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Avant-garde jazz (The development of jazz 4/11)

Leon Zernitsky: Free Jazz

Avant-garde jazz developed from the mid-50’s and was mostly called free jazz from the 70s onwards. Avant-garde is an originally military term that, in the world of art refers to deliberately breaking existing norms. This is often done to experiment, to stand up to other artists or to make a political statement. 

Anyone hearing avant-garde jazz for the first time is likely to be confused, if not averse.  In that case, it is important to remember that all art forms have avant-garde. Some examples of classically oriented avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass. Listening to their compositions helps to get a first idea of this kind of music and perhaps to begin appreciating it.  Therefore, here you can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s composition ‘Gruppen’ (1955 – 1957), played by Ensemble Intercontemporain, which consists of no less than three orchestras. 

Already somewhat used to avant-garde music? Now you listen to what this genre sounds like in jazz. But first this. We tend to appreciate music most that we recognise.  This usually involves melody, meter (3/4 or 4/4), rhythm and structure (stanza/refrain). The creators of this music employ an ‘idiom’, just as every language has its own idiom. The better you know that idiom, the easier it is to speak that language or be able to bring home and appreciate that music.  Sometimes you will sing along with a song even if you have only heard it once.

Avant-garde artists got rid of the idiom they had become accustomed to in previous years. They looked for other ways to organise ‘sounds’. This primarily involved the expression express of their own mood or an abstract idea.

Features

– The tempo can vary or be pulsed. Regularly slowing down and speeding up gives the impression that the music is moving like a wave.

– Rhythm can change constantly, sometimes along with changes in pace. 

– Different time signatures are used simultaneously (polyrhythmic)

– Free jazz is often atonal rather than using a fixed key. 

– Band members often improvise at the same time (collective improvisation).

– Identical lines are often played simultaneously, where tempo and timbre may differ (contrapuntal interaction)

– Using chromatic scales (all 12 tones of an octave are used) and microtonality (pitch differences of a quarter or less)

– Abandoning fixed chord progressions

– Chords can be placed under any note to accentuate it, regardless of the meter.

– Many practitioners have a fascination with earlier jazz styles, such as dixieland with its collective improvisation, with African music and more broadly with world music. 

– Sometimes they would play African or Asian instruments or invent their own ones.

The idiom of free jazz is thus much less pre-given and thus offers the listener little to hold on to. This is precisely what makes free jazz attractive to fans.

Forerunners

One of the first musicians to use atonal improvisation in his compositions was Lennie Tristan. In “Intuition” (1950), only the order in which the musicians participate in ensemble playing and its timing are predetermined. Key, beat, tempo, melody or rhythm were left open. Contrapuntal interaction was used as a means of maintaining cohesion. Appreciation among fellow musicians varied. Charlie Parker who was always open to innovation was enthusiastic, others found it too avant-garde and doubted whether this kind of work could ever become popular.

In 1953, he released “Descent into the Maelstrom”. It was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same title and consisted of an improvised piano solo, using multitracking (superimposing several recordings), which had no preconceived harmonic structure. Instead, he built on a series of motifs. You can listen to this work here:

You can now watch and listen to “City of Glass”, written in 1948 by Bob Graettinger for the Stan Kenton band. It is a four-voice piece that in one long movement “narrates”) the contents of a poem (tone poem).

It is characterised by polyphonic and atonal intensity. The composition was fully in line with Stan Kenton’s aspiration to play ‘progressive’ jazz to be listened to in a concert hall, thus bridging the gap between (avant-garde) jazz and classical music.

The composition is performed here by David Kweksilber Bigband in Amsterdam (2013)

In the late 50s, Ornette Coleman, Albert Aylor, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sun Ra, among others, applied their own accent. I highlight some of these artists.

Ornette Coleman

The term “free jazz” comes from Ornette Coleman‘s 1961 album “Free Jazz, a collective improvisation”. Earlier albums were “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and “Change of the Century” (1959).

“Free Jazz, a collective improvisation” lasts 37 minutes, which at the time was the longest recording of a jazz song ever. The piece was recorded with two quartets, each having its own stereo channel. Both quartets played simultaneously, with the two rhythm sections laying a dense rhythmic foundation for the horns soloing, interspersed with pre-composed passages. These passages consist of short and dissonant interplay between solos. You can listen to it now. 

Coleman has continued to experiment into the 21ste century, increasingly using electronic instruments. His pallet of styles has broadened considerably. On this recording, he plays the song Song X with Pat Metheny, in pronounced free jazz style (1985). Herehe plays Virgin Beauty (1980), which seems more like a free form of cool jazz. He is the second jazz musician after Wynton Marsalis to receive the Pulitzer Prize.

Albert Ayler

Albert Ayler was one of the most important composers and performers during in the early days of free jazz. At the beginning of his career as a bebop tenor saxophonist in Scandinavia, he had already begun to push the boundaries of tonal jazz and blues to their harmonic limits. He began collaborating with free jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor in 1962. 

One of Ayler’s most important free jazz songs is “Spiritual Unity (1964). You can listen to that here. The song is played here by Marc Ribot at the Vision Festival XI on 19 June 2007.

Timbre is the backbone of his playing rather than harmony and melody.  His ecstatic music as “Ghosts” (1964) and “Spirits Rejoice” (1965), included simple, themes interspersed with group improvisations. 

Ayler stretched the jazz idiom to its limits and many of his compositions hardly resemble jazz of the past. He exploited the possibilities of microtonal improvisation. This involves reducing the distance between notes. By tinkering with his saxophone, he was able to achieve polyphonic effects. 

Cecil Taylor

As a classically trained musician, Taylor was particularly influenced by European avant-garde composers such as Bela Bartók and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His piano playing was influenced by Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver, who play a key role in Taylor’s later unconventional use of the piano. This sounds like 88-tuned drums. 

The composition “Unit Structures” (1966) marks his transition to free jazz. He made hardly any use of scores, time signatures and harmonic progressions. The work is complex and has a rich timbre. The two bassists make varied contributions to the whole. One provides the driving force; the other is volatile and mysterious. You can listen to the composition here.

John Coltrane

Coltrane’s most work belongs to the post-bop genre. His record “Ascention” (1965) shows his appreciation of free jazz. On this record, Coltrane expanded his quartet to include six hornsplayers, including Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders.[8]:   The composition features free solo improvisation. One of the hallmarks of Pharoah Sanders’ and John Coltrane’s playing on this record is overblowing.

Sun Ra

Much of Sun Ra’s music can be classified as free jazz, especially his work from the 1960s. His earlier work was more melodic in nature, but even after that time, many works have a hybrid character, with elements of ragtime, swing, bebop and fusion. His work “The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra” (1966) was characterised as black mysticism. Many compositions were created while experimenting and improvising in the studio. 

Sun Ra has recorded more than 100 albums. He also performed frequently. His success was limited to a small group of followers. You can watch a recent performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra (2022) here. Sun Ra died in 1993 at the age of 79.

Elements of free jazz have blended with other styles and genres over the years, whose diversity has also increased as a result.

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Bebop and cool jazz (The development of jazz 3/11)

Stan Getz and Chet Baker (1983)

Band members had been drafted into the army and they were replaced by young players, like Stan Getz, who was still a teenager, dance venues had to pay more entertainment taxes and closed their doors, and conflicts arose over royalties. But more importantly, a growing number of musicians were dissatisfied with the commercially motivated artistic demise of (big band) jazz.

