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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A Power Intact

Did jazz die in the eighties? Maybe it died years earlier, with Ornette Coleman, Gill Evans, Charlie Parker, or even, simply, the minute it left New Orleans. All this is surely debatable. But the only fact that matters is this: the explosion of black American music at the beginning of the century has turned the history of music upside down.

Randy Brecker

 The immense musical river that set off from New Orleans has spawned numerous tributaries and today has arrived at its delta. Some of its large streams have got lost. In this decompartmentalized, cosmopolitan and multicoloured space, the standard-bearers of jazz have disappeared. They have left room for a permissiveness and a wild variety of individual styles, all carried by the impulse that was called swing in the thirties, which, in diversifying, has lost  none of its power.

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The Quest For And Rejection Of Memory

Two kids paradoxical and complementary approaches were at work in what was called,in a failure of nerve, 'European improvised music', rather than jazz. For some, who turned their backs on the essence of jazz, it was a question of tracking down the phenomenon of memory in order to free themselves from it and help them move away from the rigours of the battlefield of improvisation, many European improvisers were deeply concerned with their heritage.

Han Bennink on Pan Drum

Willem Breuker and Han Bennink

  If cultural references were the object of devastating derision for the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the German saxophone player Peter Brotzmann, they called forth tender impulses from Michel Portal when he grabbed the silvery bandonion (a South American accordion) or evoked his Basque origins.

Peter Brotzmann

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How It Become Bebop (opening)

Evolved in part from spirituals sung by slaves, jazz is the only truly American musical form. It was created by blacks, for blacks. For years, it was considered to be mere entertainment, but with the advent of bebop in the 1940s, young jazz musicians joined the avant-garde: bop opened the door to modern jazz, the privileged expression of a growing number of artists, strangers to its origins.

Manhattan 52nd Street Sign

In the small clubs of Manhattan's 52nd Street, small experimental bebop groups revolutionized jazz. At the time, New York was the capital of the artistic avant-garde , of intellectual excitement. Literature, theater and painting were being enthusiastically discussed in the city's living rooms.

However, the arranger Gil Evans, recently arrived in New York to rally for the cause of bebop, did not have a living room. One simple room near 52nd Street was enough for him, and it attached a crowd, day and night. The leaders of black music gathered around a turntable there, playing recordings of sax players Lester young and Charlie Parker as well as such European composers as Alban Berg and Maurice Ravel. They met in that room to listen and to talk with each other - and with young white musicians as well.

By the 1940s jazz was no longer the exclusive property of the African-American community. Bop made jazz into a language accessible to all musicians and music lovers in search of a well-informed mode of expression that was free and more physical than Western classical music.

Manhattan's 52nd Street Night View of 1949

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