>
>
> Well, wasn't 'Acid-Jazz' just the label that started it all?
>
> (I agree with Kovalainen about all the bands stated. In my
> mind, they are _all_ AJ, but now the boundaries are getting
> even more blurred with influences coming from all over the
> place - can Acid Jazz be defined as one music type or just
> fusion? Who knows)
It's so simple - Acid Jazz is a label. The name came about when Gilles
Petersen handed Eddie Piller (who founded Acid Jazz records) a tape on
which was written "Acid Jazz". The name came about because the music was
jazz inspired music for club use and the main music in the London Clubs at
that time was acid house. The acid bit refers to the fact that Acid Jazz
was a music to rival Acid House on the club scene.
As a genre of music acid jazz is meaningless to a point - it's simply too
diverse.
This point is made clear if one looks at the sleve for the album The
Very Best of Snowboy which was released by Acid Jazz records. In the
sleeve Snowboy claims that acid jazz refers to latin jazz the world over.
He's wrong, because acid jazz is used to refer to more varieties of music
than this. Snowboy does not sound like a lot of what would conventionally
be called acid jazz. Incidentally, Mother Earth claimed that they never
made acid jazz music, and that they tried it once but they were crap at
it. This also explains why the You Have Been Watching... album was on
Focus records (a subsidiary of Acid Jazz Records) rather than on Acid
Jazz.
Some of the recent acid jazz compilations put about by tossers like
Telstar are not acid jazz. For example, one features Remember Me by the
Blue Boy. This is simply not acid jazz.
If acid jazz is used to refer to music it can refer to a combination of
any of the following: latin jazz, fusion, african jazz, breakbeat, funk,
soul . . . All that these things have in common is that they are all
great forms of music. In fact, one of the appeals of acid jazz is that it
is sooo diverse. That's what makes the Totally Wired albums great.
As an anecdote, Eddie Piller gets really fucked off when people use the
words acid jazz to promote things. Bet he wishes he had a copyright on
it.