Another artist not usually necessarily associate with jazz - Bruce Springsteen. Maybe due to the E Street band members - listen to the extended organ and piano solos from around 2.40.

 

Go to 18:20 mark....

 

Just to clarify this, influence need not result in the influenced work (so Cream tunes) sounding like what influenced it (so whatever jazz Bruce and Baker might have been into). Influences from jazz could be as simple as say using a ii-V-I chord progression where you wouldn't have otherwise, or a chord progression that simply grew out of playing around with ii-V-I chord progressions, or it could be as simple as being the reason that you're focusing on intervals like ninths and thirteenths, or as simple as being the reason that you're doing stuff with a lot of extended improvisation, and so on. None of that would have to wind up sounding anything at all like jazz despite the fact that it may have been influenced by it.

Influence simply requires that (a) you've been exposed to x a fair amount, and usually it implies that you like x quite a bit, and (b) you're either consciously or unconsciously--simply due to the regular exposure in the latter case--emulating something about x in your own work, per your understanding or grasp on it (which can be quite limited/incomplete etc.), where it's something you wouldn't have done without the influence from x, but the emulated features in question can be quite abstract and/or general and/or inconspicuous, so that the influence is not at all easy to know unless someone knows enough personal information about you and why you wrote or played what you did.

It seems like people often think of influence as being limited to music that sounds like other music, but that's only a small subset of influence. Most influence is far harder to detect, not only because influence can be focused on such abstract or general details, details that aren't necessarily unique to the influencing music, but that nevertheless wound up in the music at hand because that's where the artist in question became familiar with those features, but also because (i) there are often numerous, often "conflicting" influences behind any work, and (ii) artists being what they are, they often want to transform the influences into something that's their own thing, where the influence is not so transparent. (And of course there are also always worries that if one is too closely emulating a specific thing, it will be seen as not only a lack of originality, but possibly plagiarism and it could result in a copyright infringement lawsuit.)

Also, asking if any music was influenced by x certainly isn't asking if the music is x.