Where Have I Known You Before?
/ Fusion’s Foundations
This music is new. This music is new music and it hits me like an electric shock and the word “electric” is interesting because the music is to some degree electric music… 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.
– Ralph J. Gleason
If music has something to say to you—whether it’s jazz, country blues, Western or hillbilly, Arabian, Indian, or any other Asian, African, South American folk music— take it. Never restrict yourself.
– Larry Coryell
In tracing the discursive histories of jazz, rock, and funk, I focus on the ways that racialized ideologies support generic categorizations because race was a fundamental fulcrum on which fusion troubled established relationships between music and meaning. Accordingly, a central problem for many listeners was that, independent of the genre they claimed as “their own,” the aesthetics of jazz, rock, and funk were simply too disparate, primarily because of the ways in which genres had been racialized. This idea of incommensurable mixture goes to the heart of the debates surrounding the “ain’t jazz, ain’t rock” music of these young musicians.
By the mid-1970s, jazz, rock, and funk were widely recognized as musical genres with distinctive aesthetics and histories, including a defining core of musicians and recordings. These distinctions would necessarily emphasize the differences among the three genres. To cite an easy contrast that reflected the general sense at the time: where jazz was seen as sophisticated, intellectual, even abstract, rock and funk were in essence primal and visceral, less able to shake off their orientation to the sensual in the way jazz had slowly done as a corollary to its move from a popular form to an art music. Rock and funk, meanwhile, enjoyed their own distinctions in terms of representation and performance—differences that were often openly discussed in racial terms. Rock and funk’s connection to particular bodies (white for rock, black for funk) enabled or constrained musicians’ attempts to mix the two, as the racially integrated rock band Mother’s Finest attested to in its 1976 song “Niggizz Can’t Sang Rock & Roll.” As we will see, in combining these traditions, Williams, McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock were accused by some listeners of creating a sonic Frankenstein’s monster, depleting jazz’s cerebral delights while divesting rock and funk of their celebrated physicality.
Nor did they limit their blendings to rock and jazz. A wide variety of music attracted the attention of Williams, McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock, who collectively cited Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Ravi Shankar, and Allah Rakha, as well as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, the MC5, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, as influential—not to mention McLaughlin’s study of South Asian music or Mitchell’s affinity for the music of folk musicians such as Tom Rush.
As their cited influences attest, however, these musicians consciously avoided an “anything goes” attitude in their musical hybridizations. They were highly selective about the composition and balance of their mixtures, neither arbitrary nor naive in their borrowings of elements from various musical traditions. They did not simply cart over everything from a given genre or tradition and match it up to their counterparts in other genres or traditions. However—and this is the cause for much of the concern from critics—they could be unapologetically idiosyncratic in their choices for combining various genres and traditions. Following their own tastes, they selected specific elements within a chosen genre or tradition, sometimes disregarding the uses any element may have fulfilled in its original context and reengineering them to suit their own eclectic aesthetic.
Yet for the most part, after the heated debates of the late 1960s and 1970s, jazz critics seemed to settle the question of whether fusion music was jazz by simply ignoring it. Part of the reason fusion created such strong divisions within the jazz community was due to the sense by mainstream jazz musicians and listeners that fusion’s aesthetic compromises hastened the “death of jazz”—a trope that has haunted jazz periodically since the moldy figs and their swing adversaries contested the definition of “real jazz” in the 1930s. Indeed, until recently, trade and scholarly publications that focused on jazz were uniformly circumspect about fusion. Jazz critics applauded Tony Williams for his postfusion acoustic jazz recordings, for instance, while remaining virtually silent about Lifetime, his seminal fusion trio. Likewise, Williams’s final recordings with Bill Laswell, which returned him to the decidedly avant rock direction Lifetime first explored nearly three decades before, have been largely ignored by jazz critics.
Still, we should hear the genre mixtures of Williams, McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock as sounding out the contingencies of transcultural exchanges rather than as the polished efforts of finished cultural projects. Therefore, to understand what motivated fusion musicians to make the sort of musical mixtures they did and why it proved controversial, we need to step back for a brief moment to consider the path these musicians and their predecessors took to arrive at the “ain’t jazz, ain’t rock, (ain’t funk)” music of the 1970s.
Ain’t Rock
”I could put together the greatest rock ’n’ roll band you ever heard.”
– Miles Davis“We’re not a rock band.”
– Miles Davis
In the period between the Second World War and the rise of fusion in the late 1960s, various subgenres of jazz—bebop, jump blues, third stream, soul jazz, cool, and free jazz—were the shifting sands on which the roles that race, gender, and social class played in jazz were debated. For critics reticent to engage the links between race and genre head-on, appeals to jazz as a mark of U.S. national identity helped negotiate around the role social identity played in the relationship between jazz and elite art culture. In 1938 Winthrop Sargeant, while arguing against the idea that jazz was an art music, suggested that “while [jazz’s] ancestry may be African and European, it is none the less a peculiarly American form of musical expression. The spontaneous, improvisatory aspect of jazz is remarkably adapted to the musical needs of a pragmatic, pioneering people. Like the typical American, the jazz musician goes his own syncopated way, making instantaneous and novel adjustments to problems as they present themselves.” Sargeant’s vision of the jazz musician’s individualistic “syncopated way” as the solution to “problems” projects a remarkably autonomous world of individuals free to make “instantaneous and novel adjustments” as their response. His description merges a thoughtful pragmatism—a down-to-earth, do-it-yourself work ethos—to an adventurous pioneering spirit—a willingness to break free of precedent and follow one’s muse. Sargeant heard the resolution, the synthesis, if you will, between the two ideals in a jazz music appreciated by a racially unmarked American subject.
Race was implicit, however, in the arguments between jazz critics and musicians over whether jazz was art music or a popular, even populist, music. In attempting to displace the social and political articulations of jazz artists by inadvertent or intentional inattentiveness to the underlying discourse of race, jazz critics often aestheticized a politically charged cultural practice and attenuated the oppositional strain in the music. As jazz became increasingly recognized as art music—rather than as mere entertainment or as part of an ephemeral popular culture—black jazz musicians, in particular, were both wary and inviting of their rising cultural capital. As early as 1925, Joel Rogers, writing in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, recognized that in “white society’s interest in [jazz there was] both a means for jazz to fulfill America’s democratic potential and the risk that black contributions might be erased.”
For their part black jazz musicians often linked jazz to ideas about American individualism and exceptionalism as a way to alleviate racial condescension. Yet working in a social milieu that celebrated their music but continued to bar them from political and social opportunities left many black jazz musicians ambivalent about their position as artists and entertainers. The marked difference between jazz as art and jazz as the “people’s music,” as Sidney Finkelstein called it, has been negotiated in various ways: from Jelly Roll Morton’s insistence on the importance of jazz as “pure music” to Duke Ellington’s engagements with long forms; from big band swing’s mass popularity to bebop’s bohemian exclusivity; from the New Orleans and blues primitivist mythologies to the urbane intellectualism of third stream and bebop; and from the emotional distance of cool to the sweat-invoking dance rhythms of soul jazz. Caught in the bind of American racial politics, Ellington recognized the deep irony at the heart of jazz discourse, writing, “I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores… Its guarded leisure and its music, were all our creations.” Marking American-ness in an explicitly racialized way, Ellington voiced the racial contradiction that jazz music articulated: a “free” music created by “unfree” musicians was American, not simply because the “typical American goes his own syncopated way” through the workings of an innate democratic impulse but, rather, because of institutionalized racism and its effects on black and white Americans.
Sounding Out American Democracy
Indeed, how could one speak of black and white cultural interaction in the United States without addressing the long history of unequal relations of power between the two groups, inflected through race? One way was to focus on the class cleavages art discourse engendered and downplay the racial dynamics. In the mid-1950s the jazz critic Marshall Stearns argued against the growing perception of jazz as an art music because it militated against jazz’s ability to sound out American democracy. “In our time,” wrote Stearns, “jazz is debunking the myths of ‘fine art’ and the social pretensions of the concert hall. To allow that jazz should be granted a role in the world of art, for example, leads to disconcerting questions about who is really cultured in our society.” Yet while Stearns discussed jazz’s development in black American culture, he argued that jazz’s growth was an example—a praxis, in a way—of the triumph of “All-American” democratic ideals. Implying that jazz’s conquest of the rest of the world mirrored the benefits of U.S. global hegemony, Stearns quoted a European jazz fan, Olaf Hudtwalker, who declared, “A jam session is a miniature democracy. Every instrument is on its own and equal. The binding element is toleration and consideration for the other players.”
