JAZZTRONICA:
What Is It and Where Did It Come From?

Back in 1970 Ralph J. Gleason wrote, in his liner notes for Bitches Brew that “electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging.” The music that Miles laid down on that groundbreaking album was indeed electric music, both in terms of how it was created and the effect that it had (and still has) on the listener. From there came more experiments with electricity, and as is the nature of these things, musicians pushed farther and farther to see where the limits of this new language were. Fusion took the electricity to an extreme, and it was necessary to pepper it with new ideas, new feelings, to move it forward again. We had funk, and we dug the groove. We dug the grooves of Miles, Rahsaan, Groove Holmes, Gene Ammons, and many, many more. Those soulful, funky years gave way to Acid Jazz, riding the groove and bringing in the new electric sounds, the scratching of DJs and other modern digital stuff. We’ve witnessed the convergence of jazz, poetry, and rap as well as the sped-up beats of Drum ‘N’ Bass and the slowed down, late night world of trip-hop.

And slowly, over this whole time, the new kind of music has been emerging. It has emerged in the organically reconstructed Drum ‘N’ Bass-influenced music of Erik Truffaz, in the beats-meet-bop experimentation of Matthew Shipp, in the real-time sampling mixed with free jazz of Spring Heel Jack. Herbie Hancock scratches with a CD turntable, Les McCann’s “Compared to What” is incorporated into a hip-hop soft drink commercial, and Medeski Martin and Wood bring the mix of funk, fusion, and jazz to a generation of jam band listeners.

This sound is the future of improvised music, the 21st Century sound of jazz. It is still evolving and will continue to evolve. Is this jazz? Sometimes yes, maybe sometimes no. It harkens back to Miles. Miles is the father of this modern sound. Without Duke and Lester and Louis and a host of others, there would be no Miles. This music can trace its heritage back to those forefathers, but it takes inspiration in their always searching for a new sound, not necessarily in the sounds they produced. Likewise, today’s digital sounds are not the same as the analog sounds that Miles and his bands were producing in the 1970s, but you can definitely trace the ideas and some of the music back to In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner.

Acid Jazz

Technology had found its way, not just into the studio, but also into the creation of music itself. If Miles and Teo Macero had treated the studio as an instrument starting back in 1968, an entire generation of music makers was following in their footsteps by the mid-‘80s. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in England, young DJs were under the spell of Acid House, a variation of the Chicago-based House music that had developed in the early ‘80s. Gilles Peterson, a Swiss-born Londoner, grew up listening to American soul music, and was soon DJ-ing a weekly 14-and-under disco at a local church, hosting parties based around music and dancing, very much as techno-oriented kids in Detroit were doing. He took up residency in a local wine bar, playing primarily jazz/funk artists such as Maze (the band that inspired Miles Davis’ tune of the same name) and Level 42. During the start of the Acid House scene, Peterson had the idea of mixing the crazy acid beat with the funky jazz he had been working with: “A friend of mine had just come back from Spain and had brought some acid house records with him which he announced were the latest thing. But the dancefloor stayed empty. Then it was my turn and I put on a few jazz pieces. The dancefloor was full. To take the piss out of him I called my music Acid Jazz.” The story may be somewhat apocryphal, as others remember that Peterson was far from the only person playing this type of groove-heavy music. Soon the term “acid jazz” was everywhere, and it didn’t take long before it referred to pretty much any electronic dance music overlaid with funky jazz music, primarily fusion and ‘rare groove’ stuff from the 1960s and 1970s. The fusion material was, of course, an outgrowth of Miles Davis’ initial forays into electronics, and the ‘70s work of many of his sidemen was used in acid jazz tracks. The 1960s rare groove material included things like the organ groups of Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery’s guitar workouts, music that was inspired by the very hard bop movement that Davis had helped kick off with his recording of “Walkin’.”

Acid jazz is also a term that has been used to refer to the original recordings by artists like Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd’s Blackbyrds, and other rare groove artists (the term “rare groove” refers to the fact that the vinyl albums collected by DJs were rare and difficult to find. The DJs often pasted blank labels over the record’s regular label to keep other DJs from finding out what records they were sampling). Using the turntable skills learned from years of development, beginning with disco and gay dance club DJs, up through the original hip-hop pioneers DJ Herc and Afrikaa Bambaataa, eventually melded with the electronic music of European band Kraftwerk to create techno and house, acid jazz DJs and bands (the music could be created through sampling and turntablism, using live musicians, or both) created a heady combination of disco, funk, jazz, hip-hop, soul, and Latin music that was certainly what Miles Davis had been all about since his re-emergence in 1980. In addition, the music has definite links to On the Corner. Though the sounds used in acid jazz were smoother and more pop-oriented than what Davis had been doing in 1972, the techniques and the fusion of so many elements of separate black music genres, along with exotic touches of world music sounds owes a debt of gratitude to Miles’s earlier electric period. By 1988 Gilles Peterson declared that acid jazz was dead, and that no one in the know would call themselves or their music acid jazz any longer. In the United States, the term “acid jazz” was slow to catch on, probably because there was far more emphasis on actual bands and less on DJs, and these musicians considered what they were playing to be a natural extension of the funk/rock/jazz experiments that had been in progress more than a decade previous. It took some time, but soon major jazz record labels with significant back catalogs of soul jazz began to capitalize on the newfound interest in their artists by releasing collections of their work repackaged to appeal to the new generation of listeners. Prestige began the “Legends of Acid Jazz” series, which includes releases by Idris Muhammad, Bernard Purdie, Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Gene Ammons, and Red Holloway. Not to be outdone, Verve started its “Talkin’ Verve: The Roots of Acid Jazz” series, with releases featuring Willie Bobo, Quincy Jones, Rhassan Roland Kirk, Astrud Gilberto, and others. In the words of Eddie Piller, co-founder of the Acid Jazz record label: “The only thing which held the whole thing together was a recognition of what it was not. It was not house, nor was it indie and that was about it. If you could dance to it and it had sincerity, that was enough.”

 

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