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The legends about how the name came about:
On one of the BGP Acid Jazz compilations the sleeve notes
referred to Gilles Peterson jokingly giving James Taylor a
cassette of Funk Inc. and Charlie Earland Grooves labelled simply
"Acid Jazz" in order to inspire him.
Gilles Peterson claimed on radio to have coined the phrase acid
jazz when he was asked to dj after an acid house dj. He said that the
crowd was going mental to this house music and he wasn't sure how he
could follow it up. He put on things like Jonny Pate's 'You're
starting too fast,' Weldone Irvine and Charles Earland etc., and the
crowd kept dancing. But then Gilles probably would say that he
invented it.
Then, while the Young Disciples were in California last summer, they
claimed that they gigged at this club where they had a massive acid
house thing going on downstairs, and a small room upstairs where the YDs
were supposed to play "jazz." So Femi (or was it Marc?) called it "Acid
Jazz" to attract people upstairs.
It is likely that many of these stories regarding the origin of the
term are apocryphal, and it should be noted at the time the so called Acid
Jazz thing hit, in the late eighties, alot of DJs who'd been playing
this sort of stuff already were pretty pissed off with the tag "Acid Jazz",
and the widely held assumption that Gilles Peterson deserved sole credit
for the resurrection of this form of music since he'd supposedley coined the
term.
Finally, Chris Phillips or Jez Nelson interviewed some New York soul
band last year, on a London radio station. The band said they might get
into this new acid jazz thing. At the end of the programme, one of the
DJs scoffed, saying "Acid Jazz was something Giles Peterson invented five
years ago that some other people got involved in. It is over now."
Perhaps the moral of the story is not to invent these tags, it is
bad enough with Soul Jazz, Soul Funk, Jazz Funk, Funk/Jazz etc already.
Now, of course, music does not evolve in a vacuum, and there were several
things happening in the U.S. Americans usually claim the first
mingling of rap and jazz, and could even claim dibs on "acid
jazz," because what we know today as "Acid Jazz" is usually reworked
American 70's stuff.
Some give credit to Miles Davis' _Doo Bop_ album (1992) for being the
first in that category. Also, _On the Corner_ (1972) was a bold leap
into funky jazz.
Ganstarr's "Jazz Thing," (for Spike Lee's "Mo' Bettah Blues") did come
before Miles' "Doo Bop" unless you are questioning whether it's "real"
jazz they are rapping over.
Branford Marsalis played sax on Public Enemy's Fight The Power in 1990.
Ron Carter played bass for A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory in 1991.
In 88, Stetsasonic did two versions of Talkin' All Jazz, first sampling
Lonnie Liston Smith, then remixing with a Donald Byrd track.
In 86, Run-DMC flipped a Bob James song into the hip hop classic Peter
Piper.
(The dates come from record sleeves. They don't always correspond to when
the songs were actually created.)
Incidentally, 1988 is also the year that Gang Starr dropped their monster
"Words I Manifest" single (sampling Charlie Parker doing a Dizzy Gillespie
tune) and subsequent "No More Mr. Nice Guy" album on Wild Pitch. Their LP
track "Jazz Music" initiated and predates "Jazz Thing" and even any of
Tribe's recorded efforts.
However, crediting Gang Starr with the first Hip Hop Jazz *Album* is
slightly unfair on Galliano, whose earlier projects came sometime before.
To go much further back, probably the first real rappers, after Max
Bygraves, were the Last Poets. Some of their material could be described
as Jazz Hip Hop in the loosest sense of the word, which is appropriate
considering perhaps the seminal Jazz Hip Hop track - Gangstarr's "Jazz
Thing" is simply rapping over a Brandford Marsalis Horn, and the latter
simply playing over a loop of Kool and the Gang's "Dujii", and you'd have a
hard time convincing any Jazz buff that Kool Jazz was actually jazz.
So that's how it goes. Of course, now people have started sampling jazz with
techno music (The House of Acid Jazz is a good example) and people have used
samples *and* used real musicians (eg US3).
Once people started recognizing that some of the "jazz" from the 60's and
70's was funky like that, they started to call it acid jazz as well. So
now it has encompassed a huge variety of music.
An important thing here is to recognize and acknowledge the
contributions from everywhere. The UK was the first to
revinvent funk with jazz (in the US, the jazz had slowly been
dropped from the funk ala Prince, Parliment, etc). The US was
concentrating more on getting musically serious with it's rap
forms, but until full length jazz-rap albums like Guru's came
out, the emphasis was mainly on single songs or single
samples. However, this list is more geared towards the
funkified jazz sounds of the original acid-jazz movement than
the jazz-rap community, but discussions of the latter are not
necessarily out of place. :-)
This "history" and definition is actually a collage of various statements
submitted by me and the following people. They do not necessarily have the
copyright on the knowledge, but spent their time writing about it. Much
respect to:
Robert Smith
Phil Julian
Sever R./Turner
DJ GerryV
Sean Silcoff
Most of
you saw my "ad" with a whole bunch of names- that's just an "idea" of what
kind of music we are talking about. Acid jazz is just a term to make
things easy- lets not confine ourselves with labels. Look at
the token "mascot" compilation series of this list: "Rebirth of
Cool"- jazz, rap and soul. That's what we are here about. And hey, this
doesn't mean the discussion is by any means over. ;-)
A couple of last, intellectually related thoughts from Phil Julian, who
spent a lot of time thinking and even more time typing.