Stearns developed his argument more clearly along nationalist lines when he compared jazz’s “free-swinging stride” to “the Prussian ‘goose-step’”: “A dramatic illustration of the healthy, realistic qualities of jazz is furnished by a comparison of the Prussian ‘goose-step’ and the free-swinging stride of the New Orleans march. Both are responses to military music but the difference is immense. Contrary to the robot-like motions of the goose-step, the New Orleans marcher enjoys a freedom of movement that mirrors the spirit of the music. The New Orleans marchers may appear relatively unorganized, but their motions permit greater individual expression and symbolize a truer community of interests.”
Stearns’s comparisons between the mechanical and the human, the Prussian and the American, linked political ideologies to musical styles, emphasized by his marking of jazz as an American expression of individualism. Moreover, when Stearns offered his argument for jazz as the sounding out of an American democratic ideal, he quickly moved past his guarded nods toward race (particularly if we acknowledge the “New Orleans marchers” as black Americans): “On a more abstract level, jazz offers a common ground upon which the conflicting claims of the individual and the group may be resolved—a problem that has vexed our times. For the jazzman, the dancer, and even the sympathetic listener can express himself individually and, at the same time, participate freely in a creative whole. In other words, he can ‘belong’ by participating in collective improvisation, and simultaneously let off his own brand of steam, solo.”
Jazz’s resolution for the “conflicting claims of the individual and the Where Have I group” can be found in its performative and aesthetic dimensions—dimensions Stearns noticeably removed from specific group experiences. Stearns goes further, citing the “religious fervor… typical of the response that jazz evokes in many people” because of jazz’s ability to invoke “direct and immediate contact between human beings,” for though “jazz expresses the enforced and compassionate attitudes of a minority group… in a fundamental sense, none of us is wholly free.” Linking the black American experience to the wider public, Stearns, however unwittingly, erased the particular histories of black American lives.
In 1961 the critic Martin Williams opened his Where’s the Melody? A Listener’s Introduction to Jazz with an introductory chapter entitled “An American Art.” Williams began, “If we know anything about jazz at all, we have probably heard that it is supposed to be an art—our only art according to some; ‘America’s contribution to the arts,’ according to certain European commentators. It has also the kind of prestige that goes with praise from the ‘classical’ side of the fence.” By the early 1960s, jazz had become a deracinated art form by many mainstream jazz critics—even if acknowledging its roots in African American culture—that was exported to the rest of the world in order to show the openness and inclusiveness of U.S. democracy. As Williams also noted, “[The U.S.] State Department is willing to export jazz to answer for our cultural prestige abroad.” In fact, Stearns and Williams both argued that jazz was superior to European art music for its improvisational freedom, expressive élan, and universal appeal.
By the 1960s, black writers such as Amiri Baraka, writing as LeRoi Jones, and A. B. Spellman were far less positive about the erasure of the blackness of jazz culture than Stearns and Williams, hearing in jazz the sounds of black resistance to cultural dilution and appropriation by nonblack musicians and critics. In a polemical essay, “Jazz and the White Critic,” Baraka answered writers such as Stearns by noting, “Usually the critic’s commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude which produced it… The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent.” Many jazz musicians even questioned using the term jazz to describe their music because of its association with sexual licentiousness, vice, and criminality rather than a phrase such as “America’s classical music,” which implies another, sanctioned set of associations.
Baraka argued pointedly in Blues People that white bebop musicians and fans were drawn to the music because they recognized the outsider status of black Americans and hoped to acquire, through their involvement with jazz, distance from bourgeois culture: “The white beboppers of the forties were as removed from the society as Negroes, but as a matter of choice. The important idea here is that the white musicians and other young whites who associated themselves with this Negro music identified the Negro with this separation, this nonconformity, though, of course, the Negro himself had no choice.” The dialectical relationship between primitive blackness, on one hand, and modernity, on the other, produced a “black modernity,” represented by the figure of the black bebop musician and out of which displays of white transgression were performed and articulated. As Ingrid Monson points out, “Whether conceived as an absence of morality or of bourgeois pretensions, this view of blackness, paradoxically, buys into the historical legacy of primitivism and its concomitant exoticism of the ‘Other.’”
A key difference between white and black bebop musicians and audiences, as Baraka adroitly pointed out, was an individual’s agentive power as determined by race. White musicians and listeners can opt in and out of their outsider status, but blacks, with their visible epidermal uniform, possessed fewer options for transcending their otherness. But Baraka also lambasted middle-class blacks whose rejection of jazz and the blues signaled their “desire to become vague, featureless, Americans.” Baraka was disheartened by “Negroes, jazz musicians and otherwise, who have moved successfully into the featureless syndrome of [mainstream American] culture, who can no longer realize the basic social and emotional philosophy that has traditionally informed Afro-American music.” He warned them that though they entered the broader social world equipped with college degrees and other “fundamental prerequisites of worth in society [they will soon realize it] becomes meaningless once those prerequisites are understood and desired, then possessed, and still the term of separation exists.” As might be indicated by these statements, Baraka was fiercely polemical throughout Blues People, reacting strongly against the idea that bebop and the blues represented a broadly American, rather than a specifically black American, cultural perspective.
Although some jazz musicians spoke to social issues directly in their creative work—famously with Billie Holiday’s version of “Strange Fruit” (1939) and Max Roach’s “We Insist! Freedom Now!” suite (1960)—many mainstream jazz critics remained concerned with artistic issues such as modes of self-expression and formal musical issues. Ironically, as Eric Porter argues, the “debates about bebop… played a crucial role ‘in preparing the way for the emergence and acceptance of an avant-garde jazz’ by making it ‘possible’ and ‘very natural’ to refer to jazz as ‘an art music.’” Jazz musicians’ rise in cultural capital mitigated much of the progressive political edge some of them honed even while helping “to generate a subsequent understanding of black avant-garde music as an articulation of political assertiveness and cultural resistance.” A paradox arose in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the mainstreaming of jazz was accomplished through an increased use in Hollywood soundtracks, use of jazz musicians and arrangers in adult-oriented “easy listening” orchestras who referenced jazz in their performances and recordings, and the hard bop and cool jazz chart successes that obscured, for all but the most adventurous listeners, the more explicitly politicized music of composers such as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk or the challenging music of free jazz artists such as Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. While jazz aficionados searched out Mingus or Kirk, many listeners heard jazz through the compositions of Henry Mancini or Stan Kenton, echoing the dominance of the “sweet” dance bands during the 1930s.
There were white critics of the 1960s such as Ralph J. Gleason and Nat Hentoff, who were less willing to limit their comments to the aesthetic qualities of jazz musicians’ creative work. Explicitly leftist writers such as Sidney Finkelstein and Frank Kofsky, while little noted today, raised important questions regarding the position of black working musicians in larger contexts than mainstream jazz criticism or the purportedly objective stance of professional historians normally allowed at the time. While Kofsky’s overzealous political stance may have caused him to overstate certain ideas, he captured cogently the political awareness of black jazz musicians in the 1960s when he proposed that although the “appeal of black nationalism… has fluctuated greatly [throughout jazz’s history, black] jazz musicians have ample cause for being particularly susceptible to the seductive strains of black nationalism.” Indeed, Kofsky and other left-leaning critics supported Baraka’s clear-eyed assertion that “Negro music is always radical in the context of formal American culture.”
Aesthetic arguments continued to dominate critical debate. In 1960, when the free jazz alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, he initiated vehement arguments within the jazz world regarding the role of Western tonality and swing rhythms in jazz music. As Charles Mingus stated in a Down Beat interview in May 1960, “Now, aside from the fact that I doubt [Ornette Coleman] can even play a C scale in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh… I’m not saying everybody’s going to have to play like Coleman. But they’re going to have to stop playing [like] Bird [Charlie Parker].”
Freejazz and Fusion, Mirrored
That same year, John Coltrane released My Favorite Things, which became a popular hit for him and “reintroduced” the soprano saxophone back into jazz music. More important, the recording showcased Coltrane’s interest in the musical traditions of India through his use of modal, rather than tonal, harmonic frameworks. Also significant was Coltrane’s announcement of his attraction to free jazz aesthetics with another 1960 recording entitled The Avant-Garde. Coltrane’s involvement with free jazz did much to legitimize the style for jazz critics owing to his proven stature within jazz’s mainstream, having performed and recorded with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, among others.
