First posted on Mark Is Cranky:
Listeners come to jazz from many directions. They may have a natural attraction to it. Jazz may have been the predominant music playing on their parents' home stereo (though that kind of situation has been known to drive a person in the opposite direction.) They may even have played an instrument at a young age and gone on to stay with the music they were immersed in while learning their charts.
Then, there's the "gateway record." This is the album-equivalent of a gateway drug, but without the illicit substances and contentious debate.
Famous gateway records? Mahavishnu Orchestra's Inner Mounting Flame. John McLaughlin had the jazz pedigree (Miles Davis is all you need at the top of your resume). He also had chops to burn ... and burn they did on this record. Casino by Al DiMeola. Honestly, almost any early DiMeola record will do. A sort-of cousin to McLaughlin in the smoking fretboard department, DiMeola dragged many a guitar fan toward the downbeat. Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione. In the late 1970s, flugelhorn player and bandleader Mangione had a huge crossover hit with this album's title track. So many people owned and loved that record that it surely planted more than a few jazz seeds (it was my first 'jazz' record.) Forest Flower by Charles Lloyd. Maybe not quite as high profile as some of those other artists, Forest Flower was one of those recordings that rock fans felt comfortable owning due to extended and spacey/ambient textures layed forth by some decidedly high-profile (though not at the time) players including Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette.
Many years (and stylistic shifts) later, Lloyd has combined his early modes (more or less 'straight ahead' jazz) with the more expansive structures that followed to carve out his own jazz niche. Somehow he manages to put together song suites that are both forward-looking and reverent of his past ... but without excessive sentiment.
Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
Mark,
I promoted this review to Advance.net. That means I put it here (and these places) where it could potentially be read by another few hundred thousand readers.
- Thank you for the post. Temple Stark
2 - frankiepop
You know, I'm calling you on the Charles Lloyd Myth, which has arisen in the last couple of years. First, Charles LLoyd made some great records with his 60s quartets, and he may have had a fairly substantial fan base for awhile. However, I challenge you to go back to 60s Jazz Journals and literature and cite this hippie Jazz phenomenon.
This hardly exists and may include a small northern Calif. audience that led to the Moscow trip. I have been reading Jazz literature since the 70s voraciously. There was rarely a mention of Lloyd and never as a 60s popular Jazz artists.
I bet somebody has mischaracterized Lloyd in the late 90s or 2000s to promote his excellent music, all the world Jazz has digested it through a big straw.
3 - Forest Flower
Interviews with Charles Lloyd MP3 format [and another] Charles Lloyd
very interesting