Is Acid Jazz a Racially Motivated Genre?

I think the original Acid Jazz stuff revolved more around live bands. By the time it made its way over to the U.S. the term was probably already being completely abused. I always thought of DJ Krush and DJ Cam as being more "trip-hop" than anything else. But, yeah, the term Acid Jazz was pretty nebulous. What names did you release stuff under?

 

The Bee-Gees were successful before disco. They adopted a disco sound in the mid-to-late 70s but they were not a product of the disco era.

 

The term "acid jazz"didn't exist when RTF was together.
It was a label that somehow became a genre.
Some lump together anything that sounds remotely familiar and call what it never was.

It was called Fusion.
It still is.

 

Before RTF...
The beginning would be Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) and the Tony Williams Lifetime.
The seeds of BB can even be heard on the earlier Filles de Kilimanjaro.

Williams (Lifetime), Corea (RTF), Zawinul/Shorter (Weather Report), McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra)...all alums of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew-era bands.

 

Yes, thank you. Even if the Bee Gees never did Saturday Night Fever, they would still be known as a successful Pop group.

 

I've never heard of the term Acid Jazz but I do know the Heavies I wish we could just call everything music and forget about the labels.

 

I've never heard the term "acid jazz" till today. Jes' sayin'

 

Acid Jazz is about as useless a term as New Age and Americana.

The "acid" part has nothing to do with LSD, it refers to an electronic dance music style popular in the UK at the time (although invented in the USA!) which used the Roland TB303 bass synthesizer. The first song in the Acid (or Acid House) style was called "Acid Tracks" by Phuture.



As you can hear it was a pretty minimal dance club record.

Some UK acid jazz music played by actual live bands, but some was your typical sample-based electronic dance music. Sampling of what in the USA was called "soul jazz" was common. In fact, there was a CD reissue series in the 1990s from Universal Music called "Roots of Acid Jazz" that featured many of the artists who had been sampled. Some other jazz labels like Blue Note put out similar compilations to cash in on the trend.

Some US hip-hop acts were doing something similar at the same time. Probably the best known was Us3's "Cantaloop" which sampled Herbie Hancock's "Canteloupe Island" but there were many others. There were also jazz musicians who guested on hip-hop records. The style faded away with the rise of gangsta rap.

 

Whether originally racially motivated or not I think the world would be a better place if we stopped pointing out racial differences in our cultures and started appreciating things that bridge these imaginary boundaries between us.

Can we all not just enjoy music for music? It's the one language we have that everyone on earth seems to understand at some emotional level.

 

I have no problem with labels.
Someone would ask me "Do you like Music?"
I would reply "SOME music"
And they would ask "What kind of Music do you like?"

If there were no labels I could not delineate what I like and don't like.

 

People “know what they know“ and decide what’s true and what isn’t mostly in order to support their own agendas. And as a result, they shape their perception of reality to into the reality they most want see.

Which is the reason most “discussions” about topics like this tend to go in circles and end up absolutely nowhere.

I think the larger question is why we, as musicians, even allow ourselves to get caught up with or lend credence to the labels the media, politicos, and the ‘ponytails’ in the recording industry deign to slap on us.

I strongly doubt any musician ever sat down with their band one day and said: “Hey! I got a great idea! Let’s all start calling what we’re doing Acid Jazz!”

When asked if I consider myself a progger, or a rocker (or whatever) I tell them I don’t know what a “progger” or a “rocker” is. I just think of myself as a musician.

 

To me that is Disco.
That sounds more like Donna Summer than any kind of Jazz.
More people are going to be dancing and singing to that than doing a Jazz solo improvisation.

 

When people ask me if I like music I just say "yes" and if they say what kind? I always say "everything" because there are some genres that I didn't know existed like 'Acid Jazz" and I like the Heavies not knowing that their music was called that? but I absolutely understand your point because it's all up to personal interpretation.

 

Sometimes we look for issues where they don't exist. Funk and disco are aimed at all races.

 

Thank you, I was afraid I was somehow living in a parallel universe. When someone says "acid jazz," Cantaloop is the first thing that comes to mind.

 

Two Tone and 2nd wave ska! The music of my youth. Everybody listen to The Specials. Horace Panter is one bad mo on the bass!!

 

The New Mastersounds!!...great music and P bass w/flats tone...

 

I think it's much more complicated than that. We know racism exists today and is an ongoing problem. We know that at different times labels and audiences have used rock and R&B labels to separate black and white musicians for purposes of market segmentation (though earlier in its history, rock and roll was also a powerful force of racial integration in the segregated south--life is full of contradictions). And even though Acid Jazz was originally a record label, it's entirely possible that since then, the term has been used to segregate music for artists or audiences. I'm not saying it HAS been because I don't know. But the OP's question is entirely fair to ask given the history of music, musicians, music marketing, and race in America since the 1950s.

 

Acid Jazz was a bad name for this style anyway. Doo'bop, as coined together by Miles Davis seems more appropriate.

 

Something that I learned here is that everything fall under the Rock umbrella... so it is Rock