The whole San Francisco ballroom sound scene seemed to be about jazz meets rock several years before jazzrock became a dirty word. Or maybe closer to folk meets jazz meets rock in a lot of cases. Coltrane influenced improvisation being a large influence.
Seems like a lot of krautrock is similar, open ended jazzinfluenced improvisation played on electric instruments, Amon Duul II's long instrumentals being a prime example. Can being another.
The Gun Club's garage version of A Love Supreme is great too, and it seemed that the influence of New Thing jazz lay under their sound through several incarnations. Covers of Pharaoh Sanders Creator Has a Master Plan also cropping up.
John Martyn took influence from various bits of jazz, borrowed the theme to Solid Air from Astral Travelling as performed by Pharaoh Sanders. But his early 70s work in general is folk-jazz in a similar kind of way to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which is itself archetypal.
Tim Buckley cut several lps where folk meets jazz, but got even further out live., moving into really avant territory. it would be nice to be able to get a copy of his Boboquivari tv show in good quality since it captures him around the time he was beginning to get really jazzy. Unfortunately the anthologist of the My fleeting House dvd had another agenda when it came to re-presenting what footage there was of Tim.
Saccharine Trust the SSt beat influenced band had a major jazz influence too. I wish somebody would come along and remaster their material.
Greg Ginn of Black flag was supposed to be very heavily jazz influenced too. I think it does come out in bits of his playing from 82/3 onwards.
Ther Process of Weeding Out certainly shows this.
Could be said that Reoccurring Dreams by Husker Du showed the influence as well.
& it seems to be deeply embedded in the DNA of Meat Puppets and Minutemen's sound too.
Caspar Brotzmann Massaker is heavy rock meets dark jazz in a really psychedelic way.
Hillbilly Boogie the precursor to rock'n'roll saw country meets swing jazz so jazz seems to have been encoded into the formulation of what makes up rock'n'roll whether consciously or not. Also Western Swing which preceded that took heavily from swing jazz hence the name.
& I certainly hear echoes of Mingus in the sound of the mid 60s groups like Who/Pretty Things/Small Faces and a couple of other jazz artists in the Yardbirds and Zombies so I'd say it was an influence on the formulation of Rock too.
Could go on like that, both Velvet Underground and Byrds had heavy jazz influence so does that carry over to Indie?
will come back to this later with other recommendations.
|