The instrument that ended jazz’s rigid supremacy, according to Quincy Jones
“Jazz as we know it is dead,” DownBeat magazine boldly claimed in a 1967 headline. The same year of A Love Supreme maestro John Coltrane passed during the turbulent ‘Summer of Love’ rock. A period that had become the dominant musical and cultural force of the Western world, soundtracking the major social upheavals and revolutionary spirit of the day. Despite rock rapidly shifting from garage beats to psychedelic freakouts in three short years, jazz remained an island divorced from the musical sea of changes taking place, risking irrelevancy due to the purism of its hardcore fanbase.
Already touring Europe with band leader Lionel Hampton at 20 years old, Quincy Jones had seen popular music’s infancy from the early 1950s to producing Michael Jackson’s monster records across the 1980s. An authority on jazz yet authentically connected to the trends and stylings of the day, right up until his death in 2024, the music biz and TV executive heavyweight had no time for jazz’s 1960s insecure rut nor creative conformity of any kind across his litany of releases and film score work.
“People were telling us not to mix jazz with rock, that myopic mentality,” Jones told Uncut. “That’s bullshit. Miles, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock and myself used to talk about this, how you should try everything. We’d talk about rock bands. I used to say, ‘How come we’re drinking on a Saturday night, and they’re the ones with the gigs?’ One by one we expanded—Herbie wrote ‘Watermelon Man’, Cannonball did ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’, I did ‘Walking in Space’, in 1969, and Miles did Bitches Brew…”
Keen to disregard these rigid expectations, Jones and his like-minded peers ushered in the jazz fusion era, preserving its improvisational harmony with rock, funk and R&B, scoring the Black pop charts and the wider counterculture. It was Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew which documented the electric phase of jazz so succinctly—listening to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone was vital prep for his rock-centred opus.
Abandoning jazz’s typical sense of swing, Davis plugged his trumpet into a variety of effects pedals and played his trusty brass like an electric guitar. Among the loose roll of drums and keyboards were crucially thick bass grooves, confidently peppered throughout the double LP.
“See, the electric bass changed everything,” Jones confessed. “That instrument was the one [that] changed the genre—there would be no rock and roll, no Motown, no nothing without an electric rhythm section.”
Ever since Leo Fender first popularised the electric bass and rendered the upright bass obsolete, the bass guitar’s prominence saw it infiltrate all manner of 20th-century pop henceforth. It’s impossible to imagine funk, disco, and hip-hop without the bass guitar’s essential deep skulk, and rock would never have exploded into the stadium-selling monster it would across the 1970s without its key presence interlocked with the percussive beat.
Jazz may well have tried to resist, but the moment Jones dropped Walking in Space and Davis In a Silent Way, jazz found itself brought to a musical equilibrium along with every other genre—just as any good bass lick.
