The Rock Explosion

At the end of the sixties, strengthened by his quintet's experiments, Miles Davis was ripe for bringing himself before rock and its immense audience.

Miles Davis as a Rocker?

A fusion of country music and black rock and roll (derived from boogie), rock was created by white artists in the mid-fifties. Over the next decade, it adopted the effective rhythm sections of rhythm and blues and profited by carrying soul and other types of American music forward. At the same time it received support from new recording and production methods and made use of the electric instruments that had appeared with the urban blues.

Jimi Hendrix onstage, Woodstock 1969

Instrumental performances became increasingly important not only with rock - leading to the appearance of 'guitar heroes' - but also with the transformation of musical forms. In the late sixties, 'rockers' invaded realms hitherto reserved for better-informed kinds of music, such as classical, jazz and certain types of traditional non-European music.

After this point rock could be played for extended periods, and huge sound systems were installed, making enormous outdoor concerts possible.

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Insect and Pygmies

With the use of technology, insect sounds and Pygmy choirs have been pirated and injected into recordings. One would be tempted to say that through these high-tech means jazz is rediscovering cultural appropriation - its first function.

Chieli Minucci & Special EFX

Indeed, by the end of the eighties  there was more appropriation than ever before, in both acoustic and electric jazz. Jazz musicians have picked up and assimilated everything that has presented itself. This is what one might call a real fusion music.

With Computer Software like this (DAW - Digital Audio Workstation), audio can be recorded, edited, manipulated as a normal as an analog/tape  recorder usually does or as crazy as somebodies creativity might imagine

The old standards and conventions of classical jazz are now only a part of a much large heritage - classical music, urban and rural traditions, academic music and music of the streets, rock and country, free jazz and various other sounds which is being looked at, borrowed from and generally shaken up.

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