Dissatisfaction with mainstream jazz

The music they made was not for dancing, but for listening (“musicians’ music”). They established small ensembles, usually consisting of saxophone (alto or tenor), trumpet, piano, guitar, double bass and drums. This musical development . I’ll show you an example of what it sounded like. It is Allen’s Ally (song by Coleman Hawkins (1946) played by Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt in 1958

Characteristics of bebop

Practitioners of bebop set high artistic standards and had to be proficient with their instrument. The main characteristics of bebop are:

 – A piece of music has a wider collection of sounds than a usual melody line. 

– The sequence of notes forms a complex pattern, dissonances were not shunned.

– The tempo is fast; sometimes up to 200 counts per minute. Go dance to that!

– The rhythm section often connects the different improvisations, or they flow into each other through a kind of dialogue.

– Starting points for new songs are sometimes themes borrowed from existing pieces of music extended with complex harmonies.

– The original theme is often played at the beginning and at the end, with improvisations by all band members alternating in between. 

Artists

Key figures of this genre included alto saxophonist Charlie Parker; tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and James Moody; clarinetist Buddy DeFranco; trumpeters Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie; pianists Bud Powell, Barry Harris and Thelonious Monk; electric guitarist Charlie Christian; and drummers Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Art Blakey.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded one of the first bebop records with the Billy Beckstine Orchestra in 1944. You can still hear many features of big band jazz in this, but the melody is more complicated.

Jazz standards

Standards composed by bebop musicians include: Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” (1941) and “A Night in Tunisia” (1942; recording 1981), Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” (1946) and “Scrapple  from  the Apple” (1947), and Monk’s “‘Round Midnight“, currently the most recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. You can listen here to Parker’s “Anthropologie” (1946), played by the NDR big band in 2020, Parker’s 100ste birthday.

Audience reception

The prevailing opinion of the public was that bebop no longer is music, which you listen to with pleasure, but consisted of runaway, nervous, erratic and often fragmented sounds, in which hardly any melody can be recognised. Nor did most jazz musicians see in bebop the promised restoration of the artistic level of jazz. After all, listeners need to experience artistry, and artistry is much more than virtuosity.

From bebop to cool jazz 

Charlie Parker and Miles Davis performed together as bebop musicians from 1944 – 1948, but Miles Davis began to feel increasingly uneasy with the songs they were playing. He formed a band of his own and experimented for two years with like-minded colleague. They felt that their music should contain a rich palette of harmonies. The sounds of the wind instruments had to blend rather than oppose each other. They also reduced the tempo. Eventually, this experimentation did lead to a trend-setting album, “The birth of the cool”, in 1957.  The recordings were made by a ‘nonet’ (a nine-piece band). The full recording of this album can be listened to here. Below you will find a recording of one of the songs, “Venus of Milo” composed by Gerry Mulligan, played by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band.

Characteristics of cool jazz

– The pieces are more strongly arranged and contain less improvisation than was the case with bebop.

– As with bebop, existing themes are often starting points; they are sometimes borrowed from classical works.

– Nervous energy and tension of bebop gives way to a tendency towards calmness and softness through the choice of long, linear melodic lines.

– The interplay of instruments is mainly focused harmony, rather than melody.

– Strives for brighter tones, subtlety and learning from other musical genres.

Chet Baker

Chat Baker, singer and trumpeter, is considered a great innovator within cool jazz and was dubbed the “Prince of Cool” for it. He joined Gerry Mulligan’s quartet in 1952. They developed a unique style: Instead of playing identical melody lines as solos, both complemented each other by anticipating what the other was going to play. He also received rave reviews in the 1950s for his singing, for instance here on his record “It could happen to you” (1958) 

His musical career was erratic (see the episode dedicated to him in this series) and was interrupted by long periods of drug addiction and imprisonment. He picked up his career again in late 1970.

Top of the list of 1930s jazz standards is the song “My Funny Valantine”, from the musical “Babes”. This song appears on more than 1,300 albums and has been performed by 600 different artists. One of the most intriguing versions is Chat Baker’s (1987) one year before his death. You can listen to this one now.

Modern Jazz Quartet

A special contribution to the development of cool jazz was made by the Modern Jazz Quartet, also because of its unusual composition: piano, vibraphone, bass and drums.  The four original members formed the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s band in the late 1940s. This group created its own niche in the cool jazz movement. They played elegant, understated music that often involved classical fugues.  You can hear that here in the 1956 song Django on the album of the same name, named after Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. 

Others who contributed to cool jazz were Dave Brubeck, Bill & Gill Evans, Stan Getz and John Coltrane. Charlie Parker also started playing more melodically in the 1950s 

On the following episodes

From the 1950s, the number variants within and between  genres increased. The coming episode of this series  will deal with three trends, some of which occurred and are still occurring in parallel, each encompassing different genres. The first is the creation of music with a minimum of melodic and harmonic conventions. We then speak of avant-garde or free jazz (issue 4/11). The second is seeking enrichment through crossovers to other musical styles, ranging from pop, blues, funk, hip hop and others. We summarise this under the name fusion (episode 5/11). The third trend is the search for the assumed true nature of jazz. I summarise these attempts under the name back to basics (episode 6/11). 

Incidentally, you will come across some musicians in every genre. These are musicians who constantly sought innovation such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

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Swing (The development of jazz 2/11)

By the late 1920s, jazz had become commonplace. Jazz became dance music more than before. Besides pubs and speakeasies, the venues shifted to ballrooms, theatres and cabarets. In the 1930s, numerous big bands emerged in the US and in Europe, all trying to gather the best soloists. Even today, the names of the band leaders have a familiar sound: Count Basie, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and, of course, Glenn Miller. To get in the mood, you can listen to a swinging Count Basie and his orchestra with the “One O’clock Jump” (1960).

What distinguishes swing from old jazz?

Swing usually replaces of two beats per measure, typical of old jazz (ta – ta – ) with four, with the last beat getting an extra accent (ta, ta, ta, pom).  Beats thus follow each other at a much faster pace. Technically, this was made possible by replacing the sousaphone with the double bass. This makes swing sound more fluidly than Dixieland music. 

The saxophone supplanted the role of the trumpet as a solo instrument. Moreover, the saxophone section often carried the melody, while the (slide)trumpets provided melodic accents. The rhythm section also played a more important role than in Dixieland music. For the first time, there were solos on percussion. Most bands replaced the raw sound of the banjo with the softer sounds of the guitar. Experienced arrangers contributed to the timbre, but experienced band members provided the difference through their improvisations. 

You can hear that here in the swinging performance of “Suger Foot Stomp” by Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra (1926). The difference with old jazz is evident when you compare this recording here with a recording of the same song also by Henderson’s orchestra from 1920.

Dance music

The swing era produced many songs that can still be heard somewhere to this day.  Listen to “It Don’t Mean A Thing” (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) played by ‘Duke’ Ellington’s band and sung by the first lady of song Ella Fitzgerald (1965).

Especially for the younger, swing was dance music par excellence. This also prompted the spread of Lindy hop, a dance style that is still practiced today. The name was derived from the aviator Charles Lindbergh who had taken a solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927, gaining great popularity. The style was somewhere between Charleston and breakdance with a touch of acrobatics. In the following recording of “In The Mood” from the film Hollywood Hotel (1937), you can hear the ‘hot swing’ of Benny Goodman’s band and the virtuoso drumming of Gene Krupa, and you can also admire samples of the Lindy hop.