Ted Gioia posits that by the late 1960s, free jazz and fusion were “mirror images” of each other. As I have been suggesting, while free jazz helped move jazz even closer to artistic respectability than bebop before it, fusion was seen as moving jazz toward popular accessibility, a space devoid of high cultural legitimacy. Gioia asserts that this opposition was little noted at the time by jazz critics because of an increasingly fragmenting jazz world. While Gioia’s view of the joined polemics of free jazz and fusion vis-à-vis mainstream jazz is apt, I want to suggest that the jazz world has always been fragmented, and it has been the glossing by historians after the fact that has given jazz history the seamless lineage it enjoys—at least until one begins to look at the 1960s. Different generations of jazz musicians had always crisscrossed stylistic borders as, most famously, when the vocalist Billy Eckstine’s big band ensemble in the 1940s included Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charlie Parker on alto saxophone, and a number of other young musicians associated with bebop, a then-new controversial style of jazz. Yet as Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series indicated, jazz histories are often at a loss to explain the apparent dismantling of a central jazz narrative in the 1960s.
Although the 1960s are often described as a time of a fragmented jazz-scape, however, it may be more productive to think of the period as one in which heightened accumulations of jazz styles were plied across an ever widening set of practices and critical views. Hard bop recordings sat beside free jazz albums in record store bins while mainstream jazz recordings maintained a bebop-inflected core. So-called Dixieland or traditional jazz experienced a revival, especially in Britain and the West Coast of the United States, where bandleaders such as San Francisco’s Lu Watters and Turk Murphy began recording albums that revisited New Orleans repertoire and performance styles.
But even as the 1960s jazz world struggled to accommodate free jazz, by the end of the decade jazz was being challenged in another direction by fusion. Significantly, the rhetorical positioning, by musicians and critics alike, of free jazz and fusion as oppositional to “straight-ahead” or mainstream jazz signaled a collective movement by jazz musicians away from a central idea of jazz into a multiplying array of “jazzes.” Early fusion musicians’ efforts exemplified the tensions this growing inclusivity brought to bear by matching post-tonality to funk rhythms while claiming that they were fundamentally jazz musicians. While fusion artists shared free jazz artists’ aesthetic struggles, because of fusion musicians’ simultaneous engagements with popular music, their aesthetic and political challenges have been overlooked. Pressing this further, I would also suggest that the link between black nationalist politics and free jazz is a construction and is not the result of a “natural” fit between a political ideology and a musical aesthetic. Free jazz artists were a heterogeneous group with a wide spectrum of political views, as interviews with various free jazz artists reveal. In other words, the links between fusion and an apolitical stance are no more “natural” than the connections between free jazz and particular political ideologies.
For example, the critical perspective that aligned free jazz primarily, if not exclusively, with 1960s-era black nationalist separatists obscured other perspectives. One of free jazz’s leading lights, Albert Ayler, stated in a 1963 interview that free jazz “is based on an integrated theory, white people can play it too.” Ayler suggested that “it is undeniably time for a change, but you have to be ready for it. Everybody’s not. Some people don’t want to be free.” The range of opinions about free jazz found in Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones further illustrated the diversity of jazz’s black artistic community regarding politicized music, free jazz, and the historical moment in which free jazz was taking shape (although the book first appeared in 1977, the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1968 and 1972). Yet a majority of the written material on free jazz is devoted to the links between it and the black political struggles of the period. As Iain Anderson notes, free jazz was increasingly visible as a jazz idiom, though “on the edges of the tradition.”
Still, there is a reason free jazz was once called “freedom jazz” by many of its adherents. Many free jazz players looked to liberate themselves not only from conventional Western musical norms and concerns (thematic development, harmonic progressions, rhythmic propulsion) but also from political oppression and cultural exploitation. In this milieu free jazz as avant-garde black music was viewed as political in contradistinction to other jazz styles such as hard bop. Fusion musicians, though less explicitly political, were actively involved with alternative spiritual beliefs and other socially transformative praxis—actions and beliefs that did not register as viable substitutes for direct political action or revolutionary rhetoric during the late 1960s. For example, when the free jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp compared his saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Viet Cong soldier, stating, “We are only an extension of that entire civil rights–black Muslims-black nationalist movement that is taking place in America,” his politicized rhetoric afforded a certain legitimacy that was denied to fusion musicians such as John McLaughlin or Chick Corea, both of whom advocated religious or spiritual solutions to social and political crises at the time.
Critics may simply have missed, or dismissed, the message. Fusion artists appealed to a variety of nonpolitical changes for their audiences, speaking of spiritual transformation, often in the earnest voice of the newly converted. Chick Corea, the pianist/keyboardist for Miles Davis’s electric groups, as well as leader of his own fusion group, Return to Forever, wrote a column in the October 28, 1971, issue of Down Beat, entitled, “The Function of an Artist.” He argued for an artist’s role in creating, “even if only in our imaginations, ideal scenes of what we would like the world to be like in some not too distant future.” Corea’s view that an artist’s “good intentions” served as a code of ethics was shared by other fusion artists, including his fellow pianists Mike Nock and Herbie Hancock. Corea stated elsewhere:
The true leaders of opinion on this planet are celebrities and artists: people who do something aesthetic for others. People look up to these leaders for evaluation and opinions… So artists can create a future for this planet by what they think and what they do, which makes the role of the artist one of great responsibility. This is something inherent in the artist, something most artists do without being aware of how they do it. But to be aware of how you do it is even more effective, because you begin to feel the responsibility to continually put out the truth and it kind of puts you on your guard to learn, to be honest, and to improve.
As I will detail in “Meeting of the Spirits,” the idea of enlightening audiences was important for many fusion musicians. However, I want to highlight two things at this point. First, fusion musicians’ interest in various spiritual traditions had more in common with the social transformations advocated by free jazz artists than was noted at the time. This had an impact on my second point, namely, that the focus on spirituality placed many fusion artists in the countercultural rather than the politically radical currents of the era.
Yet, ironically, given the widespread representation of free jazz as the sounding out of radical black nationalism, by the late 1960s, many jazz musicians associated with the free jazz movement found increasing patronage from elite institutions in the form of grants, commissions, prizes, and academic positions. As Iain Anderson points out, “paradoxically, both [free jazz’s] growing association with cultural nationalism, and parallels between free jazz and Euro-American concert tradition, opened doors in the nonprofit sector.” The contradiction between free jazz musicians’ radical political rhetoric and the fact that they were seeking public and private institutional funding would not blemish free jazz artists’ legitimacy in the same way that commercial success would later stain fusion musicians’ creative efforts (in fact, it worked to legitimize free jazz artists as “high culture” artists). Anderson notes the price of this upward mobility for free jazz musicians:
In 1965 Archie Shepp sounded a note of desperation when he told a reporter: “We can’t let the [black] audience escape. We must bring into our music every stench of the streets, every tragedy, don’t let them rest.” By 1968 he admitted to having lost almost all contact with black listeners. Record sales, availability of work, and the reluctant testimony of sympathetic musicians and critics indicate a small, predominantly white, middle-class, and often intellectual or artistic audience. Support in black neighborhoods remained tenuous throughout the decade [1960s], undermining [black] nationalist authority and enabling the trade press to frame free jazz on the edges of the tradition.
Shepp’s eventual turn to an R&B orientation compromised his work for some critics—yet he continued to be heard as a jazz musician. Similarly, though jump blues, hard bop, and soul jazz did not fit into a narrative of jazz music’s increasing complexity and refinement, failing to excite much interest in critical circles, the styles were often heard as part of an expansive definition of the jazz tradition. Jazz critics often dismissed hybrid efforts such as third stream and cool jazz as effete yet still considered them part of a jazz tradition. Like bebop and big band swing before it, free jazz eventually managed to become part of an ever-widening definition of jazz, though arguably remaining marginalized.
By the mid-1960s, however, many jazz musicians recognized their increasing displacement from the popular music mainstream and attempted to regain some ground lost to rock by covering a particular range of rock songs. Beatles tunes, in particular, became commonplace on recordings though these recordings were often seen as calculated strategies to garner larger record sales. In 1966 Duke Ellington recorded his arrangements of the Beatles’ “All My Loving” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on Ellington ’66 (Reprise), while Count Basie also gave a nod to rock’s growing popularity, recording Basie’s Beatle Bag (Verve). Still, the title of Gerry Mulligan’s recording consisting largely of popular music covers, If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em (Limelight 1965), expressed many older jazz musicians’ attitudes about rock music at the time.
Anti-Bourgeois Ideas
In other ways, however, mainstream jazz continued to affect, and to be affected by, non-rock popular music throughout the 1960s. Stan Getz led a small movement of jazz musicians who embraced bossa nova, a musical style imported from Brazil; the tenor saxophonist enjoyed a hit with his rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema” in 1962. The soul jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis became part of “The In Crowd” with his hit instrumental single of that title in 1965. Jazz’s mainstream appeal was apparent as Broadway and Hollywood composers increasingly used elements of jazz music in their soundtracks. Successful film composers such as Henry Mancini, who placed second behind Duke Ellington in the 1967 Annual Down Beat Reader’s Poll, had started out as jazz musicians, bringing their jazz skills and tastes to bear on their vocational creations. Hollywood also used long-established jazz tropes for its narratives in films such as Paris Blues (1961), including the idea of the jazz musician as an outsider to “straight” society, including the concert music tradition, as well as popular music’s commercial concerns.
