Soul Jazz to Post-Bop to New Thing to Electrically Eclectic

​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.