The Children of ‘Bitches Brew’
Jazz, considered commercially dead in the Sixties, is enjoying a renaissance that many in the recording industry feel will rival the popularity and stature it enjoyed during its heyday in the Thirties and Forties.
The upsurge is due largely to the adaptation of mainstream (bop or modal-oriented) jazz artists to the electronic era. Such jazz masters as Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and George Benson added their skills to a musical melting pot that included rock and pop idioms. Out of the caldron emerged something that is called jazz-rock fusion, a blend of contemporary and classical styles that some call jazz, others call schlock, but that most agree will be the music of the future.
Some attribute the jazz boom to the success of Bitches Brew, a two-record set released by Miles Davis in 1970 that sold more than a million copies, opening the eyes of music-industry executives to the sales potential of jazz-oriented music. Davis’ vision of the new jazz was further refined by Herbie Hancock, whose Head Hunters album sold a million records in 1974, and by George Benson, whose 1976 release of Breezin’ has sold nearly 3 million copies.
Within the past few years, major record labels, including Columbia, Arista, Warner Bros., A&M, RCA and United Artists have begun to invest heavily in jazz, and their growth campaigns are not only affecting the structure of the music but that of the industry as well.
Some blame the generally vacuous state of Seventies rock & roll. “People are genuinely fed up with the redundancy of rock,” said Steve Backer, director of progressive product at Arista Records. Others claim the upsurge is simply the next logical step from the synthesis of rock and jazz made popular by such bands as Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears. “Public taste is more sophisticated,” offered Bruce Lundvall, president of CBS Records Division. “Improvisation has always existed in rock. Now it’s just not so unfamiliar as it once was.”
Fusion enjoys a crucial advantage over mainstream and avant-garde jazz: it “crosses over” a wide range of radio formats, a key element to selling any music today. Top Forty, Album Oriented Radio (AOR) and progressive FM radio regularly include fusion artists like Stanley Clarke, Weather Report and Chick Corea on their playlists. “Top Forty radio is aware that it has to use older demographics in its programming,” said Ron Goldstein, head of jazz and progressive music at Warners. “Today’s audience has graduated. It wants something more harmonically interesting than unilateral rock.”
To the surprise of no one, the demographics of today’s jazz consumer reveal an older, more mature fan: mostly male, college-educated and between the ages of twenty and thirty. “We’ve found that the young audience that accounted for the rock success of the Sixties has kept its buying habits in the Seventies,” said Vernon Slaughter, director of progressive jazz music marketing at Columbia. “And as this group goes through various stages, it wants a music that fits its new lifestyle. Jazz is the next logical step in music education.”
Major-label commitments to in-house jazz divisions and catalog expansion (the acquisition of vintage jazz for reissue) have made room for less commercial — avant-garde or mainstream — artists on their rosters. And they’ve indirectly benefited the independent labels, which attribute their new commerce to the “backward” broadening of public taste — consumers buying an artist’s early, usually traditional, work after buying his latest fusion effort. Because many of the independents were the first to sign and release the jazz artists now enjoying greater popularity, they are reaping belated rewards.
Following the epochal success of Bitches Brew in 1970, Clive Davis, then president of CBS Records, signed Weather Report, a band made up of several musicians from Miles’ band, and worked to establish the reissue campaign of Columbia’s Contemporary Masters series, which includes Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.
Bruce Lundvall carried on the jazz campaign at Columbia when he became president in 1975. “We saw the jazz area opening up to a broader public,” Lundvall said, “and we saw an opportunity to take the lead. Within a couple of years we had a thirty-five percent share of the jazz market.” In the last five years he’s signed Dexter Gordon, Woody Shaw — two mainstream artists — and padded his fusion roster with artists like Herbie Hancock, Hubert Laws and Al Di Meola. There are now about fifty jazz artists signed to Columbia, up from ten in 1970.
Following his departure from CBS in 1973, Clive Davis formed Arista Records and immediately began to build a jazz roster. He signed avant-garde saxophonist Anthony Braxton, who is still with the label, and, through a distribution agreement with Freedom Records, added Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Roswell Rudd and Cecil Taylor to the catalog. Arista then bought the esteemed Savoy Record Company and reissued dormant be-bop and R&B gems from the Savoy vault, which included work by Charlie Parker. In 1975 the company further expanded its commitment to jazz with crossover artists the Brecker Brothers and guitarist Larry Coryell. Recently Arista signed fusion acts made up of young, classically trained artists.
Around the same time, RCA and United Artists acquired the Blue Bird and Blue Note labels, respectively. RCA dug into the Blue Bird vault and reissued treasures from such big-band era jazzmen as Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Fats Waller. Later, RCA arranged to distribute Pablo Record artists Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Count Basie, and most recently took over distribution of Salsoul Records, a primarily disco and jazz-funk outfit.
The Children of ‘Bitches Brew’, Page 1 of 3