It was widely acknowledged in jazz circles that fusion musicians were not the first to merge jazz with other musical idioms, nor were they the first to introduce innovations that would incite a redefinition of jazz. Dizzy Gillespie’s meetings with Mario Bauza and Chano Pozo merged Afro-Cuban musical sensibilities with bebop aesthetics, for instance, and represent a prior moment of mixing that John Storm Roberts calls “the first of the fusions.” Many jazz musicians, including some of the most creative innovators, are part of a long history of cross-cultural music. Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton insisted that authentic jazz required a “Spanish tinge,” and his works often drew on European concert music. His use of Chopin’s “Funeral March” on his own “Dead Man Blues,” for instance, is a sly comment on the differences between European and African American sensibilities toward death and death rites and rituals. Ellington’s continual effort to extend jazz forms into larger compositions that did not follow Eurocentric forms or structures is another case in point.
Paul Lopes argues, “The jazz art world… ultimately staked claim to a unique tradition in American music that bridged various cultural distinctions active in both high and popular art in the United States. This art world was a unique combination of both populism and elitism—a celebration of the artistry of popular culture and a striving of many for high art status.” Yet young jazz musicians who were beginning to fuse rock with jazz at the time read the cultural landscape in ways that contrasted sharply with jazz musicians and critics, of either mainstream or experimental bent, who appeared increasingly uninterested in music deemed “popular.”
Ain’t Jazz
”A lot of jazz players make the mistake of aiming just for the listener’s head and don’t try to get to their body. Rock gets to people’s bodies and people have to be moved.”
– Larry Coryell“[The Beatles] have such a freshness. They approach their thing with just as much finesse and enthusiasm as does John Coltrane. They are “now” and are the greatest.”
– Larry Coryell
As noted by Bernard Gendron and Theodore Gracyk, a number of constituencies began to take popular music seriously during the 1960s. Not just fans but writers and social critics heard a growing sophistication in rock. As Gendron observes, rock displaced jazz in the dominant cultural hierarchy not by “rising ‘higher’ than high-cultural music—it is still ranked lower—but by making the latter less culturally relevant where it matters,” in the myriad venues where fans, critics, and musicians debated rock aesthetics and otherwise “made [rock music] meaningful.” While lyrical content received most of the attention, observers such as Chester Anderson, who noted the correlations between rock and baroque music in a 1967 San Francisco Oracle article, were also acknowledging the increasing musical refinement of rock musicians. The Beatles’ 1967 release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band signaled the arrival of the rock concept album—a recording with related compositions, not simply a compilation of hit tunes or a hit tune coupled to filler material. Sgt. Pepper’s indicated, in fact, the change in rock audiences’ tastes from 45 rpm singles to the 33 1⁄3 rpm “long player” or LP. As rock audiences matured, so did the format for production and consumption, which granted musicians the ability to produce more complex works by providing the time for them to develop musical and lyrical themes.
As a corollary, in the same year as Sgt. Pepper’s, The Pretty Things released a rock opera, S.F. Sorrow, predating The Who’s more celebrated Tommy by a year. These were the activities of serious musicians, unfazed by conventions and music industry dictates for musicians working in the popular music arena. As Paul Williams noted in Crawdaddy! as early as 1966, “But one thing has changed over the years, one minor detail: the music has gotten better. So much better, in fact, that there are even people who are beginning to take rock ’n’ roll very seriously indeed.”
The seriousness with which critics began analyzing rock music can be read in the pages of collections such as the 1969 anthology The Age of Rock, which included articles by the classical composer Ned Rorem on the Beatles, H. F. Mooney’s American Quarterly essay on the shift in popular music tastes from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Ralph Gleason’s “Like a Rolling Stone” article for the American Scholar. The collection’s subtitle, “Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution,” indicates the paradigm-shifting possibilities that rock held out for its serious listeners at the time.
In fact, early black rockers such as Ike Turner, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and a host of New Orleans–style boogie-woogie players such as Fats Domino and Robert “Professor Longhair” Byrd gave early rock ’n’ roll its musical language, as well as its sociopolitical temperament, that is, the voicing of black, later teen, rebellion, including the articulation of anti-bourgeois ideas; the complication of black/white binarisms and polarities through an aesthetic of mixing; an enthusiastic, even confrontational, use of volume, rhythmic velocity, and sense of timbral experimentation; and the celebration of the physical and, as it was increasingly marketed and heard as a white genre, the reengagement of the body in white, middle-class social spheres. The acknowledgment by early white rockers such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins of the influence of black musicians or the impact of Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and country-and-western music on Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ellas “Bo Diddley” McDaniel indicate the cross-cultural roots of the music.
Initially, rock ’n’ roll had performed a genre-blending aesthetic of its own, appropriating elements from the blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, and country and western before its recognition as a distinctive music idiom enabled rock musicians to begin border crossings of their own (again, these generic designations are used here as shorthand signifiers for broad spectrums of musical creation and consumption). The first rock ’n’ roll record is widely credited to a 1951 recording by Jackie Brenston, an African American saxophonist, whose backup band was led by Ike Turner, of a song titled “Rocket 88” at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studios. However, rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues served as audio signs marked “Whites Only” and “Coloreds Only,” respectively, in the segregated record shops, radio markets, and corporate divisions throughout the U.S. music industry and the broader American landscape in which it operated. In time the racialized separation of musical genres assumed an authoritative backdrop in musical discussions, affecting the ways audiences and artists perceived particular artists and genres. As de jure market segregation transformed into de facto market stratification, the so-called race market morphed into the “rhythm-and-blues” market.
In another sense, however, rock ’n’ roll allowed the “crossover” of black music into the mainstream popular music market through white performers. David Brackett describes the legacy of that movement as evidenced by the continuation of the “crossover” phenomenon: “The crossover process functioned much the same [in the 1980s] as it had since the inception of separate charts for ‘popular,’ ‘country and western,’ and ‘rhythm and blues’ in the 1940s. That is, the ‘black’ chart functioned as a ‘testing ground’ in relation to the ‘Hot 100,’ revealing extraordinarily popular songs that might have broad enough appeal to cross over to the mainstream.” Moreover, the index for mainstream appeal was partially configured by “the expectations about genres and audiences that circulate between industry employees, writers, musicians and fans have the power to affect the way in which the chart performance, and hence the ‘popularity,’ of different genres is represented.” Barry Shank also interrogated the various meanings for “crossover,” from integrative promise to cultural dilution, finally demonstrating that both views may be too limiting owing to the fluidity of both racialized ideologies and musical formations. However, Shank rightly suggests that “crossing over” has the potential to complicate racialized thinking by ensuring that musical meaning is not hijacked by the often racialized notions about musical genres held by audiences who inhabit divergent listening contexts, each creating often radically different interpretations of “what the music means.”
But, in fact, rock ’n’ roll was aggressively promoted to white teenagers through the recordings and appearances by white performers such as Presley, Lewis, Perkins, Charles “Buddy” Holly, and Johnny Cash, followed by a wave of teen idols such as Pat Boone, Dion DiMucci, and Fabian Forte, who were white surrogates for their black models. Pat Boone’s covers of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs were not meant to displace their recordings in African American record players but, rather, were meant to place a “safe” version of black music on white American teenagers’ turntables.
Though Chuck Berry and Little Richard crossed the color line by posting hits on the national pop charts, black musicians, by and large, continued to face subordinate conditions in the marketplace. The oft-repeated quote of Sam Phillips claiming he could make a fortune if he were able to find a white singer with a black vocal sensibility resonates here. Indeed, Chuck Berry’s extraordinary success in the late 1950s points to the possibility of hearing rock ’n’ roll as black music, even as he was explicit about his belief that his ability to use “proper diction” helped him achieve success on the pop (white) charts. Berry’s early recognition of the racialization of rock ’n’ roll as a white musical genre helps explain his careful cultivation of a deracinated vocal style on his recordings. His vocal style cloaked his miscegenational threat from white teenagers’ parents as he sang directly to adolescent sexual desire, rather pointedly in light of his legal problems involving relationships with young, white women.
