I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.
What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.
So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.
But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.
So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.
Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!
Looking forward to it