Between ‘hot’ and ‘sweet’ swing

Gradually, big bands’ repertoire began to include more than swinging dance music. This was because big bands played not only in ballrooms but also in revues and musicals. Also, big bands increasingly became accompanying orchestras of vocalists, such as Ella Fitzgerard, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, who had a varied repertoire. Besides ‘hot swing’, they therefore played ‘sweet swing’, which was quieter and geared towards the older age group. This group distanced itselves from jazz because of its often complex improvisations, high tempo, wild dancing and sometimes daring lyrics. But several musicians also condemned the commercial and musical excesses of swing and returned to the old jazz. Tension between music as a form of entertainment and art form is something of all times.

Numerous jazz standards

As was the case with Dixieland music, the swing period produced many jazz standards (characteristic songs). Some you have already been able to listen to; a few others are: “Begin the Beguine“, “Chattanooga Choo Choo“, “King Porter Stomp“, “Sing, Sing, Sing“, “Body and Soul” and “Caravan“.  A full list can be found here. There is no point in listing the performers as they have been in the repertoire of many dozens of bands, singers or vocalists.

The imminent end of the swing era….

After 1940, things gradually went downhill for the big bands, many performers had to enlist and, because of war funding, the government increased the entertainment tax for all dance venues. Moreover, the musicians won a long-running case over their share of record sales. The cost of a big band became too high, and bands disbanded. Some of the musicians started looking for new ways.  In their opinion, both the compositions of hot and sweet swing were increasingly driven by commercial considerations. They wanted to restore jazz as an art form. That is what my next post is about. 

….. But not for good

Big bands and swing music made several comebacks. The bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, which advertised themselves as progressive jazz, retained plenty of fans, thanks to their innovative arrangements and high-level soloists such as Stan Getz. Many radio and television stations established their own big bands to accompany singers. In the Netherlands, the Ramblers occupy a special position among these.  Founded in 1926, the Ramblers became VARA’s house orchestra in 1964. After the dissolution of the VARA dance orchestra in 1974, the name Ramblers was reinstated and became the house orchestra of the TROS.  Here you can watch a promo of this almost 100-year-old orchestra, which, like many similar former big bands, has significantly broadened its repertoire.

The renewed popularity of Duke Ellington’s band is partly due to its performance at the 1956 Newport jazz festival. Due to circumstances, the band started hours late. On the programme was Ellington’s composition “Crescendo & Diminuendo in Blue”. A piece consisting of two parts, connected by a short solo by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. At the beginning of the solo, a woman started dancing in the aisle, soon hundreds of other audience members followed. Thousands more stood up and began rhythmically clapping along and encouraging the soloist. Ellington let Gonsalves play on for six minutes, which set one of the best improvisations in jazz ever. The audience was delirious and when the song finally ended, a minute-long standing ovation followed and album sales jumped. The ‘Duke’ uttered the legendary words, “Today I was born”. You can listen to the entire performance below; the audience’s reactions are less audible in this filming. For that, you can listen to a radio recording of the entire song here, with textual commentary on the performance. 

Swing into the 21ste century

Gipsy swing or jazz manouche is the only in Europe variant within the genre of swing. Founders were jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and they became famous with the Quintette du Hot Club de France. Interest in this style waned when the swing era came to an end, but from the 1970s d the appreciation returned in full and many French children nowadays often learn to play gipsy jazz at an early age. Incidentally, there are at least a hundred bands playing jazz manouche in the Netherlands, united in the Stichting Hotclub de France.

In the post-1990 period, swing revived worldwide, albeit with fewer personnel on stage. Bands like Royal Crown Revue and Lavay Smith, performed old or new songs in the original style. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Caravan Palace, added a touch of rock and ska to their swing performance. With Caravan Palace – a French group – that’s a good dash of gipsy swing. Each of these bands is worth a listen. 

I invite you to listen to one of the many contemporary bands playing the original gipsy swing, in this case the jazz standard “Minor Swing” composed by Django Reinhardt and performed by the Saint Andreu Jazz Band (2013).

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Old jazz (The development of jazz 1/11)

Drawing by F. Bildstein, cover of The Mascot from 1890. Public domain 

What is now called ‘old jazz’ – still alive and kicking – originated in New Orleans in the late 19 century. Jazz evolved from genres that already came into being within the Afro-American communities, such as worksongs, boogie woogie, ragtime and spirituals. Other genres, par example marches and hymns had primarily a European background. 

To begin with, you will hear the Dixieland classic “One step” played by the Dutch Swing College Band (1974).

In North America and in South America and the Caribbean, contacts between populations originating from Africa and from Europe resulted in a variety of musical style. I limit myself to the first region. In doing so, six genres are highlighted: old jazz, swing, bebop, ‘cool’, ‘fusion’ and free jazz. To this day, they have practitioners and enthusiasts. In addition to six posts dedicated to each genre, you are acknowledged with five leading musicians, bandleaders and composers: Louis Armstrong, ‘Duke’ Ellington, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillepsie and John Coltrane.

Characteristics of jazz

The following five characteristics can be found in almost all genres of jazz, developed to date:

  • Collective participation: While jazz music is often (partly) written out, musicians have a relatively large amount of freedom.
  • Improvisation: Written jazz music almost always allows room for improvisation, sometimes by soloists but often also by other orchestra members.
  • Antiphony: Members of an orchestra respond to each other, either by arrangement, or while improvising.
  • Polyphony: A piece of music combines different, sometimes contrasting melody lines.
  • Polyrhythmic: Sometimes a song consists of several successively or simultaneously occurring rhythmic lines.

The forerunners

From the second half of the 19 century, there are several ‘precursors’, for example the New Orleans-based Louis Gottschalk who composed in 1853 the musical piece “The banjo: grotesque fantasy”. 

New Orleans would become the mecca of old-time jazz from the end of the 19 century. One reason was that many freed slaves settled in in this town after the abolition of slavery. Every café or brothel had a band playing. The first band was called the “Original Dixieland Jass Band”, but ‘jass’ soon became ‘jazz’, which means something like ‘bunch of jerks’. This name came from that part of the population that disliked jazz (see print above). Musicians considered it as a nickname. In 1925 released the first jazz record, the ‘Livery Stable Blues’. Listen to it  here. What this song sounds like 100 years later can be heard here. Better sound quality, but otherwise the same. In 2006, Jelly Roll Morton composed the “Jelly Roll Blues”. You can hear a version from 1926, played by his then band, the ‘Red Hot Peppers’, here. 

Dance orchestras

The instruments you see and hear here can be found to this day in Dixieland bands. ‘Dixieland’ is a nickname for the southern US.  The word is derived from the French word ‘dix'(10), which appeared on banknotes circulating in the area during the Civil War. In time, many jazz musicians from New Orleans moved to Chicago and later New York, or crossed the ocean to Europe, where old jazz also flourished. So did the ‘Original Dixieland Jazz Band’ and it created a jazz craze in Britain. 

Louis Armstrong also began his career in New Orleans, where his virtuosity on the trumpet distinguished him. He did have to scrape together his living, first at the age of 12 as a street musician. Later he played in various orchestras. At the invitation of his mentor King Oliver, he left for Chicago at the age of 22, where he played the trumpet in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and earned well. You can listen to the first record of this band (1923)

Young people in the 1920s saw jazz as a means of rebelling against the older generation. Young women dressed in ‘flapper fashion, smoked in public, danced the Charleston and talked freely about sex. The ‘prohibition’ in the US contributed to the spread of jazz also. ‘Speakeasies’, well-hidden pubs and cabarets where live music was everywhere, sprang up almost in every street. For many older people jazz equaled moral decay in the first place. 