Unfettered Borders and Boundaries
While few rock scholars would disagree with Greil Marcus’s assertion that “most of the first rock ’n’ roll styles were variations on black forms that had taken shape before the white audience moved in,” Chuck Berry’s first national rock ’n’ roll hit was a reworked country fiddle tune, “Ida Red,” which he renamed “Maybellene.” According to Berry’s pianist, Jimmy Johnson, a cosmetics article spotted in the studio inspired the new title—perhaps a Maybelline product—further implicating the role of commercial culture on rock ’n’ roll. For the record, Berry claims the title came “from a storybook of animals who bore names,” including a cow named Maybellene. An early rock ’n’ roll style, rockabilly was named in recognition of the close relationship between country music and rock ’n’ roll. Early rockabilly stars such as Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis transitioned easily to the country-and-western, or country, genre. Rock ’n’ roll’s inherent cross-cultural hybridity contributed to white parental fears of cultural miscegenation and the corruption of white middle-class youth. However, much of this anxiety was directed toward perceived increases in adolescent insubordination to parental authority, masking the racial undercurrents of their concerns.
Rock musicians in the mid-to-late 1960s performed their own sets of cross-cultural moves, merging a core set of idiomatic musical gestures that defined rock with other musical styles. Rock groups’ experiments with other musical genres and traditions radically altered the ways in which rock was conceived and discussed. Psychedelic groups integrated instruments from Asia and Africa for their “innerwordly” explorations, following their use by mainstream pop groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, while art-rock groups such as Soft Machine, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Pink Floyd, and Gong were fusing avant-garde art music, rock, and free jazz aesthetics.
As I have mentioned, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a watermark recording that signaled rock musicians’ development of a musical aesthetic that, despite incorporating a wide variety of musical traditions, including South Asian, proved popular with mainstream rock audiences and rock critics. The increasing influence of non-Western music in George Harrison’s guitar work, in particular, familiarized Western pop music audiences with Indian music sensibilities. The music industry’s awareness of how diasporic communities, global-hopping “first world tourists” (even if only from their television sets and Martin Denny recordings), and an emergent sense of a “shrinking” planet (cf. the popularization of Marshall McLuhan’s conception of the “global village,” increased telecommunication systems, and the growing power of supranational financial and political organizations) formed a considerable new market while enabling new consumptive patterns unfettered by national boundaries, style or genre borders, and even language barriers. The music industry’s efforts to mark out this emerging market eased the financial concerns of musicians whose desires to explore non-Western and nonpopular music, including collaborations with non-Western musicians, were energized as well as enticing mainstream pop listeners to accept exotic soundings as music.
By 1967 a number of pop musicians were blurring the separation of high art and pop music with, on one hand, bands like the Doors singing Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” on their eponymous 1967 debut recording and, on the other, the Nice performing renditions of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony no. 6 in B Minor. Later, in the 1970s, bands such as Sky, led by the classical guitarist John Williams, would merge jazz, rock, and classical music sensibilities.
In 1966 the Paul Butterfield Blues Band recorded East-West (Elektra), in which the title composition was a fusion of South Asian raga and African American blues distilled through a hard rock crucible. There is a live release culled from keyboardist Mark Naftalin’s own archival tapes of previously unreleased versions of the piece, which even more clearly reveals the band’s integrative musical sensibilities. The guitarist Sandy Bull incorporated non-Western instrumentation such as the oud in his recordings of the 1960s. His debut recording, Fantasias for Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard 1963), is prescient for many of the musical fusions that would become commonplace within a few years. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Bull performed on a wide variety of instruments (banjo, oud, guitar, mandolin, dulcimer), accompanied on some recordings by the jazz drummer Billy Higgins. His merging of Middle Eastern, blues, gospel, and various folk styles is an under-acknowledged early fusion-world recording that remains musically compelling today. I recognize there have been a number of composers in the European concert music tradition who had also been interested in non-Western music, from Béla Bartók’s ethnomusicological interest in the music of the Magyar to Henry Cowell’s interest in Indonesian gamelan, among others. However, I mean to draw attention to the ways in which musicians who were considered “popular” or “pop” began to draw on the music of non-Western traditions.
Yet rock musicians did not encounter the same resistance from rock critics and audiences as their jazz compatriots. This imbalance has much to do with rock’s racialization as a white musical idiom, which essentially left rock music “unmarked.” Rock’s whiteness figured the genre as a universal musical idiom that, as expressed in the acknowledgment by fans, critics, and musicians of rock’s inherent hybridity, was free to roam the world in search of beguiling sounds and musical practices that were denied music that was racialized as a black musical tradition (or Latina/o, or, indeed, any nonwhite cultural or ethnic group). Rock artists have been freer in their ability to appropriate other musical idioms, facing far less critical opprobrium in their musical mixtures than jazz or funk artists, for instance (while I recognize that there are constraints and restrictions to this maneuver, it is rock musicians’ freedom relative to jazz musicians that I wish to emphasize; furthermore, rock musicians, like jazz artists of an earlier time, had little to lose and everything to gain by striving for virtuoso status). This was undeniably part of rock’s attraction for Tony Williams, as we will see.
Peter Wicke argues that the emergence of rock ’n’ roll as a distinct genre occurred within a context of 1950s U.S. youth caught in the contradictions of, on one hand, an educational system bent on producing docile managers and obedient workers for the future and, on the other, a culture industry that promoted individualistic pleasure as a goal in itself. Wicke argues further that the “conservatism of country music on one hand and the rebellious energy of rhythm & blues on the other became the essence of rock ’n’ roll,” energizing the contradictions of these youths, who witnessed “prosperity and consumption as the essential conditions of a meaningful life, but no longer believing in such a life.” Rock ’n’ roll “reduced [this contradiction] to a musical formula, expressing both the noisy rebellion and the secret conformity” the youth of the time embodied.
Indeed, rock music steadily displaced other types of music from the “top of the pops,” partly as a result of a growing youth audience that had plenty of free time and discretionary income. This age group in the 1960s, made up of the so-called baby boomers, was not the first youth subculture identified by the music industry as a group of potential consumers. An earlier modern mass youth culture came into existence in the so-called jazz age of the 1920s, when an unprecedented number of young people had access to sizable amounts of disposable income and leisure time. The culture industries, accelerating a phenomenon begun during the imperial era, when global trade moved products from the colonized periphery to the cosmopolitan market center, increased the commodification of culture, turning artistic endeavors into products, including music. Even after the ebullient decade of the 1920s, the teenaged bobby soxers of the Depression-era 1930s were targeted by a popular culture industry that realized that the “continually new” was not only available in terms of products but of audiences, as well. There are, of course, significant differences between each teen subculture in terms of specific historical and cultural contexts, but the similarities between them—discretionary income, a commodified form of “teen rebellion,” identification with popular culture entertainers, and a desire to mark off a teenage space separate from parent culture and larger social constraints—signaled the growing centrality of popular music’s role in forming a recognizable youth identity. The music and mass communications industries interpellated teen audiences with increasing sophistication while contributing to the ways in which youth identity was constituted through consumerist culture.
By the late 1960s, however, rock musicians were reshaping popular music by expressing more than adolescent themes and obsessions in their music—a shift reflected in the increasing use of rock as opposed to rock ’n’ roll as a descriptive term for the music. Additionally, the change from rock ’n’ roll to rock foreshadowed the shift to identity-driven political movements as race, gender, and sexuality displaced the mass movements, such as those protesting the Vietnam War and the coalitional countercultural activities of the late 1960s, which no longer seemed to hold their explanatory or representative power. In fact, despite Nick Bromell’s keen observations of rock’s utopian sensibilities throughout the late 1960s in Tomorrow Never Knows, Bromell fails to recognize the economic inequalities that the racialization of genre enabled among groups of musicians, notwithstanding Hendrix and his white middle-class rock fans.
The changing relationship between racial politics and popular music can be lightly sketched by comparing the 1969 Woodstock festival and the 1972 Wattstax concert. Woodstock was celebrated as a utopian Garden, as Joni Mitchell’s song so famously described it, a paradise where Sly and the Family Stone, a funk-rock band in which black musicians and white shared duties across gender lines, embodied the countercultural values of racialized and gendered equality, and Hendrix’s diving glissandi and electric screams deconstructed the U.S. national anthem through distortion and feedback, reasserting the song as a countercultural sign. Three years later, Wattstax was a celebration of blackness, a point the filmmaker Mel Stuart emphasized in segments of commentary from ordinary black citizens and Richard Pryor placed between footage of the exclusively black musical acts, punctuated by Isaac Hayes in gold chains symbolizing black oppression in the festival finale. Stuart’s film forces us to notice the difference in audience participation for “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice” at the music festival, underscoring the offstage commentators’ disappointment in the continued economic, social, and educational inequality between blacks and whites despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Gettin’ Seriously Funky
Still, by the mid-1960s rock clearly outsold and out-hyped other forms of popular music. Throughout the period the music industry played a part in forming a growing audience for rock music from a group who might have previously been disposed to jazz, as youthful audiences responded to the transgressive and libidinous energies in rock that their parents had heard in jazz. The construction of a market-driven culture industry dictated (apparently) new forms of (in reality) old products, as Adorno criticized. One of the self-perpetuating effects of the continual renewal of popular music forms was that diverse audiences projected their sense of self onto popular music performers and genre-defining performative gestures, basing their projections on delineations shaped, in part, by the music industry.