From: julian@unx.sas.com (Phil Julian)
Subject: Definition and History of Acid Jazz
I agree about the misuse of tags, which eventually become commercial
record hype. On the other hand, there is the danger that musical
forms which are not fully defined will disappear without any trace.
An article in Option magazine, with various headlines threatening the
"Death of Rap", lamented the fact that no real history of rap has been
written, and went on to add that all the true innovations were in the
past. If the same logic were applied to Acid Jazz, you would have to
say it is also dead.
As an example of definitions of music, I offer the posts I made to the
funky music group, defining jazz fusion and r&b. I made the posts
because discussions eventually centered about music origins and
definitions. And to clarify what I am looking for here, I give you
these long definitions.
As I suspected, there are several definitions for several types of jazz,
and this book has no single definition of jazz. But the category
"Jazz-Rock-Fusion" is the closest alphabetical category that is not a
biography, and so I present the first 4 paragraphs of that definition
(it is too long to copy). Again, from _Jazz, The Essential Companion_
(by Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley; 1987 copyright):
Towards the end of the 1960s the jazz scene in the USA and Europe
found itself in a state of deep crisis. The more conventional forms
-- 'bebop', 'hard bop', 'modal jazz' etc. -- seemed played out, and
audiences were falling off. At the same time, the avant-garde music
of the day -- 'free jazz' and 'improvised music' -- seemed
unattractive to many musicians, and had not gained a new audience of
any significant size. by 1967 rock had established itself as teh
current vernacular music, and was attracting huge audiences. Jazz
seemed to have lost its social relevance, record sales slumped, clubs
closed, people began muttering that jazz was dead and by 1968 even
big names were drawing only handfuls of people.
The music itself was undergoing a severe identity crisis: was it
related to the great ethnic musics of the world -- African, Indian,
oriental and European -- in that it featured incisive rhythms,
coherent structures, the disciplines of organized harmonies and/or
scales and diatonic melodies which spoke of the human condition? Or
was it now related more to the abstract music of the 20th-century
classical avante-garde which was too 'serious' to accomodate the
sensous pleasure of ostinato rhythms or the comfort of tonality? The
choice facing many musicians was an unappetizing one: they could
either play in an established style, or throw out all the old rules,
join the avant-garde and create abstract music. It became imperative
to find a new identity and a fresh approach.
Jazz and rock both came from the same roots: the blues, hot gospels,
worksongs and rhythm and blues. Nearly all American jazz musicians
had started out with r & b bands, and in the 1960s many younger
musicians had grown up with rock and roll, the Beatles and other rock
groups. So it was perfectly natural that, throughout the decade,
jazz musicians began to use and develop rock rhythms. Miles Davis'
young rhythm-section with Tony Williams had played both spontaneous
and premeditated rock rhythms in 1964 and 1965, and from the
mid-1960s many people, including Gary Burton, Larry Coryell, Herbie
Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Lloyd, Don Ellis and
Bob Moses had made extensive and sometimes very subtle use of them.
The whole jazz-rock movement was crystalized and given its full
momentum by three Miles Davis albums, _Files de Kilimanjaro_ (1968),
_In a Silent Way_ and _Bitches Brew_ (both 1969), which produced an
astonishingly fresh sound, combining rocky drum rhythms and bass
riffs with sometimes three electric keyboards and guitar, creating
and releasing tension in new ways and projecting the mysteriously
sensuous and evocative atmosphere of the trumpeter's best music. The
ensemble which recorded these albums included among others Herbie
Hancock, Chich Corea, Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin,
Tony Williams and Larry Young, all of whom afterwards led their own
groups, producing their own particular brand of fusion and dominating
the 1970s. Davis's three albums suggested lines of exploration and
development which might be followed up in many different ways, and
musicians all over the globe began to see a way out of the creative
impasse. There was also a growing audience for the new music; with
fusion, jazz had rediscovered its social relevance.
I promissed this information, but I had to find the time when it was not
work time, and when there was not basketball on the TV (GO Heels!). So,
here is the definition of "rhythm-and-blues" from from _Jazz, The
Essential Companion_ (by Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian
Priestley; 1987 copyright):
A term for music adopted by the US record industry in the late
1940s to replace the demeaning descriptions such as 'race records'
(1920s) and 'sepia series' (1930s). These names had, of course,
covered nearly all of early jazz issues which, it was naturally
assumed, were only worth marketing for black listeners.
A lot of what is now thought of as rhythym-and-blues actually
predated the term, and was a direct outgrowth of the blues groups
and 'jump bands' of the late 1930s. But the rhythmic bounce and
the saxophone-dominated instrumentation remained a constant thread
at least up to the work of Earl Bostic, Fats Domino and Little
Richard, although gradually more and more electric guitar sounds
were absorbed (via West Coast blues) in the evolution of r & b into
rock and roll. Much of the vocal work of the period was more
influenced by gospel than blues, which is one reason why such a
thorough-going mix made r & b the basis of all pop music since, in
the same way that bebop simultaneously laid the foundation for all
later jazz.
More than that, rhythm-and-blues has continued to interact with
post-bebop jazz; where folk-blues had provided a touchstone for
early jazz, now the relationship was closer. Not only had r & b
been influenced by jazz, but most of the important jazz players of
the hard-bop and free-jazz generation servered their apprenticeship
in r & b bands, even the great saxophone innovators John Coltrane
and Ornette Coleman.
-- by Brian Priestly
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