Jazz was becoming less and less an exclusive affair for black people. ‘White’ Paul Whiteman became top bandleader in the 1920s and he hired Bix Beiderbecke and brothers Jimmy and Frankie Dorsey, among others; musicians who would go on to make a big name for themselves. You can now listen to a recording of his band from 1925.

The same Paul Whiteman had commissioned George Gershwin to write the “Rhapsody in Blue, which his orchestra would premiere. You can listen to this orchestral work here, in a performance by the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein (1976)

Marching bands

In addition to the dance orchestras, marching bands graced every celebration. This custom lives on to this day. Whether it was a funeral or wedding, groups of 10 to 15 musicians would move along in the procession at a slow pace, followed by a dancing crowd. This practice was not always appreciated too. Watch a funeral procession with the New Orleans Traditional Band here.

Some of these bands became famous and performed outside New Orleans. For example, the Eureka Brass Band, the Tuxedo Brass Band (1958), the Treme Brass Band (2013) and the Olympia Brass Band (2009). Some contemporary New Orleans Brass Bands, such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and the Rebirth Brass Band combine Dixieland music with influences from funk, hip hop and rap. You can watch and listen to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band during a performance on stage.

Sustained popularity

The Dixieland craze lasted until the early 1930s, but the genre remained popular. In the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong’s Allstars band became a leading orchestra. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland music was one of the most popular jazz styles in the US and abroad. It was a reaction to polished big band swing and complex bebop, which will be discussed later. Musicians were partly older musicians who had started their careers with old jazz. But also young musicians, such as the Lu Waters Band, Ward Kimball and his Firehouse five plus two and Conrad Janis and his Tallgate jazz band. 

Music critics have made lists of all genres of music that include the most listened, loved, covered songs. You’d be amazed at how many songs that almost everyone knows today stem from this period, such as “When the Saints Go Marching In”, “Charleston”, “Tiger Rag”, “Basin Street Blues”, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, “Tea for two”, “Crazy rithm”, “Bye Bye blackbird”, “Mack the knive”, “At the Jazz Band Ball , “I Found a New Baby”, “Ain’t misbehavin'” and many others. A full list of jazz standards from the pre-1930 period can be found here.

I finish with an old hand: Louis Armstrong playing and singing “When The Saints Go Marching In”.

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1990s: ‘Alternative rock’ (History of rock after 1960 6/6)

Record companies started to apply the term ‘new wave’ as a label to groups they wanted to promote as an alternative for punk rock. Music critics rather speak of ‘alternative rock’ – or ‘alt-rock’ – an umbrella term for all music they consider more original, challenging, or experimental than the musical ‘mainstream’. Unlike ‘art-rock’, it is about music that makes audiences dance and sing along, and bands that fans can identify with. R.E.M. is an example, as well as Nirvana, Pearl jam, Red hot chili peppers, Pixies, Cure and Green day’ who all figured in the alt-rock boom in the 1990s and later. Here R.E.M. sings ‘The one I love’. 

Grunch

Another recognisable style developed under the alt-rock umbrella, namely ‘grunge’, with the city of Seattle at its epicentre. Nirvana’s ‘Smells like teen spirit’ on the album Nevermind marked the beginning of this genre.  Listen to singer Kurt Cobain in the song ‘About a girl’ here. I choose an ‘unplugged’ version to illustrate Kurt’s musical prowess. 

Grunge, like punk, was a reaction to the commercialisation of pop music. Grunge refers to the ‘raw’ sound of the music, sometimes also the result of the amateurish nature of the recordings. Grunch combines elements of post-punk and heavy metal. Most songs are introspective, melodic and have a melancholic undertone. Whatever you call the genre, the musical level towers above that of most famous (or infamous) punk groups.

Grunge may be a reaction to the commercialisation of pop music, but the genre also unintentionally contributed to it through its (cash) success. Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana also known as the voice of generation X, was uncomfortable with this. We don’t know if this led to the fatal self-inflicted shot that ended his life. 

Under the predictable rubric of ‘post-grunge’, bands like Bush and Candlebox imitated the sound of Nirvana. Other post-grunge bands in the early 20ste century included Queens of the stone age, 3 Doors down, Foo Fighters, Nickelback and Matchbox Twenty. Alanis Morissette is one of the female solo artists within the genre. Form your own picture by clicking on the links. Listen here to Queens of the stone age with ‘Go with the flow’.

Britpop

Grunge was a predominantly American phenomenon, and as a reaction to the pessimism of grunge, another form of alt-rock developed in Britain, namely Britpop, fronted by bands such as Blur and Oasis. Oasis’ album ‘(What is the story) Morning glory’ (1995) was the third best-selling album in British history. Listen to Oasis’ song Wonderwall here

Of course, several groups also resisted the fact that these two groups defined the image of Britpop. Examples include Radiohead, Travis and Coldplay. In their turn, they used the label – how could it be otherwise – post-Britpop.  Listen here to Radiohead’s ‘Karma police’, a good example of the broad genre of ‘alt-rock’ because it is more original, challenging and experimental than the musical ‘mainstream’, however you name it.

Rock versus pop

This gives cause to reflect on the terms rock and pop music. Rock artists generally set themselves apart from pop. Either because they found pop too commercial, or because of their artistic pretensions or because of their connection to the subculture from which the music they made came. Much of pop music is made with the intention that a wide audience will appreciate it and buy the albums in question. The ‘producers’ of this music are outspoken professionals with no artistic pretensions in the first place.  They usually employ a mix of styles to create ‘hooks’ to attract and hold the audience’s attention.

What about art?

But when is art? Such a predicate remains extremely subjective. The fact that songs are ‘played’ and ‘covered’ for decades may be an indication of their artistic level. The same is true of much ‘early music’.  Of the many compositions from past centuries, only a small proportion are constantly played, listened to, praised, and elevated to art. 

Parts of the rock music I am featuring in this series are now widely known and appreciated. Think of the songs that have been in the upper echelons of the Dutch NPO Top 2000 for decades. It’s only one criterion, but I have little problem speaking of art in such cases. I will close this series of posts not with number 1 (Bohemian rhapsody), a work of art par excellence, but with the long-standing number 2, the original version of Hotel California by the Eagles (1977), a song that shows off both my daughter’s and my grandson’s playlists. This version features Felder and Walsh’s famous two-minute-plus guitar solo:

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Second half 1970s: Punk (History of rock after 1960 5/6)

Punk is a style of music characterised by short, fast songs with simple lyrics and melodies, played on basic instrumentation. Many punk groups produced their recordings themselves and they released them through independent labels. Punk harkened back to the ‘rock and roll’ of the 1950s and the culture of garage bands of the 1960s. The songs were not even that different from those of beat groups in the early 1960s.

Punk opposed what were seen as the musical excesses of the previous period, such as psychedelic-influenced musical styles, art rock, metal and symphonic rock. The songs generally turn against the establishment, such as ‘Career opportunity’s’ by the Clash. And ‘Right to work’ by ‘Chelsea’ that addressed social issues such as unemployment and the grim realities of city life. Resistance to society was increasingly explicit in the way punks dressed. Tattoos, piercings, and metal studded and nailed accessories as well as the mohawk, the pointed hairstyle, gradually became commonplace for a while.

The first punk groups with wider fame were the Stooges with lead singer Iggy Pop, Ramones, Stranglers and Sex pistols. In the US, punk remained an ‘underground’ phenomenon; in Britain and mainland Europe, the music became widespread. 