Yet by the late 1960s, rock musicians did more than simply sell vast sums of recordings to unsophisticated listeners or represent “teen rebellion.” They became spokespeople for a radical youth counterculture advocating serious political and social agendas in more confrontational ways than those articulated by earlier youth subcultures such as the flappers or even the beatniks—groups who seemed less committed to radical social change, at least to the fans of then-underground acid rock bands like the Grateful Dead or mainstream popular bands such as the Rolling Stones. As Ralph J. Gleason would write in 1967, “The most immediate apparent change instituted by the new music [acid rock] is a new way of looking at things. We see it evidenced all around us. The old ways are going and a new set of assumptions is beginning to be worked out. I cannot even begin to codify them. Perhaps it’s much too soon to do so. But I think there are some clues—the sacred importance of love and truth and beauty and interpersonal relationships.” This idea of radical social transformation through musical change—as well as the role of the individual, rather than the collective, in such transfiguration—would have a significant impact on early fusion musicians.
Ain’t Jazz, Ain’t Rock…
“Most critics use formal criteria in evaluating music, but you can’t discuss the “harmonics of funk.” It doesn’t apply. You have to evaluate funk on the level of emotions, the projection of emotions, maybe rhythms. We just don’t have the terminology to discuss funky music critically.”
– Herbie Hancock“Yeah, [playing funk] is hard to do, real hard.”
– Larry Coryell Herbie Hancock
“Playing funky” has long registered the racialized meanings attached to black music. At the beginning of the twentieth century the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden composed a tune known as “Funky Butt,” among other titles, and its suppression by New Orleans police, who, according to the clarinetist Sidney Bechet, “whipped heads” whenever it was performed, indicates the term’s volatile signification. Funk, referring to bodily fluids and excretions, was explicit in its evocation of embodied activity, often hyper-sexualized and racialized—to “get funky,” then, was to be overcome with black physicality. Funky was used to describe early jazz, as well as nineteenth-century minstrelsy songs, and the attachment of physical pleasures—dance, sex, and other forms of physical activities—to the music underlined both its transgressive and its nonintellectual purview. The recurrent crises around popular music have some of their roots in the construction of black music as a space of transgression. The devalued position the music genre named funk occupies in dominant music discourse, scholarly and popular, is indicated by the relative paucity of texts devoted to serious discussions of its history, aesthetics, or cultural meanings, particularly in light of the vast and growing amount of literature devoted to Afrodiasporic music in general.
My central point is that funk musicians in the 1970s were partially shaped by the longer histories of “funky music” in the United States and, assisted by the creative possibilities that technology granted them, created an aesthetic that not only renewed ties to an African heritage but also made “cultural moves,” to borrow Herman Gray’s provocative term for an expansive vision of black cultural production, toward a future free of the various discursive and material constraints they faced at the time. While Gray is primarily concerned with twenty-first-century artists, his argument that “contemporary black cultural politics must get beyond the nostalgic paradigms and moral panics about representation, inclusion, and the threats of technology” motivates this brief look at 1970s funk (and, in fact, guides my concern for situating race in music beyond essentialist celebration or condemnation, broadly speaking). In other words, black funk musicians used funk music to revitalize moribund connections to Africa and preslave pasts while looking to futures beyond contemporaneous conditions of racial discrimination. Indeed, they were active participants in contemporary music-production techniques, freely engaging the technological tools of the time to enhance and extend black histories into an imagined future in which black bodies not only participated in space exploration, for instance, but also imagined space travel as a means to diminish, if not eradicate or reverse, the various meanings funk might register in its relationship with blackness.
Most contemporary popular music audiences hear funk as a genre fashioned by James Brown and his band’s transformation in the 1960s of earlier rhythm-and-blues shuffle rhythms by placing an emphasis on the first beat (also known as the “downbeat”) or, as James Brown expressed it, “the one,” as well as maintaining a hyped up backbeat. Drummers, while emphasizing the downbeat, incorporated the square rhythmic underpinning of a rock steady hi-hat against R&B’s more swing-oriented backbeat, accentuating funk’s polyrhythmic complexity. More important, it was a musical idiom that emphasized polyrhythmic interplay not only between percussion instruments but by organizing the entire musical ensemble—including the electric guitar, organ, horn section, and, the instrument that would come to define much of the sound of 1970s funk, the bass guitar—as a “rhythm machine.” Sly and the Family Stone’s bassist, Larry Graham, is widely credited with inventing the “slap bass” technique, “slapping” the bass strings with his thumb and “popping” the strings with his fingers to create a percussive sound, supplementing rhythmic value to the melodic and harmonic capabilities of the instrument. There were other influential bassists, such as Bootsy Collins of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic (as we will see later, the fusion bassist Jaco Pastorius dramatically transformed the rhythmic orientation of this technique by using it thematically, as well).
By the 1970s, funk was a musical genre created by, marketed to, and popular with an urban African American audience, sounding out the social realities brought by urban “renewal,” white flight to the suburbs, and the political sensibilities that emerged in an increasingly pessimistic post–civil rights era. Funk musicians played with urban African American codings and interacted ironically with dominant understandings of black urban experience. However, I want to avoid reducing funk’s politics to what Matthew Brown terms “politics at the gestural level” and rendering its aesthetic dimension as little more than a shout-out to its advanced polyrhythms or its seductive charms as a “groove” music.
To be sure, funk, like jazz or the blues before it, was marked by the primitivist and hypersexualized meanings attached to black cultural life by dominant white readings. Importantly, though, funk remained distinct from jazz by refusing to attenuate those readings by reducing or obscuring the blackness of the music’s sonic or discursive signifiers in order to achieve mainstream cultural legitimization. Rickey Vincent cogently describes funk as “an aesthetic of deliberate confusion, of uninhibited, soulful behavior that remains viable because of a faith in instinct, a joy of self, and a joy of life, particularly unassimilated black American life.” Indeed, funk musicians foregrounded difference through displays of black flesh on record covers and advertising posters, by embracing black sexuality and physical pleasure, and by otherwise celebrating the black urban experience while critiquing structural and systemic modes of oppression. Gina Dent argues that black pleasure as expressed through and by black music engages a political stance in which black bodies mobilize a counternarrative to those of victimization and humiliation. In this light, “gettin’ down” and “gettin’ it on” were more than salacious calls for sexual play but functioned as entreaties for the vitalization of a black politics through an engagement of black aesthetics. Being funky was a political as well as aesthetic decision, as James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” testified in 1968.
Vincent argues that funk music was “the successor to the soul music of the 1960s in terms of its representations of popular black values—particularly those ideals of social, spiritual, and political redemption.” Vincent explains that as the optimism of the 1960s civil rights movement decreased in the 1970s across black communities and political groups throughout the United States, the cheerful, upbeat sounds of soul music were displaced by the harder-edged sounds of funk. Brian Ward supports Vincent’s assertions by detailing the ways in which the move from soul music to funk occurred in a historical context in which the liberal promises of black integration after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were increasingly dashed by continued educational, employment, and housing inequities between whites and blacks in the United States. As James Brown exhorted audiences in 1974, “People, we got to get over before we go under,” further advising them to “turn on your funk motor, get down and praise the Lord, get sexy, sexy, get funky and dance,” advocating a politics of funk, if you will, in a period of economic “stagflation” linking economic empowerment to a black erotics.
Musically, funk bands such as the Bar-Kays, ConFunkShun, Lakeside, Cameo, and Kool and the Gang moved black popular music away from mainstream notions of consonant harmonic and melodic elements and toward the gritty, even “greasy,” sounds of 1970s urban black life as announced by the band Tower of Power on its 1970 debut recording, East Bay Grease. It is no coincidence that soul music parlayed a strong connection to gospel into a commercial idiom that sounded more conciliatory to integrative desires than to the black nationalist ideals of the black power movement lauded in funk anthems such as the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power.”
