Nowadays vibraphonist Roy Ayers is indelibly linked with funk and disco: His group The Roy Ayers Ubiquity recorded the soundtrack for the blaxploitation movie Coffy and scored top ten Billboard hits with albums Everybody Loves the Sunshine (1976) and Lifeline (1977). In 1979, after three weeks of touring in Nigeria, Ayers even recorded an album with Afro-funk pioneer Fela Kuti and his Africa 70—delivering two extended, repetitive jams, each the full length of an LP side. On the record, both bandleaders sing futuristic messages imagining worldwide Black unity by the year 2000.
 
Yet Ayers began his career as a traditional jazz player. In the 1950s, the Los Angeles native studied with his soon-to-be-famous vibraphonist neighbor, prolific Blue Note recording artist Bobby Hutcherson; in the ‘60s, he played in flautist Herbie Mann’s group, recording a series of accessible albums that drew together soul jazz, middle eastern sounds, and covers of pop hits by the Beatles and Sonny Bono.
 
Ayers’s 1967 album as a post-bop bandleader, Virgo Vibes, showcased his ability to play with tempos, textures, and phrasing. Lead-off track “The Ringer” feels complex despite being built on only three chords—and allows a group including tenor sax player Joe Henderson and pianist “Ronnie Clark” (Herbie Hancock under an assumed name) to stretch out as they please.

​Like Grant Green, Hank Mobley was most firmly associated with hard bop and soul jazz. His 1960 album for Blue Note, Soul Station, is generally regarded as his high point as tenor saxophonist and bandleader—not a groundbreaking album, but nonetheless one of those hard-swinging, delectable records that everyone interested in jazz probably ought to own. It highlights Mobley’s signature “round” tone—warm and inviting yet free of stage-y affectations.
 
In the 1950s, Mobley made the rounds, playing with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Max Roach, and as a founding member of the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey and Horace Silver. In 1961, he replaced John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s quintet, but left within a year, frustrated by a band in transition—and possibly unable to fill Coltrane’s outsized shoes. “When I left Miles,” he explained in a 1973 interview, “I was so tired of music, the whole world, man, I just went back to drugs.”
 
In 1964, Mobley was arrested for heroin possession; throughout the prison stint that followed, he refocused and wrote a slew of ambitious new tunes, many of which would be recorded in 1966 for A Slice of the Top. The album brings together a curious yet potent assortment of sounds: Mobley arranged it with pianist Duke Pearson for an octet, and it features parts for both tuba and euphonium. Players included trumpeter Lee Morgan, who had been a member of the third incarnation of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late ‘50s; pianist McCoy Tyner, known for his pyrotechnics in Coltrane’s A Love Supreme-era classic quartet; and alto sax player and Sun Ra Arkestra veteran James Spaulding.
 
Mobley considered it his finest album—yet sadly it wasn’t released until more than a decade later, in 1979. As Mobley explained in the same interview: “I have about five records on the shelf—Blue Note had half the black musicians around New York City, and now the records are just lying around. What they do is just hold it and wait for you to die.”

​Grant Green was known as a traditional hard bop and soul jazz player; his records took a turn toward extra amplification at the end of the ‘60s, but he was otherwise remarkably consistent in his choices. Aside from the occasional detour into bossa nova (see The Latin Bit, recorded with Afro-Cuban Jazz drummer Willie Bobo and including the sounds of congas and chekere) his playing style throughout his career remained steeped in blues and R&B. He treated guitar as a lead instrument, eschewing chords and preferring single-note melodic lines—possibly because his main influences were not guitarists but horn players, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Joe Henderson.
 
Green was a mainstay for Blue Note records, recording more than 20 albums as a bandleader from 1961–65 and many more as a sideman, appearing in sessions with Hank Mobley, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner. Yet despite his prodigious output and distinctive phrasing, Green was largely underappreciated during his lifetime and generally regarded as a utility player, not a star.
 
"Grantstand" is the title track for an album recorded for Blue Note in 1961 and released the following year. It’s the earliest recording in this mix, and it demonstrates how players coming out of the 1950s hard bop scene brought other forms of dance-oriented music into jazz. Not only that: With the popularity of R&B organ trios in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and the prolific recorded output of organists like Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott, jazz sessions routinely included electrified instruments—in this case, “Brother” Jack McDuff’s Hammond B3—long before “going electric” became a cause for alarm among some music purists.

​This mix follows overlapping generations of musicians as they navigated divergent threads in jazz from 1962 to 1972—a decade of rapid stylistic change. During this time, players looked to their roots in traditional blues and R&B; to the hypnotic sounds of powerfully amplified funk and acid rock; and to non-western instruments, spiritual awakenings, and radical ideologies, pushing past the expectations of the record-buying public and forging new tools for reinvention and self-discovery.
 
By the end of this decade, “avant-garde” in jazz could mean either a populist embrace of the zeitgeist or a withdrawal to rarefied spheres in which most of the familiar elements of musical composition were discarded. For Miles Davis, it meant gathering an expanded percussive ensemble and recording droning, elliptical funk grooves; for John Coltrane, it meant recruiting younger players willing to abandon conventional tonality or timekeeping and follow him into the unknown.
 
This split mirrors attitudes toward audiences in other modernist circles. In his book The Rest Is Noise, critic Alex Ross describes how avant-garde classical musicians in early twentieth century Europe engaged in “an easy back-and-forth between occult esotericism and cabaret populism.” In Paris, he explains, composers moved “into the brightly-lit world of daily life;” in Vienna, meanwhile, musical iconoclasts were busy “illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.”
 
Traditionalists like critic Stanley Crouch have tended to regard this decade as the art form’s denouement. He essentially defines jazz as repertory music—the development of which begins with Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5 and Hot 7 recordings in the 1920s; continues through the varied career of Duke Ellington, the rise and fall of big bands, and bebop in the 1950s; and ends with John Coltrane’s mold-breaking 1964 album, A Love Supreme.
 
For Crouch, the music that came after—free jazz, fusion, and other avant-garde explorations—hardly merits consideration. "We should laugh at those who make artistic claims for fusion," he opined in a 2003 article for Jazz Times.
 
Crouch has championed a generation of neo-bop players determined to turn the cultural clock back to the mid-1950s—like, for example, the Marsalis family. In an interview for the 2001 Ken Burns PBS documentary series, Jazz, saxophonist and composer Branford Marsalis echoes Crouch, referring to the albums of avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor as “self-indulgent bullshit,” and summing up the 1970s by saying “jazz just kind of died. It just kind of went away for awhile.”
 
While these ideas have metastasized in parts of the cultural establishment, the classicist redefinition of jazz as a closed system—a story with one central through-line, possessing a beginning, middle, and definite end—ignores the non-linear messiness of how musicians actually work together, trading ideas in real time and creating new music out of the ashes of the old, session-by-session, gig-by-gig. In fact, the divides between free jazz and fusion—or even rock, jazz, and classical music—are far from absolute: Coltrane embraced the sounds of both Igor Stravinsky and Babatunde Olatunji; Miles Davis studied Karlheinz Stockhausen and saw proto-punk band The Stooges play in concert. A simplified narrative that ignores social context and dismisses years of complex human creativity and expression should immediately make us suspicious—and, hopefully, curious to hear more.