Iggy Pop and the Stooges

The Stooges released their first album – called the Stooges for short – in 1969. Their fifth and last album – Ready to die – dates from 2013. In the intervening period, the band lived a dormant existence for most of the time. In 2016, the band disbanded permanently as only two members – including Iggy Pop – were left alive. The albums in the pre-1973 period were not a commercial success and critics also gave the band a lukewarm reception. What particularly stuck with many others was Iggy Pop’s ‘stage diving’ and the heroin use of the group’s members.

Many punk rock groups took songs from the Stooges’albums to imitate them. Especially this one: ‘I wanna be your dog’.

Ramones

The Ramones is also an American punk rock band, and its first album ‘Ramones’ (1976) was commercially unsuccessful. Years later, the album received plenty of recognition for its influence on the development of hard rock. The Dutch punk group ‘Heideroosjes’ calls the Ramones its main inspiration. You can listen to Blitzkrieg Bop now:

Stranglers

My favourite punk song is ‘No more heroes anymore’ by English punk rock band Stranglers. This rendition below dates from 1977, the still existing group’s 50th anniversary is coming soon, and the band has explored a multitude of genres in that time. Compare ‘No more heroes’ with ‘Golden Brown’ (1982), which you can listen to HERE (2012). It seems like an innocent tune. Superficially, it’s about a girl but essentially about heroin. What is special about the song is the alternation of three- and four-quarter measures, which gives it a playful character. It is the group’s highest-rated song.

Sexpistols

English punk group Sexpistols released one album: ”Never mind the bollocks. Here’s the sex pistols’ (1977) The group existed from 1975 – 1978 but performed several more times after that. The original line-up consisted of John Lydon (‘Johnny Rotten’), Steve Jones, Pail Cook and Glen Matlock, later temporarily replaced in 1977 by John Richie (‘Sid Vicious’), who could not play any instruments. This group was literally plucked off the streets by would-be manager Malcolm McLaren, who saw the group as his own pop art project, loathed its music but thought he could make money from it. 

On stage and off, the band cultivated an image that the Daily Mirror characterised as ‘filth and fury’. The music was secondary; the media was all about the band members’ behaviour. That, especially after Sid Vicious’ arrival, revolved around riots, (verbal) violence and shocking the public and the rest of Great Britain. The ‘pistols’ became public enemy No 1 after the release of their single ‘God save the queen’. Gradually, gigs were increasingly cancelled to prevent riots. Meanwhile, tensions in the group were running high, the group broke up, Sid Vicious was arrested for murdering his girlfriend and subsequently died of an overdose. 

For the group’s members, it was not the quality of the music that was paramount, but the commotion they created. In that respect, it is true that the Sexpistols were one of the most influential groups of the 70s and 80s.  They have been called an inspiration to Guns N’Roses, Nirvana, Greenday and Oasis, among others. These groups, whose musical quality was miles above that of the Sexpistols, may have adopted from the latter in daring to deviate from social and especially musical conventions, use simple melodies and lyrics, perform an expressive stage act and, above all, play to the audience.

The Sexpistols and thousands of other punk groups provided an outlet for young people who saw little future in the then. Their following ranged from hooligans, revolutionaries, neo-Nazis to addicts. At the 1996 and 2007 reunion concerts, the audience was now a cross-section of people in their thirties and forties, and better times had arrived in economic terms. The individual members of the group meanwhile made a name for themselves, and it must be said, their stage act in 2007 is impressive. You can listen and watch it below. The actual performance of the song ‘Pretty vacant’ starts at 2 minutes from the beginning and is preceded by an atmospheric shot of the venue.

You can watch and listen to this song in its original performance (1976) HERE

Heideroosjes

The Netherlands also had a punk band, the Heideroosjes. Only formed in 1989, the group has 1,500 performances to its name almost all over the world, always in the same line-up. In 2012, the band gave two farewell concerts and another reunion followed in 2019. Here they sing ‘I’ll see you later'(2012)

Eventually, most punk rock groups started making more accessible and sometimes more artsy music and were then referred to as ‘post-punk’. They learned how to get more out of their instruments and discovered that lyrics were more than shouting political slogans. The ‘Clash’ album ‘London calling’ combined punk rock with reggae, ska, R&B and rock and roll and is, according to many, one of the best rock records ever. Listen to the song ‘London Calling’ (1979) here

The record companies did see earning opportunities in groups touting themselves as ‘post-punk’. Anything that could remotely be classified as such was marketed as ‘new wave’. Examples include the Police, the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Blondie, the Specialsand Madness. British ‘new wave’ later included Standau Ballet, Ultravox, Culture club and Eurythmics. Check out these groups, pick what you like and consider whether you can still make a connection with punk. That will usually not be the musical style, but it may also involve audience interaction.

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1970s: Hard rock (History of rock after 1960 4/6)

In the late 1960s, hard rock developed into a genre of its own. This was partly due to the influence of ‘acid rock’, the more psychedelically inspired variant of blues rock. One of the precursors was the British band Cream, consisting of seasoned musicians such as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Their album ‘Fresh Cream’ (1966) is a prototype of hard rock.

The group made four albums between 1966 and 1968 and then the members went a way of their own. You can see the three gentlemen here at a reunion in 2005. Would you be interested; you can watch and listen to the entire concert via this link. 

If you wish, you can see a recording of ‘Sunshine of your love’ HERE, at their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1968.

Hard rock

In the 1970s, hard rock began to sound increasingly harsh. Think of early examples like the Who, Deep purple, Steppenwulf (‘Born to be wild’) and Iron Butterfly (‘In-a-gada-da-vida’). Later, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith and Van Halen, among others, followed. Other examples include Def Leppard (Great Britain), the German Scorpions, AC/DC from Australia, the Swedish band Europe and in the Netherlands Golden Earring. 

In the 1990s, hard rock became one of the most dominant forms of popular music. Guns N’Roses and Bon Jovi occupied prominent places on the charts for years. Also attracting a wide audience were Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and the Ashbury Jukes, Tom Patty and Bob Seger, musicians who often dwelled on social problems and urban decay. Heart was the first female hard rock band to spawn top-10 albums. Listen to both Heart frontwomen here, a recording from 1976.

English band Led Zeppelin made art-rock out of hard rock with the song ‘Stairway to heaven’. Many music critics consider it the best rock song ever. What follows is a recording from a reunion in 2007, so about 35 years after the first performance and 27 years after the members of the band broke up.  It starts with an acoustic part to gradually swell into hard rock. It ends with an a cappella sung line “And she’s buying a stairway to heaven”. The lyrics are by Robert Plant and the music by Jimmy Page. 

You can see the moved Jimmy Page and Robert Plant back HERE at a concert presented to them in the presence of President Obama and his wife Michelle in 2011.  The ladies of Heart sing and play ‘Stairway to heaven’, accompanied by choir and orchestra.

Led Zeppelin has been dogged until 2020 by a lawsuit from a Los Angeles rock band that felt the intro to ‘Stairway to heaven’ bore a strong resemblance to that one of its own songs. It took until 2020 for this claim to be dismissed.  In another lawsuit, the plaintiff claimed that if you play some passages backwards, the trained ear can hear satanic messages. This claim was also rejected. The judge questioned the existence of a record player with a turntable that could spin backwards. 

Heavy metal

Bands like Deep Purple, Steppenwulf and Black Sabbath are considered as the first “real” heavy metal groups and played with even more volume. Some employed occult lyrics and bizarre attire. You can watch and listen to a recording of Black Sabbath HERE. 