The Pleasures of Psychedelia
Yet, like jazz and rock before it, funk’s hybrid roots were obscured by its rhetorical positioning within a given racialized culture. While funk was mobilized in various popular culture forms that highlighted black difference—notably in the so-called blaxploitation films of the era—it was a form influenced by, and influencing in its own turn, musical worlds beyond its nominative home culture. In fact, Vincent spends considerable space on Jimi Hendrix and other black rock musicians in his book, signaling the cross-genre nature of 1970s funk. As George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic fame admitted, “The Beatles are my all time favorites,” and, like Tony Williams, he admired Detroit’s hard rock band the mc5, in addition to contemporary “prog rock” bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It was not only that white musicians could “bring the funk” but also that groups such as the Beatles and other progressive rock bands hipped black funksters to the pleasures of psychedelia and the possibilities recording technology and the performance equipment used by rock bands enabled. Funkadelic Billy “Bass” Nelson admits that having to borrow the Marshall stacks and fiberglass drums of the white funk-rock band Vanilla Fudge, when Funkadelic’s equipment failed to arrive for a gig opposite them, persuaded the band to change “from rhythm and blues, Motown wannabes into what we evolved into: the real Funkadelic.” Beyond mere instrumentation, George Clinton and his P-Funk amalgamation played with the sonic and mind-warping possibilities of the studio, and the sound of funk for many bands was a noticeably sophisticated blend of technological and rhythmic acuity.
The music by groups and artists such as Sly and the Family Stone; Stevie Wonder; George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic; Earth, Wind, and Fire; the Bar-Kays; and the Ohio Players circulated as musical and figurative manifestations of an Afrodiasporic tradition that was not simply historical but a vital part of the contemporary soundscape. Musically, while funk bands emphasized the fundamental James Brown rhythmic vamps that formed the foundation for complex overlayings of polyrhythms and melodic material, like their rock counterparts they developed individualized sounds through a careful manipulation of electronic instrumentation and gear, fetishizing specific instruments, playback, and recording systems, as the often extensive equipment listings on recordings of the time attest.
As post–civil rights era hopes were challenged by continued structural oppression and racist policies in the United States, funk musicians looked to Africa as an imagined repository of black cultural authorization but gave it a sounding out that used the latest studio and playback technologies. While instruments such as mbiras and djembe drums, as well as the wearing of dashikis, demonstrated the connections to Africa felt by funk artists and their audiences, even if in primarily imagined expressions, traditional instrumentation was buttressed by their creative interplay with technology, using speaker systems, effects processing, and mixing options to produce music that would have been unrealizable without the electronic gadgetry. These emerging musical practices, including the use of Afrocentric artwork and fashion in promotional photographs, album artwork, and live performances, supported these young musicians’ desires to reconnect with working-class black communities through a fashionable blend of black pride and musical technique.
It is no coincidence, then, that a strong element of avant la letter Afro-futurism was prevalent in funk. Egyptian iconography vied with stylized space suits, and pyramids served as backdrops to hovering spaceships in the stage spectacles of live performances and album covers. Afrofuturism is a term used to describe a number of African American artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians, whose works complicate and comment on blackness through the engagement of science, technology, and, often, science fiction literature and iconography. As Matthew Brown argues, “Nineteen-seventies frustrations led to more mediated beliefs in this homeland; rather than a nationalism that pointed either to Africa or to a secure community in the U.S., Funkadelic album cover art on One Nation under a Groove (1978) presents ‘Afro-nauts’ leaving earth and colonizing outer space.” Accordingly, Clinton’s evocation of a Mothership connection to the Parliament-Funkadelic aggregation played on science fiction imaginings, while other groups, including the Bar-Kays; Earth, Wind and Fire; and the Commodores, performed in space-age costumes. Even Marvin Gaye released a 1978 single, A Funky Space Reincarnation, which effectively linked science fiction themes within a funky, streetwise perspective. Drawing on African imagery and futuristic science fiction imaginings for their album covers and stage shows, many funk bands imagined a “funky” black presence that projected Afrocentric cultural values into a technological future.
Yet, while funk allowed black musicians to claim a connection to Africa— even if only to an imaginary, fantastic Africa—and was used to broadcast Afrocentric political views, nonblack musicians are an important part of its history. The white guitarist Joe Medina was a member of the so-called Funk Brothers, the name given to a group of studio musicians used by Motown, playing a seminal role in the constitution of the label’s mainstream commercial style of black music. Sly and the Family Stone, heralded as one of funk’s founding bands, featured an interracial membership, and the success with black audiences experienced by white funk groups such as the Average White Band, whose very name played on the racialized assumptions of genre, was evidence of the cross-cultural legacy of funk. Tower of Power was founded by the saxophonists Emilio Castillo and Stephen Kupka, neither of whom are African American but whose band became one of the more successful funk bands of the era.
This proto-Afrofuturist turn to outer space and science fiction was not restricted to funk musicians of the 1970s. The fusion drummer Lenny Williams produced a number of science fiction–inspired recordings, including the concept album The Adventures of the Astral Pirates (Elektra 1978), and during his most well-known fusion association with Return to Forever, he and his fellow band members had also turned to science fiction for inspiration. Even earlier, the jazz musician Sun Ra based his own cosmology on a number of themes that would be taken up by Afrofuturists, predating the term and its ideological formation in the 1990s. Hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaata espoused a similar theme of global and extraworldly universalism that included a technologically based utopianism. These proto-Afrofuturist approaches shared a desire to position black bodies within discourses of African cultural legacies, as well as to articulate desires for a place in the future as represented in space exploration, computerized networks, and technological advances writ large. As I will detail later, Herbie Hancock engaged these ideas in his fusion music of the 1970s, intentionally confronting the broken middles among race, genre, and technology.
* * *
As I have noted, although funk may refer to a particular musical genre developed in the late 1960s, funky has long been used to describe various black musics, including jazz. The use of funky within jazz is often traced to its use to describe the pianist Horace Silver and the hard bop movement in which he was first recognized. To give some sense of the relationship hard bop shares with fusion, including both styles’ evocation of “funk,” let us backtrack momentarily to the beginnings of bebop. While big band swing ensembles were giving way to jump blues, at least on black jukeboxes in the late 1940s, what was to become known as bebop was being created by young jazz musicians, motivated in part by the same reason fusion musicians would list a quarter of a century later: a creative urge to revitalize a form of music that had grown moribund and overly commercial (at least, to their ears) but to which they still felt a strong connection. As bebop grew beyond musicians’ jam sessions, its audience, like the earlier “hot” jazz aficionados, seemed more interested in the transgressive social aspects of the music rather than an enrichment or deep appreciation of jazz culture. In reaction, as bebop became integrated into the mainstream of jazz—indeed, as it arguably became the lingua franca of mainstream jazz—a number of jazz artists turned away from the intellectualizations of bebop toward a jazz that was oriented, once again, to black dance floors. David Rosenthal described the predicament many jazz musicians faced in the 1950s: “The problem in the early fifties was: where do we go from here? Bebop, which had begun as a promise of freedom, had turned into something of a straitjacket, an increasingly codified form of expression… R&B might be a source of new ideas, but it was too limited to satisfy jazz musicians as a regular context.”
Many hard bop artists—including Sonny Stitt, Jackie McLean, and John Coltrane—had, in fact, first performed professionally in rhythm-and-blues acts. In contrast to bebop musicians’ self-conscious alignments with fine art and their public disdain for commercial considerations, which, as Scott DeVeaux argues in The Making of Bebop, were part of their own mythologizing project, hard bop musicians often performed in both rhythm-and-blues and hard bop jazz groups. Jackie McLean, a self-described bebopper, speaks to the illusory limits of genres: “I played in rhythm and blues bands when I went to North Carolina in 1953 to try to go to school again, and I stayed down there for a year, and yeah, it helped me. It influenced me… I certainly, myself, thought along heavy blues lines, blues feeling, and my concept of it, so I just think it had more of a gospel feeling to it, a sanctified feeling to it mixed with all the other ingredients that Bird [Charlie Parker, bebop alto saxophonist], Bud [Powell, bebop pianist], Thelonious [Monk, bebop pianist] gave us.”
Artists such as Horace Silver, Eddie Harris, Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith, and Lou Donaldson responded to bebop’s intellectualism and increasingly rigid codification by creating an instrumental body-oriented jazz that emphasized danceable rhythms. Their blues- and gospel-based melodic and harmonic material was linked to a conscious desire to redirect jazz back toward black audiences, who were seen as abandoning jazz for the pleasures of rhythm and blues. Hard boppers blended the roots of African American musical idioms—the blues, work songs, and gospel, in particular—with bebop’s improvisational innovations.
