1980s and 90s New Revolution

The death of Miles Davis in 1991 seemed to mark the end of an era in jazz. His final album included a collaboration with a rapper, pointing to the coming dominance of rap and hip-hop in contemporary pop. By the turn of the century, jazz was a broad church; there were audiences and venues devoted to almost every form of the music, from New Orleans trad to free improv, while the number of jazz artists of interest to major record labels continued to dwindle.

The best-selling jazz artists of this period, such as David Sanborn, Kenny G, and Grover Washington, played an accessible form of jazz-fusion music, developing out of Miles Davis’ more challenging groups of the previous decade. Kenny G’s ‘smooth jazz’ stylings found a vast audience, selling 15 million copies of 1992’s ‘Breathless’ while attracting the contempt of many more accomplished jazz instrumentalists. The innovative and ever-developing Weather Report remained one of the defining bands of the era.
The avant-garde tradition of Coleman, Coltrane, and Ayler continued to produce distinctive new artists including David Murray, Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer, Dave Douglas and John Zorn, whose ‘Naked City’ record showed the eclectic reach of post-modern jazz. Clarinettist Don Byron produced a classic in his album ‘Tuskegee Experiments’, exploring historic racial injustice.
Something of a schism developed in jazz between the visions of these fiercely original players/composers and the neo-classicism of Wynton Marsalis, who proselytised his belief in the continuing centrality of the jazz tradition running from Armstrong, Ellington and Parker to the present. Wynton Marsalis’ influence was strengthened by his work for Jazz at the Lincoln Center, and many alumni of his bands went on to lead their own ensembles. Marsalis, too, explored racial injustice in his large scale work ‘Blood on the Fields’ which won a Pulitzer prize.

In the UK, a jazz revival was detected by the media, centred on the emergence of young Black British players including Courtney Pine, Gary Crosby, Julian Joseph, Steve Williamson and Orphy Robinson. Pine’s debut album ‘Journey to the Urge Within’ found itself in the top 40 album chart. Larger ensembles like the Jazz Warriors and Loose Tubes helped to find new audiences for jazz. Established artists continued to find it challenging to sustain a career in the UK, though, and often looked to the continent for larger audiences and more sympathetic promoters and broadcasters.

In the late 80s the Acid Jazz movement rediscovered jazz as dance music, and spawned a lively club scene in which DJs and live performers found a young audience unencumbered by jazz purism. Important voices emerged in European jazz, particularly on Germany’s ECM label and from Scandinavia; Jan Garbarek’s tenor playing combined sophisticated improvisation in the American jazz tradition with distinctive folk elements from his Norwegian background. The great Polish trumpeter Tomas Stanko did as a number of mature players did: from a background in free improvisation, he turned to a more composed and conventional style, which seemed to offer a summation of all the various strands in small group playing of the post-60s period, in music of great depth and dignity, such as ‘Litania’ (ECM).

In the 90s, jazz made new connections with popular music; some artists looked to pop for tunes that could become the basis of jazz variation – Herbie Hancock’s ’The New Standard’ group did just this, as did the Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau, among others. The ‘jam band’ phenomenon- improvising rock groups drawing on inspirations such as the Grateful Dead- found common ground with jazz; a leading example, Medeski, Martin and Wood, eventually teamed up with one of the major jazz guitarists of the period, John Scofield.
Younger singers who attracted audiences and record companies include Diana Krall and Cassandra Wilson, Bobby McFerrin and Kurt Elling; in Britain Ian Shaw, Leanne Carroll, Cleveland Watkiss and Stacey Kent led the way vocally. Carla Bley and Maria Schneider were among the arrangers who continued with large ensembles in the tradition of Gil Evans and George Russell, despite the daunting economic challenges of organising and touring such bands.

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