In short, when the rock-and-pop folks added jazz to the mix, it invariably hurt their marketability and compromised their prospects. The band Chicago sold more records, the less jazz they put into them. Zappa had his best sales when he squeezed the jazz out of his recordings, and opted instead for “Valley Girl” shtick. To some extent, Joni never regained the mass market audience she had enjoyed before this move. When Joni Mitchell released her Mingus LP, it proved to be her poorest selling release in a decade. The rock and pop acts who embraced jazz, in contrast, often did so despite commercial considerations. When Count Basie started covering songs by the Beatles, he may have had his reasons, but who dares claim that he had decided that the Liverpool sound was cooler than Kansas City swing? When Sonny Rollins recorded “Disco Monk,” he certainly had some goals in mind, but I doubt that one of them was a plan to raise his music to a grander level of expression. True, there were a few jazz cats who moved into fusion for aesthetic reasons, but the vast majority did it for baser motives – a chance at a bigger payday or a larger dose of fame. The jazz musicians who took on rock-and-roll rarely had such high and mighty notions.
Embracing jazz was their way of aspiring to a higher degree of artistry. When rock or pop musicians tackled jazz, they usually believed they were raising the level of their music. Perhaps it was only a psychological advantage, but (as Yogi Berra once said) the mental half is ninety percent of the game. And though it is easy to dismiss the long-haired hippie types who dared mess with jazz, the fact is that the rockers had at least one big advantage.
For every Grover Washington, there was a Joni Mitchell. For every Weather Report, there was a Blood, Sweat and Tears. Yet for every Miles Davis, there was a Frank Zappa. They remember the jazz musicians who crossed over to the rock and pop charts, but they forget the other side of the equation - the rock and pop acts who embraced the jazz idiom. When jazz fans look back at the fusion music of the late 1960s and 1970s, they tend to see only half of the picture.
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