Complexifying on those Primitivist Expectations
This self-conscious return to the African American roots of jazz music was marked by performative displays of blackness. Hard boppers’ “funkiness” was expressed musically by quoting black gospel and spiritual elements along with a renewed interest in blues forms. I do not mean to suggest that bebop musicians abandoned the blues. Bebop musicians did, in fact, manipulate the blues, complexifying the form through the use of, among other things, substitute harmonies and rhythmic displacements. I do mean to suggest, however, that hard bop musicians engaged a more “roots”-oriented approach to the blues. Eric Porter notes that “many be-boppers saw the blues as a symbol of the limitations placed on them as musicians and as African Americans… symboliz[ing] both the primitivist expectations of a white audience and the demands of a culture industry that wanted to pigeonhole black music.” By contrast, hard boppers openly flaunted their blues orientation by emphasizing, for example, short, rhythmic riffs, rather than long, complex lines, and a danceable backbeat rather than the rhythmic displacements of bebop drummers. Hard bop musicians also strayed from bebop’s subversion of popular song harmonies, choosing instead to play on modal and pentatonic harmonic structures.
Songs like Bobby Timmons’s “Moanin’” and Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” were typical hard bop reengagements of earlier black music traditions. While bebop musicians marked out a space for African American high cultural status, hard bop musicians thumbed their noses at such pretense. Deplored by middle-class blacks interested in political and economic uplift, hard bop musicians’ use of black slang was their means of demarcating “soulfulness” and the authenticity of hard bop’s roots. Using black vernacular in titles such as “Moanin’,” “Strollin’,” “Pentecostal Feelin’,” “Dat Dere,” and “Messin’ Around” was a way to actively reengage working-class African American culture, explicitly coding black vernacular speech as a signifying ground on which their music was created, performed, and heard. As a generic marker, hard bop was also less parochial than other jazz styles, encompassing everything from the funky “soul jazz” organ trios of Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff to the more mainstream jazz bands of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the 1950s Miles Davis groups.
But, like many popular jazz styles, hard bop was met with critical opprobrium. In his essay “The Funky-Hard Bop Regression” Martin Williams wrote, “The gradual dominance of the Eastern and then national scene in jazz by the so-called ‘hard bop’ and ‘funky’ school has shocked many commentators and listeners. The movement has been called regressive, self-conscious, monotonous, and even contrived.” Contrary to critical efforts to foreground hard bop’s commercial success as a means to dismiss the style, the music was embraced by some in the black community as a way of affirming black political empowerment. In the words of a Harlem record storeowner, “I think most of that soul music is now being manufactured rather than felt but at least this is one time in jazz history when the Negroes are popularizing their own music. It would take a lot of courage for Stan Kenton or Shorty Rogers [both white jazz musicians] to call one of their albums The Soul Brothers.” Although hard bop hits like Lee Morgan’s “Side-winder” (1963) and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” (1962) helped keep jazz in the popular mainstream, however, the politics of dance and the body failed to register with dominant critical discourse as little more than lightweight entertainment. The dance club and mass popularity, for all its valorization in big band swing discourse, engendered very little prestige elsewhere in much of the mainstream jazz criticism of the postwar period.
* * *
Like hard bop, funk music was antithetical to middle-class black aspirations. It represented the same move “backward” in its celebration of black physicality that a black politics of uplift had continually struggled against in a variety of popular culture forms, from minstrelsy in the nineteenth century through the use of jazz as a space of (white) transgression. This debate took a slightly different tangent in the 1960s, when critics such as Amiri Baraka decried the antagonisms the black bourgeoisie felt toward the blues at the time. The issue of black representation in popular music remained a volatile issue within the black community in the 1970s. The funk diva Betty Davis, at one time married to Miles Davis, had her concerts boycotted by black religious organizations and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publicly denounced her single, “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up,” from her 1973 debut album. Yet, as Scot Brown notes in his study of the Dayton, Ohio, music scene that spawned the seminal funk band Ohio Players, funk music’s formation was largely the result of the increased economic resources of working-class blacks throughout the 1960s: “The availability of relatively high-wage working class jobs in Dayton, from the World War II era through the early 1970s, gave families resources to purchase instruments, vehicles for transportation, and sound equipment.” The distinction between African American middle-class and working-class aspirations of the era is seen in the ways jazz moved toward the symphony hall while funk remained decidedly popular and populist in its appeal. I want to draw attention, however, to the fact that, like earlier blues, rhythm-and-blues, and hard bop musicians (and unlike, say, black minstrels and vaudevillians), a career in funk music held out the promise of upward social mobility from the working class while still acknowledging, even honoring, those roots.
This upward mobility came at a price, however. The simultaneous commercial success with mainstream audiences of the film Shaft (1971) and Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack cemented the relationship between funk music and representations of “the street.” This link between sound and image has continued to provide the U.S. popular imaginary with authenticating tropes of black urban grittiness represented through a black hypersexual and violent pathology—all supported by a funky backbeat, syncopated wah-wah rhythm guitar, and aggressive bass lines (its continuing resonance is witnessed by the fact that funk has not yet been entirely displaced by hip-hop or rap in movie or television soundtracks as a sonic signifier of a particular kind of urban, “street” blackness). Yet films such as Shaft also resonated with black audiences, who read these films as affirmations of black (male) superiority and power against (white) oppression. Through their relationship to these films, their images and their narrative thrust, funk music provided a rich intertextual linkage, reinforcing not only funk’s blackness but also its confluence with the black power ideological currents of the era.
To return to fusion: Herbie Hancock was explicit about the division between older, jazz-oriented understandings of funky and more contemporaneous ideas about the term, declaring, “Well, [Horace Silver performed] some of the first funky piano playing, though it’s applied towards a jazz sound in the rhythm section. That kind of playing overlaps what I’m talking about, but they’re not the same thing. Horace is within the jazz framework, and I’m closer to the R&B framework. There’s a stylistic difference, even though there’s a common ground.” Hancock underlined rhythm’s fundamental place in understanding funk, declaring, “There’s another reason for my present style: I haven’t found a way to do more advanced things harmonically without losing the funkiness of it. That’s why I don’t like a lot of jazz/rock fusion music. They lose the funkiness because they put more emphasis on harmony than rhythm.” As Hancock also notes, while there are shared elements among the various kinds of musical funkiness, there are distinctions in kind, as well. For example, as I have mentioned, similar to their peers in the rock world, funk musicians were also exploring and utilizing the latest studio technology. Additionally, where rhythm and blues was built around star vocalists backed by anonymous studio bands, funk musicians were more likely to be members of self-contained bands, performing and recording songs they composed and arranged themselves—similar, again, to the rock bands of the era.
I want to conclude my admittedly too-brief look at funk to suggest that privileging “the one” can be conceived of as more than a call to a particular musical groove. Looking at the 1970s helps us consider the ways in which funk musicians—jazz, pop, or otherwise—transformed the meanings blackness registered in the popular imaginary through their reconceptions and performances of an aesthetic that recognized and paid tribute to Afro-diasporic connections at a time when black sociopolitical movements were challenging the subordinate, even degraded, status of blackness itself. As Tony Bolden notes, “James Brown’s 1972 hit single ‘Make It Funky’ codified a clarion call within a wide spectrum of black (organic) artists and intellectuals, just as Duke Ellington had theorized self-reflexively in his 1932 recording of ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Importantly, funk musicians reached out beyond the borders of the United States—indeed, of the planet—as a means to locate their music and aesthetics within a broader space than allowed by the commercial genre considerations dictated by historically racist music industry practices. In this light James Brown’s call to “hit on the one” also points to the connections among Afrodiasporic musical practices, a unified yet dispersed and diverse grouping of musical traditions that ranges from BaBenzélé hunting songs to Pentecostal gospel, through Brazilian samba and Puerto Rican plena, as well as can be heard in Trinidad and Tobago’s soca and Jamaican reggae. As Radano argues in Lying Up a Nation, black music, as a category, was constructed out of a complex set of possibilities, arriving at the end of a long discursive trail marking the distinctions between white and nonwhite musical traditions, particularly as demarcated in the “new world” of chattel slavery of African-descended peoples. Pointedly, Brown’s calls emphasizing “the one” speaks to the multiple historic and aesthetic connections among the widely scattered musical cultures created by blacks in contact with other cultures and out of which Brown, Stone, Clinton, and other funk musicians performed and celebrated.
Excerpted from Chapter Two, “Where Have I Known You Before? / Fusion’s Foundations” (footnotes omitted) from Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion by © Kevin Fellezs, published August 2011. Copyright © Duke University Press 2011. Reprinted with permission of Duke University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Kevin Fellezs is an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University.
![Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered [MUSIC] May-August 2024](https://www.popmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/all-things-reconsidered-call-music-may-2024-720x380.jpg)
