MUSIC APPRECIATION
WEEK 14
JAZZ AND ROCK Part 4
The 70s
At the urging of his younger band members, Miles Davis slowly began to use Rock elements in his music. This lead to Miles' newest innovation: Fusion. With the album In a Silent Way (1969), Miles started using more electronic instruments and fewer chord changes with emphasis on groove. He added John McLaughlin on electric guitar and Chick Corea on keyboards and started recording the monumental album Bitches Brew in the same year. This brought together the worlds of Rock and Jazz and featured extended improvisations in the studio all mixed together in an epic two-record set that was to be hugely successful and influential on the future of both Jazz and Rock. Here is a video of Miles performing this new music in 1969.
This album went on to influence many new fusion groups like Return to Forever, seen here performing "500 Miles High" in 1972.
Although the music of Frank Zappa can't really be categorized, Zappa dabbled in Fusion through his career. Here he is performing "King Kong" with the Mothers of Invention in 1968.
Some people have called Zappa's music Art Rock, although he hated that term, because of it ambitious nature and compositional complexity. Here is one of the most difficult pieces to play in all of Rock, "The Black Page," so named because of all the notes. Here we see Zappa on his last tour in 1988 with a full big band filled with virtuoso musicians that could play his music perfectly. Your teacher saw this tour when it came to Portland.
In the 7os, we begin to see Rock being influenced by many different styles of music including Classical. The Moody Blues' concept album Days of Future Past, was a song cycle about one day, from morning until evening. It has a narrator that guides us through the album, recalling Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf . The album also features an orchestra backing the band. Here is "Nights in White Satin" from that album:
The Who was the first Rock band to write a Rock Opera. Tommy was a three record set that told the story of a deaf and blind boy who becomes a Christ-like figure to his followers. Pete Townsend wrote the music as a comment on the celebrity and influence of Rock stars. Here is clip from 1970 of The Who playing "Pinball Wizard" at the Isle of Wight Festival where the band performed the entire album. Townsend claimed the studio was never able to capture the excitement of a live Who performance.
The idea of the "concept" album was perfected by Pink Floyd, who released several concept albums including Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall and The Final Cut. Pink Floyd's masterpiece was Dark Side of the Moon, an album as renowned for its studio brilliance as well as its excellent music and thought provoking lyrics. Here is link to a video of the entire album played live in 1994. It should listened to as one long work, like a symphony.
The restrictions that defined something as Rock or Jazz were slowly falling away by the 70s and Rock was now being looked at as something beyond entertainment for teenagers. Rock had grown up and so had its audience, leading to a movement called Art Rock. Groups like King Crimson, Genesis and Gentle Giant created ambitious albums that featured long, epic songs, sometimes lasting four sides of an album. Emerson, Lake and Palmer released Brain Salad Surgery 1973, which featured a huge variety of styles and extended instrumental sections throughout the album. This was virtuoso music played by masters of their instruments and it was music best enjoyed with headphones in the dark. Here the band performs their arrangement of two movements from Russian classical composer Modest Mussorgsky's orchestral tone poem Pictures at an Exhibition.
Here is the original.
"The Gnome" original:
And now ELP's take:
Artists like Carlos Santana straddled the line between Jazz and Rock, playing what became known as Jazz Rock. Here is Santana playing "Black Magic Woman"
The first Heavy Metal Bands actually considered themselves to be amplified Blues bands.We heard from Led Zeppelin earlier in the semester but Black Sabbath was the first true Heavy Metal band, with their covers that looked like horror movies and their dark lyrics about war, the Devil and drugs. Ozzy Osborne considered songs like "Lord of this World" and "Iron Man" to be religious songs that were pro-Christian, but with a name like Black Sabbath they soon became hated by parents everywhere and accused of being Satanists. Here is the anti-war classic "War Pigs."
People like Alice Cooper and David Bowie started to treat their concerts like vaudeville shows and played characters with full make up and acted out scenarios. Alice Cooper claimed that "Alice" was a person who came out on stage and was not him. David Bowie toured as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, an androgynous fictional rock star. He later would appear as The Thin White Duke. This was Glam Rock. Here is David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust in 1973:
KISS took this to the extreme. All members wore makeup and played fictional characters, the Demon, the Star, the Cat and the Spaceman. For many years, the group would not allow themselves to be photographed without makeup. Here they are performing "Shout It Out Loud" from their best album Destroyer.
Rock had become big business with huge stadiums and football arenas selling out for mega-acts that put on huge shows with light shows, and very loud sound for fanatic fans.
Disco was a new type of dance music that became a huge but brief fad in the mid-1970s. Hated by the hard-core rockers and loved by the people that danced to it, Disco seemed to take over everything and threaten the future of Rock, with groups like The Rolling Stones and KISS and roots rockers like Rod Stewart all recording Disco tunes to get them on the radio. The Bee Gees, who started out as folk rockers, were by far the most successful of these Disco acts. With the release of Saturday Night Fever in theaters in 1977, Disco music exploded into a national sensation. Here is the opening scene of that movie, featuring John Travolta stylishly walking to the hit "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees.
...and another scene featuring Travolta dancing to "You Should Be Dancing:"
Not everyone was thrilled with Disco, Glam Rock and Art Rock. Many people thought Rock was losing its edgy roots and becoming too slick for its own good. The Punks were about to have their say and it wasn't going to be pretty...well, maybe "Pretty Vacant"....
Smile, and take this week's Music quiz.
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