“Real jazz should blow the mind” by Richard Goldstein
This month’s roster at the Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco’s psychedelic Roseland, includes Count Basie and his band. Count Basie?
A surprise hit among the bells and beads at the Monterey International Pop Festival was Afro-jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela. His merits as a musician and a singer are debatable in jazz circles, but his fans include a hard core of the Los Angeles rock scene.
The Blues Project use an electric flute to high-light their resonant jazz-rock composition. “Flute Thing.” The Byrds use brass on their new single, “Lady Friend.” Even tradition-minded groups like the Butterfield Blues Band are adding horns.
The Jeremy Steig Quartet has let its hair grow, plugged itself in, and renovated its image with the name Jeremy and the Satyrs. Their music is jazz, but most of their fans hear it as rock. The Free Spirits, most musical of the new groups on the Lower East Side scene, could entertain any jazz buff, but would they? And Ralph Gleason, jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has said of that city’s well-known rock group, The Grateful Dead: “They’re really a jazz band.” Anyone who watches them rock in the parks, under a red sunset and before a grooving gathering, would probably agree. although few scholars would call their music jazz.
Something strange is happening to pop music. The rock explosion has shattered all the familiar cliches about structure and sound. Bizarre chunks of music have assumed their own orbits around the only thing that holds pop together these days–a beat. The traditional barriers between folk and rock were the first to go. (Continued on Page 16)