Not melody or rhythm, but timbre, ‘soundscape’ and volume should give the listener an adrenaline rush. Later, it turned out that heavy metal’s chord progressions are much more complex than at first glance. Strange as it may sound, classical composers like Bach and Vivaldi had a major influence on the genre. Many musicians had conservatory training and played their instruments in a virtuoso manner. 

Here, Steppenwulf plays ‘Born to be wild’ in 1986, a song made famous by the film Easy Rider.

Gothic rock

From the early 1990s, metal groups increasingly adopted gothic elements. Gothic rock is instantly recognisable for its darker sound, with the use of mostly minor chords, reverb, dark arrangements, and dramatic and melancholic melodies. Goth rock was fueled by Gothic literature associated with themes of sadness, nihilism, dark romanticism, tragedy, melancholy and morbidity. Gothic influences are not limited to metal and punk. They appear in songs by Velvet undergroud (‘All tomorrow’s parties’) and Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering heights’. 

Symphonic rock

Metal bands regularly use violins and choral singing, and sometimes entire symphony orchestras support their performances. An older symphonic metal song is ‘Dies irae’ by the band Believer on their 1990 album ‘Sanity Obscure’. In this song, metal and classical music merge seamlessly. They were not the only ones: Swedish band Theron also made use of a live orchestra and classical composition techniques during the ‘Miskolc Experience’, which even became more prominent than their metal roots. The band performed with choir and orchestra at the Miskolc Opera Festival in Hungary (2007). Deep purple (Concerto for group and orchestra), Moody Blues (Days of future passed) and Black Sabbath (‘Spiral Architect’) preceded them.

Dutch band Within temptation followed the same path from 2000 In their third album, “The silent force” they played with a full choir and orchestra. Music critic Chat Bower speaks of the optimal balance between the “melody and hooks of mainstream rock, the depth and complexity of classical music and the dark edge of gothic metal”. 

Listen to Within Temptation along with the Metropole Orchestra here.

Later, the group omitted ‘heavy metal’ vocals altogether. Like HERE in a performance by singer Sharon den Adel (Within temptation) together with Anneke van Giersbergen (The Gathering). They sing ‘Somewhere’, also with the Metropole orchestra. 

Finnish band Nightwish, featuring Dutch singer Floor Jansen, also went in the same direction. They use electronics to produce an orchestral sound.  The song ”The phantom of the opera”, with a guest role for Henk Poort peaked on the Dutch charts.

The last band I mention in Dutch group Epica, with the album “The divine conspiracy“(2007). This group also plays along with choir and orchestra here. Their music has been described as combining “a dark oppressive gothic atmosphere with bombastic and symphonic music. This is best expressed in the suite ‘Orchestral Medley’.  You can listen and watch that one here.

This album also features their version of Carl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’. The band, which has existed since 2002, revolves around singer Simone Simons and composer, singer (‘grunter’) and guitarist Mark Jansen. The band has had many performances worldwide.

Metal is still popular.  Among the first 20 songs on the Dutch NPO top 2000 is four metal songs: in sixth place ‘Stairway to heaven’ by Led Zeppelin, in ninth place Metallica with ‘Nothing else matters’, in 15de place November rain by Guns ‘N Roses and in 17de place Child in time by Deep Purple. These groups did increase their audience base. The members of Metallica cut their hair. The audience got older and increasingly consisted of women. Also the variety of styles increased. Probably because of this, in the early 1980s, 20% of all albums sold in the US were metal, or what passed for that at the time.  

Much of the furore was created by US band Evanescence, led by singer Amy Lee. The group sold more than 20 million albums and is one of the most successful bands of the 21ste century. Apart from ‘metal’, the group also plays ballads, as HERE in ‘My heart is broken’. Essentially, the band’s songs are an outgrowth of Amy’s love of classical music and her desire to express herself in contrasting styles. HERE, the group plays ‘Bring me to life’.

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Late 60s: Art-rock and psychedelia (History of rock after 1960 3/6)

In the late 1960s, a growing group of young people started using hallucinogenic drugs. This also applied to musicians, who sought musical inspiration in (hard) drugs and wanted to make music that resonated with this group of young people. Halls of screaming fans were a thing of the past for them, insofar as they still performed publicly.  The 13th Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas, are usually considered the first band to use the term “psychedelic” as early as early 1966. This started with folk rock and later continued across all genres. The harder variants, which usually harkened back to blues rock, were also called acid rock. Many bands added oriental scales and various sonic effects to achieve hypnotic soundscapes. 

The Beatles

After the decline of the Mersey beat, the Beatles in Britain were once again forerunners in the fields of both psychedelia and art-rock, reinventing themselves in albums such as ‘Rubber Soul’ (1965), ‘Revolver'(1966), ‘Sergant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band’ (1967) and ‘Magical mystery tour’ (1967). ‘Rubber soul’ marks the transition to a new period in which the Beatles decided to stop performing in public and only do studio recordings. A feature of the whole album was the expansion of the instrumentation, including a Hammond organ. George Harrison was heard on the sitar for the first time. Critics were complimentary, praising the growing maturity of Lennon and McCartney as lyricists. You can listen to Norwegian wood, a self-contained studio recording, here.

Furher renewal followed a year later. In the first half of that year, the group made its final world tour, which was surrounded by riots caused by right-wing extremists, bad weather and negative publicity. The group was fed up with the screaming fans, most of whom completely drowned out the music. The main reason to cancel touring, however, was that the production of the songs became increasingly complicated and the songs took shape and content by experimenting with the technical possibilities offered by the studio. The themes shifted to existential topics like death, overcoming material needs. Lennon and Harrison drew inspiration from LSD but also from Eastern spiritual movements.

You can listen to a song typical of the album HERE. It is ‘Tomorrow never knows’. This is a ‘drone composition’ that uses only one keynote (C) and otherwise consists of several samples varying in length that are mixed. 

Other songs that may have greater fame are ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Good  day  sunshine’ and ‘Yellow  submarine’. Watch and listen to a relatively recent recording of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ here.  Recorded live in New York 2007, sent by Paul Mc Cartney.

 In the absence of live recordings by the Beatles themselves, I refer to Spotify for listening the albums.  Alternatively, below you will find recordings by the Dutch cover group ‘The Analogues’. This group performs all Beatles songs live, if necessary, with an extensive set of instruments.

‘Sergant Pepper’ followed in 1967, I release ‘Within you, without you’ here. This song is based on a Hindu Veda and, apart from George Harrison, is played on the album exclusively by Eastern musicians. The Analogues managed to perform a meticulous version of this song

Other songs included ‘With a little help from my friends’, ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’, ‘She is leaving home’. All played and sung by ‘The Analogues’.

You can listen to the live unplayable ‘A day in the life’ (followed by ‘Let it be’) here. So much for ‘The Analogues’ contribution, too.

The style of the songs on ‘Sergant Pepper’ – sometimes even within a song – varied widely, The record was considered as a ‘Gesamt Kunstwerk’. That the Beatles’ songs were art was already established after Revolver.  Remarkably, ‘Sergant Pepper’ was initially considered as the Beatles’ best album ever, but as the years went by, ‘Revolver’ took over this position, because of its originality, the quality of the lyrics and the consistency of the songs.

The EP ‘Magical mystery tour’ was the soundtrack to a film of the same name and included well-known songs like ‘Fool on the Hill’. ‘I’am the walrus’ and ‘Hello goodbye. For critics, it was mostly old wine in new bags.

