One of the many underlying attractions to jazz lies in its minority status. While its impact on the wider musical and cultural scenes over the last 100 years is off the scale jazz audiences are small, jazz album sales are at the low end of the musical spectrum, and very few jazz musicians make a decent living out of their jazz credentials. Traditionally, jazz musicians are not great self-promoters, don’t always communicate effectively with their core audiences or encourage new audiences to give jazz a try.
Jazz for most of its life has garnered a deserved outsider status. Negotiating the complexity of much great jazz can be challenging. Its insider language (the root of so much mainstream contemporary language and argot) and its low mainstream media presence, the lower status associated with great art played by black musicians, its close association with civil rights struggles (continuing to this day) and its political edge all combine to reinforce the sense that jazz is, even should be a distinctly minority taste. A taste enjoyed only by a small band of often older jazz connoisseurs.
And yet, as with most hard and fast rules it is the exceptions that catch the attention. And it may surprise you to learn that jazz has had numerous places in the sun, topping mainstream, non-jazz specific charts and capturing the attention of millions.
Going back to its origins in the 1920’s and the swing era of the subsequent two decades, jazz in the hands of Louis Armstrong, the touring big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and many more played to huge audiences, both live and via juke box hits and radio “relays”. Recordings sold in vast numbers and had a huge influence on contemporary American culture and dance styles.
Eddie Harris
Nat King Cole became the first established Black TV star in the U.S. in the Eisenhower era, a matter not lost on the warped world view of the Ku Klux Klan. Bing Crosby started out as a jazz crooner; Frank Sinatra always was a jazz singer. Singers like Billy Eckstein and Louis Jordan produced levels of fan hysteria that would later be more widely associated with the Beatles.
Jazz was at the forefront of mainstream popular music in the 25 years spanning Louis Armstrong’s emergence in the mid-1920’s to the celebrity enjoyed by Nat Cole and Louis Jordan up to the early 1950’s. This level of popularity and profile began to change very rapidly after WW2 and led directly to the decline of the touring big band era.
However, despite jazz’s retreat into niche category, it continues to produce music that has grabbed mainstream musical interest and topped mainstream music charts.
My focus in this piece and in the accompanying playlist is on jazz recordings that went gold or platinum way beyond the world of the Downbeat jazz polls. Here are some reasons why;
Catching the zeitgeist
Occasionally jazz finds a mass audience associated with youth culture in a particular era. It’s happening again now in the U. K. In their different ways Charles Lloyd and Pharaoh Sanders both fully paid up members of the jazz tradition found their music keying into the summers of love in the late 60’s and early 70’s During this period and before his long sabbatical Lloyd recorded and toured with the Beach Boys. John Handy’s fascinating Live from Monterey album had a similar although briefer impact in that era.
Infiltrating other commercial musical genres
Jazz music has experienced many periods where interest and audiences decline and the musical mainstream tramples all before it. Rock and Roll signalled the final death knell for the big band era, R&B, rock, funk and hip hop each in their turn put pressure on the “pure” practitioners of jazz. However, jazz musicians are more than capable of bringing their jazz chops to bear within different musical genres. Some like Herbie Hancock, Miles. Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea chose very successfully to explore rock and funk music; others enter those worlds in search of a pay day. In both cases the quality of the music was greatly enhanced by the presence of jazz musicians. Weather Report which stormed the concert and festival circuits in the 70’s and 80’s offer arguably the best example of what a group of top line jazz musicians can bring to the table of jazz rock and world music. The saxophonist David Sanborn, best known for his numerous appearances with mainstream artists is an outstanding example of the added value of jazz within wider musical contexts.
The Incredible Jimmy Smith
Out of Nowhere
Quite often a composition will come out of left field, grab the attention of much wider audiences and go on to define the subsequent career of the responsible jazz artist, sometimes to their chagrin! I recall hearing Stan Getz at Ronnies during an earlier London heatwave in 1976 where he announced The Girl From Ipanema as “the tune that put my kids through college”. Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd an others rode the bossa wave and brought it into the jazz mainstream.
The Dave Brubeck quartet were building a solid reputation through the 1950’s and were big hits on the lucrative college circuit. However, Take Five written in the, for then unheard of time signature of 5/4 went on to become the biggest selling jazz single in history. The story goes that Colombia executives did not want to include it in the album considering it “too weird”. Take Five appeared in 1959 and achieved modest sales before going stratospheric from 1961.
Less epochal were tunes that saw the light of day within the jazz mainstream and were suddenly taken up much more widely. Eddie Harris’s Exodus went to number 2 in the R&B charts-no one was more surprised than Eddie. Keith Jarrett never imagined that his solo Koln concert-which almost didn’t happen (Jarrett was unhappy with the quality of the piano) would go on to be the biggest selling solo album in jazz and the landmark recording for the highly influential ECM label.
Herbie Hancock was living in Donald Byrd’s spare room in New York when he recorded Watermelon Man his first album for Blue Note which went viral. Herbie is still featuring it in live performance. Mongo Santamaria had a similar experience with Afro Blue, which John Coltrane then covered, in my view more memorably. Cannonball Adderley had no idea of the impact of Mercy, Mercy, Mercy composed for him by Joe Zawinul and featuring a trademark Cannonball intro.
The legendary Blue Note label could subsidize its commitment to free and ultra-modern jazz musicians through a series of soul jazz hits by such members of its core stable of musicians as Kenny Burrell, Stanley Turrentine, Jimmy Smith and Ike Quebec.
Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
Miles Davis x 3
Miles Davis was a hugely complex character. One of his most consistent drivers was his wish to achieve widescale recognition beyond his core jazz status and audience while always staying ahead of the game. And Miles always stayed ahead of the game.
In terms of income and album sales Miles Davis was certainly the most commercially successful musician in the history of jazz. Recognized as a unique voice right from the get-go with Charlie Parker at 19 years of age Miles continued to generate major sales figures throughout his career.
However, in terms of his capacity to break out of his core jazz audience I would identify three pivotal periods and moments.
Miles’s recordings with Prestige with his first great quintet comprising four albums all recorded within a matter of days in 1956 as part of Miles’s release clause with the label in advance of his move to a much more valuable contract with Colombia. The albums were entitled Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ and together constituted the highest level of sales and radio plays beyond dedicated jazz stations that Prestige achieved. Quite a leaving present!
Kind of Blue recorded in 1959 is the highest selling album of all time and, along with Miles’s earlier large format recordings with Gil Evans signalled his decisive breakthrough into the musical and cultural mainstream and into the consciousness of mainstream America.
While Miles’s second great quintet earned him top billing and healthy record sales none of them matched the sales achieved by Kind of Blue or indeed the sales and status shift achieved in Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson and On The Corner. Three early albums from the 1970’s that signalled Miles’s decisive entry into the worlds of fusion and rock, providing his ticket of entry to perform as the headliner at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 with an estimated audience of over 600000 people. From this point on Miles’s live performances were almost all in stadia and large concert halls.
The Playlist
Weighing in at just over three hours my playlist contains both unexpected, one off and slow burning hits that took jazz into the popular mainstream.
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