The Other Direction
Jazz fusion is usually told as a story of jazz musicians plugging in. Jazz rock is the opposite current: rock musicians reaching toward jazz. Where fusion players brought conservatory training and bebop vocabulary to electric instruments, jazz rock bands brought blues feel, pop songwriting, and the sheer volume of a rock rhythm section to horn charts, modal harmony, and improvisation. The two streams crossed constantly, but their origins and intentions were separate.
Horns Over Chicago
In February 1967, six musicians in Chicago held a meeting. Saxophonist Walter Parazaider, trombonist James Pankow, and trumpeter Lee Loughnane had studied together at DePaul University’s School of Music, absorbing jazz theory and big band arranging. They joined guitarist Terry Kath, drummer Danny Seraphine, and keyboardist Robert Lamm, called themselves the Big Thing, and played Top 40 covers in nightclubs until producer James William Guercio renamed them Chicago Transit Authority and brought them to Columbia’s CBS studios on 52nd Street in New York in late January 1969.
They recorded a double album debut in five days of tracking and five days of overdubs. Pankow wrote the brass arrangements, tightly voiced ensemble passages hitting with big band precision at rock volume. “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” folded a walking jazz bass line into a pop song, while “Free Form Guitar” was seven minutes of Kath alone with his Fender Stratocaster run through a Bogan PA into a Showman amplifier, producing feedback that drew admiration from Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly called Kath the best guitarist in the universe.
Blood, Sweat & Tears arrived from a different route. Al Kooper, who had played the Hammond organ on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” left the Blues Project in 1967 to build a band fusing jazz, blues, and classical music within rock. He recruited trumpeter Randy Brecker, alto saxophonist Fred Lipsius, and drummer Bobby Colomby. Their debut, Child Is Father to the Man, produced by John Simon, arrived in February 1968 with string arrangements and Randy Newman covers. Kooper’s bandmates pushed him out by April, unhappy with his singing. Colomby found a replacement through folk singer Judy Collins, who had heard a Canadian vocalist named David Clayton-Thomas at a club uptown. Clayton-Thomas transformed the band. Their self-titled second album spent seven weeks at number one and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating Abbey Road.
The British Strain
British jazz rock drew on blues, progressive structures, and the London jazz scene rather than horn sections and R&B grooves.
Traffic formed in Birmingham in April 1967 when Steve Winwood, already a veteran at eighteen from the Spencer Davis Group, linked up with drummer Jim Capaldi, multi-instrumentalist Chris Wood, and guitarist Dave Mason. They rented a cottage near Aston Tirrold in Berkshire to write, isolating themselves from London. By the early 1970s, the core trio of Winwood, Capaldi, and Wood had built an improvisational language around Winwood’s keyboards and Wood’s flute and saxophone. The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971), recorded at Island Studios, went platinum in the US. Its eleven-minute title track showed how rock improvisation could achieve the spaciousness of jazz without copying its vocabulary.
Colosseum pushed further into jazz territory. Drummer Jon Hiseman and tenor saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith had played together in the Graham Bond Organisation and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before forming Colosseum in early 1968 with organist Dave Greenslade and bassist Tony Reeves. Their Valentyne Suite (1969) became the first release on Philips’ new Vertigo label, Hiseman’s jazz drumming and Heckstall-Smith’s free improvisation hitting with full rock weight.
The band If took a similar approach with stronger jazz credentials. Formed in 1969 by saxophonists Dick Morrissey and Dave Quincy alongside guitarist Terry Smith, they played jazz solos over what a Billboard reviewer called “a bloody good rock rhythm section.” They released eight albums between 1970 and 1975 without commercial breakthrough but with deep respect from musicians in both camps.
The Canterbury Convergence
Canterbury, a cathedral city in Kent, produced an improbable concentration of musicians who blurred every line between rock, jazz, and psychedelia. The scene traced to 1962, when Hugh Hopper, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, and Richard Sinclair formed the Wilde Flowers. By 1966, Wyatt and Ayers had left to form the Soft Machine with Australian guitarist Daevid Allen and keyboardist Mike Ratledge, naming the band after William S. Burroughs’s 1961 novel.
Soft Machine compressed a jazz rock education into a few years. They toured North America in 1968 opening for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, playing psychedelic pop. By 1970, their double album Third was almost entirely instrumental: four side-long compositions featuring Elton Dean’s saxophone and Ratledge’s distorted organ over Hopper’s fuzz bass. Wyatt’s “Moon in June” was the last track the band recorded with vocals.
Caravan, also descended from the Wilde Flowers, took a gentler path, Dave Sinclair’s Hammond organ providing warmth against song-oriented structures. In the Land of Grey and Pink (1971) became the quintessential Canterbury record. Hatfield and the North, formed from ex-members of Caravan, Delivery, and Matching Mole, built a sound on odd time signatures and extended melodies across two Virgin albums, Hatfield and the North (1974) and The Rotters’ Club (1975).
Zappa’s Jazz Ambitions
Frank Zappa treated jazz harmony, rock performance, and orchestral ambition as a single toolkit. Hot Rats (1969), mostly instrumental, used extended improvisation over jazz-inflected structures. His deepest engagement with big band jazz came from catastrophe: on December 10, 1971, a concertgoer pushed Zappa off the stage at London’s Rainbow Theatre, leaving him with a fractured leg, broken rib, head trauma, and spinal injuries. Confined to a wheelchair, he wrote prolifically. The result was Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, both recorded at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles in the spring of 1972. For the latter, he assembled a twenty-piece ensemble, writing dense jazz orchestrations for players including keyboardist George Duke, trumpeter Sal Marquez, and drummer Aynsley Dunbar.
The Studio Perfectionists
Steely Dan occupied unique ground: a rock band obsessed with jazz harmony that gradually became a studio project dedicated to eliminating imperfection. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, both captivated by bebop before they met, stopped touring after 1974 and used rotating casts of session musicians. For Aja (1977), they employed nearly forty players, including drummers Bernard Purdie, Rick Marotta, and Steve Gadd; guitarists Larry Carlton and Jay Graydon; and bassist Chuck Rainey. The title track featured a Wayne Shorter saxophone solo. Each song was recorded with six or seven different rhythm sections until the right combination emerged. For Gaucho (1980), seven songs took a full year, forty-two musicians, and eleven engineers. The results were jazz-steeped compositions in rock song forms, produced with a clarity that became an audiophile benchmark.
Essential Listening
- Chicago – Chicago Transit Authority (1969)
- Blood, Sweat & Tears – Child Is Father to the Man (1968)
- Traffic – The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971)
- Soft Machine – Third (1970)
- Colosseum – Valentyne Suite (1969)
- Steely Dan – Aja (1977)
- Frank Zappa – Waka/Jawaka (1972)
- Caravan – In the Land of Grey and Pink (1971)
- If – If (1970)
- Hatfield and the North – The Rotters’ Club (1975)
- Blood, Sweat & Tears – Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968)
- Frank Zappa – Hot Rats (1969)