Three more albums would follow:

‘The Beatles’ (the ‘White album’), with songs such as Ob-la- di Ob-la da, While my guitar gently weeps, Julia, Blackbird, I will, Revolution 1 & 9. Most of the songs were much simpler in structure also because the use of LSD had by now been renounced. During the recording, tensions in the group, also due to the ubiquitous presence of Yoko Ono, continued to rise. 

Then came ‘Abbey Road’, whose songs included ‘Come together’, ‘Something’, Maxwell Silver Hammer’ and the 12-minute medley. Critiques were mixed, Some critics felt the sound was too artificial, especially with the overuse of a moog synthesiser. Still, some thought it was the best album ever because it was less pretentious due to the absence of psychedelic influences. Before the album was released, John Lennon had left the group for good. The other members followed soon after.

Their last album was ‘Let it be’ (1970).  Its recording had already started in 1968. According to Paul McCartney, it was supposed to be a solid rock album, with songs that could be performed live, a performance that would be captured on film.  The live performance was limited to a one-off performance on the roof of the Beatles’ record company office, Apple Inc, which led to an unprecedented traffic jam in New York. Songs included: ‘Two of us’, ‘Let it be’, ‘Maggie Mae’, ‘The long and winding road’ and ‘Get back’.

Beach Boys

Another group with high artistic ambitions was ‘the Beach Boys’ and in particular the eldest of the three Wilson brothers, Brian. The song Good vibrations illustrates the artistic direction the group had taken, continuing its original surf sound. Brian Wilson was impressed by the Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’ and he wanted to top that album. To free up enough time to do so, he stopped touring and devoted himself entirely to the production of the album, which was to be the best rock album ever, ‘Petsounds’.

The album ‘Petsounds’ eventually included the following songs ‘You still believe in me’, ‘I know there is an answer‘, ‘Sloop John B’, ‘God only knows’ and ‘I just wasn’t made for these times’. He co-wrote the lyrics with Tony Asher. It was recorded in the studio, with the other band members, but mostly with session musicians. The album uses a variety of instruments. More than the use of technology, the complicated vocals define the character of the album. In recent years (2002 – 2016), Brian Wilson has given a series of live performances of ‘Petsounds’. You can watch and listen to ‘God Only Knows’ (London 2002) here 

Pink Floyd

In the list of art bands with a psychedelic slant, Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ cannot be left out. The title track alone lasts 23 minutes, divided into six parts. To play this song, the group had to bring a brass section and a choir. You can watch and listen to a 23-minute recording from London’s Hyde Park (1970) HERE.

More accessible is Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’. You can see this song here 40 years after its first performance by a still vital band Pink Floyd (Barbican London 2007)

Finally, I mention ‘Velvet underground with songs like ‘I am waiting for the man’. Jefferson Airplane (‘White rabbit’), the Byrds (‘Eight miles high’) and Iron Butterfly (‘In-a-gadda-da-vida’) 

The Woodstock festival is considered the pinnacle of psychedelic rock. Soon after, this genre was on the wane as many hallucinogens, including LSD were made illegal in both the US and Britain. 

Musicians’ quest to create songs of a high artistic standard was by no means over. Symphonic rock is characterised by poetic lyrics, advanced technology, long solos and demonstrations of high technical skill. The compositions use elements from experimental music (Mike Oldfield), avant-garde music (Eno), classical music (Procol Harum) and jazz (Colosseum). Groups often sufficed with studio recordings, but fortunately some also performed live, often accompanied by extended horn groups (Blood sweat and tears). Moody Blues brought in an entire symphony orchestra when they recorded ‘Days of Future Passed’. From this concert you can see ‘Nights in white satin’ here

Major successes were limited, with only a few groups reaching the top of the charts, Pink Floyd being the most successful. ‘The dark side of the moon’ (1973) is an example of ‘art-rock’ par excellence and is one of the best-selling albums of all time. So are symphonic compositions like ‘The Wall’ by Pink Floyd and Tommy by the Who. In the late 1970s, the utopian ideals of art-rock fell into oblivion. Society hardened, virtuosity was rejected as it was supposed to come at the expense of immediacy and accessibility. We then found ourselves on the eve of punk. Earlier, the numerous ‘glam-rock’ groups expressed resistance to both the revolutionary momentum of the 1960s and the pomposity of art-rock. Members of these groups wore flamboyant clothes, but their music was diverse, ranging from simple but powerful pop songs (Marc Bolan, David Bowie) to more complicated music by Roxy Music.

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Folk rock, country rock & blues rock (History of rock after 1960 2/6)

Bob Dylan (2011) Photo by Kevin Winter

The revolution in music in Western Europe had a huge impact in the US. Until the early 1960s, folk, surf music and the Nashville sound were dominant musical styles there. Almost overnight, these genres faded into the background in favour of music imported from Western Europe; only the ‘Motown sound, managed to hold its own. Talk was therefore of the ‘British Invasion’. The ‘Beatles’ performance on the Ed Sullivan Show (1964) was the starting point. You can see this performance HERE.

A much better picture of the Beatles’ reception in the US is provided by the following recording of their performance at the Washington Coliseum a few days after the Ed Sullivan show. The group sang five of his well-known songs. Remarkably, they more or less had to build the stage themselves.

Many members of (future) folk-rock acts, such as ‘Byrds’, ‘Jefferson Airplane’, ‘Lovin’ Spoonful’, ‘Mamas & Papas’ and ‘Buffalo Springfield’, also turned away from traditional folk music in 1964 and 1965. The careers of Chubby Checker, Ricky Nelson, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers and ‘Elvis Presley’ suffered (temporary) damage. The British invasion also influenced the style of garage bands. Their numbers also increased to an estimated 180,000 bands, of which at most a few thousand did record at one time or another. 

A US reaction to the British invasion was not absent. American artists blended the sounds of existing embattled genres with European ‘rock’ influences. 

From ‘folk’ to ‘folk rock’

In the early 1960s, ‘rock’ and ‘folk’ were separate genres, with their own audiences and festivals. ‘Folk’ as a genre – poetic songs accompanied by acoustic instruments – totally snowballed in the 1960s as a result of the ‘British Invasion’, which temporarily established the hegemony of Beatles and Rolling Stones and related groups and artists in the US. But several former ‘folk’ singers struck back. They mixed the existing ‘folk’ repertoire with rock, including the use of electric guitars and drums. One inspiration was the group ‘the Animals’ who turned the acoustic lament ‘House of the rising sun’ into an archetypal folk-rock song. Precursors in the US of ‘folk rock’ were the Byrds and Bob Dylan. The latter indicated that the rock version of ‘House of the rising sun’ had motivated him to perform with electric instruments.

The first folk-rock song of American origin was ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, a composition by Bob Dylan, sung here by the Byrds in 1965. In turn, the Byrds influenced countless other artists such as ‘the Mamas & the Papas’, Simon & Garfunkel and Sonny & Cher.

Compare the folkrock version HERE with the acoustic version sung by Melanie in 1968. 

Bob Dylan’s metamorphosis can be heard on his album ‘Bringing it all back home’. On 7 of the 11 tracks, he is accompanied by a band with electronic instruments. On his later albums, such as ‘Like a rolling stone’, he continued this trend, much to the dismay of some of his original fans, who made no secret of it during performances. I now play two songs from the album ‘Bringing it all back home’. 

