Jazz-Rock 7
Following Miles Davis's Bitches Brew success-it was the number one selling jazz album in 1970 in Billboard Magazine-The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report became the most successful jazz groups of the 1970s. Yet critics of jazz-rock claimed that by adopting the trappings of rock, jazz-rock musicians had "sold out" the artistic virtues of jazz to win that success. The so-called jazz neoclassicists claimed that jazz-rock had forsaken the progress made by jazz in establishing an American musical art worthy of being considered "America's classical music." These critics wielded significant influence during the 1980s and 1990s and were most often associated with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and music critic Stanley Crouch. Speaking of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew in a 1990 article in The New Republic, Crouch commented that "[Davis] was intimidated into mining the fool's gold of rock 'n' roll.'" To Crouch, Bitches Brew put Davis "firmly on the path of the sell-out," and his "desire to be perceived as the hippest of the hip has destroyed his powers of communication" (Crouch 1990). Of course, jazz had enjoyed earlier periods of immense popularity, but that was before the bebop sea change of the 1940s, during which jazz adopted its posture as an art form that stood above the commercial fray.
Soul-jazz predates jazz-rock, with the earliest examples from the early 1960s. Soul-jazz incorporated the heavy back-beat rhythms, blues form, and gospel musical gestures typical of early soul music. Notable early proponents of soul-jazz include Jimmy Smith (organ), Ramsey Lewis, Ahmad Jahmal, and Herbie Hancock (piano), and George Benson (guitar). As jazz musicians started experimenting with instrumental funk music in the early 1970s, they created jazz-funk. The new style included improvised solo passages, funk-oriented riff-based bass lines, static harmonies, and the staccato instrumental articulations typical of mainstream funk artists such as James Brown and George Clinton. The seminal jazz-funk recording is Herbie Hancock's 1973 album Head Hunters. However, these and other performers at the time did not regard themselves solely as soul-jazz or jazz-funk artists but instead had songs later categorized as one or the other. Therefore, we should consider jazz-rock as distinct from soul-jazz and jazz-funk.