The jazz albums that inspired Syd Barrett
For the uninitiated, there was no way of knowing where Syd Barrett came from in Pink Floyd. Throughout his short time with the prog-rock pioneers, Barrett’s offbeat look at rock and roll seemed to come from another planet, taking the aesthetic of drums, guitar, and voice and putting the most warped ideas imaginable into his sound. Although a handful of rock trademarks were laced throughout Barrett’s work, a few of his inspirations went beyond rock altogether.
Then again, it’s unsurprising that Barrett wanted to stretch the limits of where rock had been. Throughout Pink Floyd’s rise, the counterculture movement was progressing by leaps and bounds, bringing with it a starstudded host of musicians looking to push the limits of what rock and roll was capable of outside the usual hit song format.
While Barrett may have had hits on his mind when working on the first major Pink Floyd cuts, he was also interested in other musical ventures. Outside of the world of rock or even avant-garde, jazz music was particularly alluring to Barrett when woodshedding his first ideas.
While at Mike Leonard’s Highgate house, Barrett would be introduced to the world of Yusef Lateef with the album Eastern Sounds. Far removed from anything that the Western world was used to at the time, the songs featured drastic shifts in the modern understanding of harmony, bringing in different world music influences that weren’t prominent in rock and roll.
Although Barrett may not have been the most vocal jazz enthusiast in the world, the power of those songs would carry over to his work with Pink Floyd later. Throughout albums like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Barrett will suddenly switch to different modes of writing that are ripped straight out of Lateef’s playbook.
Outside of the world music realm, Barrett also had a fascination with John Coltrane’s self-titled album. Blending pieces of traditional jazz with layers of instrumentation, the various walls of sound Coltrane would create would be helpful when building the psychedelic soundscapes Barrett was known for every time he sat down to write a song.
More than just the production, the various freeform elements of Coltrane’s sound would leave a considerable mark on Barrett’s music. When looking at the early days of Pink Floyd, the band’s chaotic live shows have a few common threads with Coltrane’s approach, making songs come alive whenever they played live and going outside the realm of what was written on the page.
Although Barrett absorbed as much music as possible, it couldn’t protect him from his fragile mind. After only a handful of years with Pink Floyd, Barrett was sent packing due to his various manic states, leading to him going into seclusion for years on end and not surfacing in the public eye after the late 1970s.
Despite his absence from the band, Pink Floyd’s would still contain elements of what Barrett was getting at, with ‘Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun’ showcasing Roger Waters’s understanding of Barrett’s approach to harmony. While Barrett wouldn’t be working with Pink Floyd, his jazzy influences were able to work their way in without even trying.