Acoustic is ‘It’s all over now, baby blue’, live at the Newport folk festival:

Next you can watch and listen to Maggie’s farm, a solid rock version. Dylan sang this version at the same edition of the Newport folk festival. Bob Dylan achieved great fame as a folk singer, think of songs like ‘Blowin’ on the wind’ and ‘The times they are changing’.  Less well known is that Dylan was a lover of rock & roll from a young age. In 1965, he decided to manifest it as such. According to exegetes, when he sings ‘I don’t want to work on Maggie’s farm anymore’, Maggie’s farm symbolizes the folk music scene. Listen to ‘Maggie’s farm’ here, including the booing at the end.

To this day, a significant group of fans of original ‘folk’ and ‘country’ music has continued to exist, outside the US too. This genre is called Americana or ‘roots music’. Examples include The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as well as Ry Cooder and Bonnie Raitt. Another example is the Dutch group ‘CCC Incorporated’. You can hear a recording of the latter here.

From ‘country’ to ‘country rock’

‘Country music’ also suffered badly during the ‘British invasion’.  But many songs by artists like Hank Williams and Merle Haggard remained popular, and their popularity increased again when a dose of ‘rock’ was added. After Gram Parsons joined the Byrds, the group turned to country rock and songs like ‘Sweetheart of the rodeo’ and ‘You ain’t going nowhere’ were considered prime examples of this genre. 

Here you can watch and listen but the latter song (1968):

In the 1970s, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt became performers at respite from this genre. So did John Denver and Neil Young. Members of Ronstadt’s backing band later continued under the name ‘Eagles‘ continued the tradition.

From ‘blues’ to ‘blues rock’

In the development of blues rock, there was no one-way traffic between the US and Britain. As early as 1958, the American blues guitarist Muddy Waters toured Europe (see my exploration of the development of the blues in the US) and, especially in Britain, this led to a true blues boom. This inspired among others the members of the (future) Rolling Stones, Cream, Animals, Yardbirds, Kinks, Who and others. All these bands added a ‘rock twist’ to it.  Their music became so popular in the US in the second half of the 1960s that one could speak of a second British invasion. The blues rock was fiercer and louder that the beat music that was starting to sound dated. In the US, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat and the Doors were the first exponents of this new genre.  The members of these the bands often played long solos during performances, following the blues. 

Here, Canned Heat plays ‘On the road again’

Blues rock was getting louder and louder, moving towards heavy metal. I will come back to this in a subsequent post. However, there were also bands that stayed closer to the traditional blues genre. In the 1980s, these included, for example, ‘the Fabulous thunderbirds’ and ‘Stevie Ray Vaughan’.

In the above, we see the dichotomy emerging between ‘soft rock’ and ‘hard rock’. Folk rock and country rock were the basis for soft rock. The emphasis was on harmonic melodies. Key artists were, Carole King, Cat Stevens, James Taylor. Commercial highlights were provided by Fleetwood Mac and Billy Joel.

Hard rock was fiercer, mainly featured repetitive ‘runs’ and distortion of the sound and joined blues rock. This genre had numerous variations from the 1960s onwards, ranging from acid rock, metal, pink and grunge. International successes were mainly achieved by Queen, Thin Lizzy, Aerosmith, AC/DC and Van Halen.

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Early 1960s: Beatlemania (history of rock after 1960 1/6)

‘Rock & Roll’ caused a furore in the period 1940 – 1960. Initially played and sung by ‘black’ musicians, later white singers gained the upper hand.  The genre spread worldwide, thanks also to the polish the record industry applied to it. This alienated young people who felt more attracted to the catchy melodies and rhythms of the thousands of skifflegroups with their simple instrumentation. Their great example in the late 1950s was Lonnie Donegan. One such skifflegroups were the ‘Quarrymen’ from Liverpool, and when they picked up the pace and called themselves Beatles, the ‘Merseybeat sound’ spread around the world at lightning speed. 

The Beatles left behind an extensive body of work, consisting of 12 albums and a string of singles. The first five albums represent the ‘Merseybeat sound’: ‘With the Beatles’ (1963), ‘Please, please me’ (1963), ‘Meet the Beatles’ (1964), ‘A hard day’s night’ (1964) and ‘Help’ (1965). You can watch and listen to ‘It’s a hard day’s night’ here, sung not by the Beatles themselves, but by the Dutch cover group, ‘The Analogues’. 

Those who still prefer to listen to the real Beatles and take in the enthusiasm of thousands of fans singing along can find a recording of ‘It’s a hard day’s night’ HERE.

The performance of the Beatles and many other British groups in clubs in Hamburg contributed greatly to the ‘sound’ and breakthrough of the new genre. The musical revolution affected not only professional groups such as ‘Gerry & the Pacemakers’, ‘Searchers’, ‘Freddie & the Dreamers’, ‘Herman Hermits’ and ‘Hollies’, among others, but also thousands of amateur groups who played the music of their idols or wrote their own songs. A phenomenon that resembled the American ‘garage bands’ I will come to write about. Singers like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Petula Clark were also influenced by the new musical style.

The Netherlands had an early professional scene – Nederbeat – with groups like ‘Outsiders‘, ‘Q65‘, ‘Motions‘, ‘Shocking Blue‘ and, of course, ‘Golden Earring’. ‘Golden Earring’ made music continuously and in the same line-up from 1961. Only when George Kooymans fell seriously ill in 2021, the band decided to stop immediately.

Here is an (acoustic) recording of ‘Just a little bit of peace in my heart’. A song from 1968, which the group played until its last performances, and which has been continuously on the Dutch Radio 2 top 2000 since 1999 (2023: place 599). George Kooymans wrote this song after the end of his relationship with Melanie Gerritsen. He regretted it terribly and fortunately for him, she came back to him a year later.  They married and eventually celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together.

One of the most distinctive features of ‘beat music’ is its driving character, which is caused by the first three beats of each bar having an equal emphasis and the fourth beat having a distinctive ‘backbeat’.

It was not only ‘Merseybeat’ that set the tone. Some groups were more strongly influenced by American rhythm & blues, also because of direct contacts with musicians there. These included “Rolling Stones”, “Yardbirds”, “Spencer Davis group”, “Moody Blues”, “Animals“, “Them” and “Kinks“. 

Here is a 1965 recording of the very young ‘Rolling Stones’ with ‘I can get no satisfaction’. 

In many places, young people were also making music themselves. It was referred to as ‘garage rock’ because the usually young musicians practiced in the garages of their parents’ houses. Garage rock songs often revolved around the traumas of high school life, such as lying girls and unfair teachers. 

Here just a ‘random’ garage rock song in some venue. What rarely happened: This little band became famous and later called themselves ‘The Who’. If you know that, you immediately recognize the young Peter Townsend and Keith Moon.

By now, the term ‘Rock & Roll’ had moved into the background and was mainly referred to as ‘rock music’. In subsequent years into the first decade of the 21ste century, ‘rock’ would become an umbrella term for a variety of genres, with influences from almost all other genres, including classical music. From 2010, the influence of hip-hop, dance and electronic dance music increases, but as is the case with disco, the influence of ‘rock’ in popular music remains strong. 

Musicians in the 60s-80s embraced the predicate ‘rock’ to differentiate themselves from ‘pop’, which they condemned as being commercial. That said, many rock songs became roaring commercial successes and their creators made gold money. During this period, ‘rock’ was also seen as the musical expression of youth culture sometimes also of resistance to society. The blurring of the line between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ repeatedly led to new more radical expressions of ‘rock’ such as ‘punk’ and ‘grunge’. 

I explore the development of ‘rock’ after 1960 in six consecutive episodes.