Rock is generally disparaged by jazz buffs as a brutally simplistic form. Yet speaking more theoretically-ignoring the admitted differences of training and virtuosity that often do separate the jazz musician from his less refined rock brethren-the real difference between the two styles has to do with set forms versus improvisation.īoth rock and jazz have their roots in the black music of the 19th century: church hymns, brass bands, spirituals and blues. Long ago jazz emancipated itself from simple song‐forms and turned into an improvisatory art. Even at its outwardly most stale-the “dogged format of theme, solos and theme-jazz allows its players the chance to demonstrate their individual virtuosity. Rock, although it has evolved its own characteristic sound, has stuck closer to its roots. Forms are more basic (and more easily mastered by the untutored musician) and improvisation is limited to short solos that are usually planned pretty carefully in advance. Beck's record is interesting is that it seems, for us rock fans, to point toward a way that the essence of rock can channel the vague meanderings of jazz‐rock as it is generally encountered. The problem seems to be that too many talented but commercially ambitious jazz musicians approach the jazzrock idiom with a withering self‐loathing condescension.

I have no special insight into what Herbie Hancock thinks he's doing.

The absence of any but the most hackneyed forms amounts to a dissolution of inspiration into cliche.īut for the past couple of years his jazz‐rock albums have sounded like a bunch of sophisticated musicians cranking out facile improvisation in the most bored manner imaginable. What rock offers is the reinsertion of set patterns into this flux that are worked out-“composed”-in a searching way. Perhaps this is overvaluing both rock and Mr.

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