Jazz rock emerged from the late 1960's fusion of Miles Davis style hard bop and the more progressive elements of rock, epitomised by the eclectic sounds of Weather Report, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Blood, Sweat And Tears and Chick Corea. If these were the genre's early mainstream, Santana's laid-back Latin American sound was a popular offshoot. Less successful, although highly regarded, were Tim Buckley's experiments with the idiom from a folk rock perspective before his early death in 1975, a path also followed by Joni Mitchell, culminating in her acclaimed MINGUS album of 1979.

As happened to so much other music in the 1970's jazz rock's mainstream slipped into stylised commercial mediocrity, losing it's experimental edge, a move begun by artists like George Benson and Chuck Mangione and continued in the 1980's and beyond by Kenny G. Far more challenging and interesting was the 1970's studio jazz rock.. sometimes labelled 'yacht rock'.. of Donald Fagen & Walter Becker's Steely Dan, who brought a level of sophistication and perfectionism rarely if ever encountered before to rock music, drawing on many areas of popular music, jazz and literature for their unique aura.

The avante-garde mainstream, if such a thing exists, was the realm of Frank Zappa from the late 1960's onward. Zappa approached rock from the direction of the experimental avante-garde of the 1950's, but his influences were so diverse that his strange concoctions, a melange of jazz-rock and classical with a blob or two of doo-wop and a huge dollop of satire, defy meaningful categorisation. Zappa proved to some extent that experimental artists do not necessarily have to make concessions in order to gain wider acceptance, and this has been confirmed by the international popularity of the Pat Metheny Group, who have managed to remain accessible to a wide audience while simultaneously stretching the boundaries of the jazz rock genre.

{back}      {next}     {back to modern rock}