17 January : Where are They Going? Where Have They Come From?

The Tony Williams Lifetime released a double album, Emergency!, in the USA in 1969 but it didn’t get a UK release until 1970. Ahead of the UK release, Melody Maker of 17 January 1970 carried an interview with members of the band that covers one or two topics that will recur here throughout the year. The band were Tony Williams, drums; Larry Young, organ; and John McLaughlin, guitar.

The issue I want to pick up on today is that of genre. The bigger context is that Williams and McLaughlin were with Miles Davis on 1969’s In a SIlent Way, and Williams, McLaughlin and Young were all on 1970’s Bitches Brew. The directions taken by Davis and Williams left the critics scrambling for ways to explain what was going on. Later in the year there were questions about why Miles Davis had ‘gone pop’, which seems faintly absurd to us now but was serious then. Emergency! attracts similar questions.

The Wikipedia entry for Emergency! as at today, calls it ‘one of the significant jazz fusion recordings’ and says ‘the album has commonly been regarded as a pioneering, influential, and original album the the jazz, rock, and fusion genres.’

The interview with Tony Williams (by Richard Williams) starts off in the same vein, asserting that ‘the importance of the use of rock rhythms by the Miles Davis Quintet is only now beginning to be realised’. Richard Williams comments that jazz musicians incorporating rock elements are more exciting than rock musicians incorporating elements of jazz. Tony Williams was having none of it: ‘I’m not thinking of it in those terms. I’m thinking of it as playing the drums and using whatever sounds good. I know what you’re saying, but it’s really better not to talk about it.’

Listening to Emergency! (it’s all on Spotify) is recommended; 50 years on and it still sounds fresh. McLaughlin is too versatile a guitarist to get caught out in cliches, and Larry Young is doing stuff on the organ that too many people these days seem to think began and ended with Keith Emerson, but Young is much more harmonically interesting than Emerson. I’m also more and more inclined to side with Williams on his resistance to ‘genre’ thinking. As I’ve hinted in other posts, I recoil instinctively from the endlless proliferation of categories and subdivision imposed on art by armchair critics; it’s enough to say that this music still sounds vital and alive.