Back in 1968, the music scene was undergoing a revolution that had nothing to do with MP3, but the overall effects were just as far-reaching. Black popular music had been neatly divided by the music industry into jazz, blues, R&B, and gospel, but as more listeners (both black and white) discovered these segmented genres they began to be drawn together into a cohesive whole that threatened to create a new black identity in America. Jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Ramsey Lewis began to seek ways to bring blues and gospel back into jazz music. Jazz had been largely replaced by R&B as the music of choice among black listeners as the harmonic complexities of bebop and the emotional detachment of cool jazz took the music on a path that veered sharply away from its roots. In 1968 John Coltrane had already been dead for a year and Miles Davis released the album Miles In the Sky, the first of his albums to utilize electric guitar and Fender Rhodes electric piano. Cannonball Adderley and Ramsey Lewis had already had big chart successes with their recordings of “Mercy Mercy Mercy” and “The In Crowd.” Former Coltrane producer and Impulse! Records A&R man Bob Thiele founded a new label, called Flying Dutchman, with the express intention of producing a line of jazz-based records that would sell and be played on the radio. He also recorded a lot of favorite jazz artists, including a great many leading avant-garde players (Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp) and others (Oliver Nelson, Bud Freeman) who found themselves without recording contracts. In 1971 the label was acquired by Atco, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. Atlantic was well-known for its amazing jazz, soul, and R&B catalog compiled under the auspices of Neshui Ertegun, and Atco released its share of interesting items as well, such as the first few Dr. John albums. So it should come as no surprise that many of Flying Dutchman’s most interesting experiments came about during this time period. In 1976 the label was taken over by RCA, who had signed their share of soul music acts as well. Flying Dutchman continued to release records until the early 1980s and amassed an amazingly diverse catalog, most of which is currently out of print.

Thiele was, of course, not the only one to believe in the commercial potential of jazz/funk/soul in the early 1970s. Creed Taylor, who had come up with the concept and branding of the Impulse! Label to begin with, did similar things with his CTI and Kudu labels, and there were others, including Cadet, Buddah, and Milestone. Thiele and Taylor were undoubtedly the most successful and ultimately Flying Dutchman retained a grittier edge and seemed to come closer to capturing this groundbreaking era in the history of Afro American popular music.

Unfortunately, the Empire did strike back. The creative impulses that brought avant-garde and electric jazz into being were diverted into the music industry’s concept of “jazz rock” and then “fusion” which quickly descended into a quagmire of technically proficient but soulless recordings. Funk and soul music were co-opted and turned into disco and “urban contemporary” formats, both of which were friendlier to radio and white record buyers than their more authentic counterparts. When a new generation of jazz musicians pointed to the appalling spectacle that fusion had become towards the end of the 1970s they were able to rewrite history and move jazz music back to the period immediately before the advent of this exciting music. Interestingly they were aided and abetted in this effort by Stanley Crouch, whose recording Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight was released by Flying Dutchman.

But someone was listening to what had been accomplished during the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-80s a club scene had grown up around a deep appreciation of the 1970s catalogs of Flying Dutchman, CTI, and Blue Note Records in the UK and some European cities. Rare vinyl copies of these recordings went for large sums of money and were spun at clubs by DJs who were not even born when they were originally recorded. Similar things happened in the U.S. with the advent of hip-hop and DJ culture, and soon this vastly underappreciated and underdocumented period of American music began to seep into the public consciousness. We seem to have entered a new period of experimentation, particularly with jazz musicians like Matthew Shipp, Erik Truffaz, Dave Douglas, and others who are willing to pick up the discarded threads of this fruitful merging of artificially separated musical styles.

With the increasing popularity of these musical styles and a wealth of material in the vaults, it seems only natural that RCA’s resurrected Bluebird label should test the waters with a couple of compilations that collect some of the best Flying Dutchman material from the 1969-1975 period. Both Flying Groove and Flying Funk are described as “Rare Grooves and Jazz Classics from Flying Dutchman, Bluebird, and RCA” and their content is quite similar. Taken as a pair, there is a wealth of history here that should appeal to jazz fans who love R&B and soul music as well as to fans of R&B and soul who also enjoy jazz.

Flying Groove gets off to a an intense start with the Gil Evans Orchestra’s version of the Jimi Hendrix tune “Crosstown Traffic.” The band is made up of fantastic musicians, with the vocal credited to trumpet player “Hannibal” Marvin Peterson. To some this big band jazz/rock approach may sound dated, but as usual Evans’ arrangement is exceptionally well executed and the group actually does rock. Guitar work is credited to Keith Loving, Ryo Kawasaki, and John Abercrombie, so I’m not sure who does the solo work, but it is good despite not being as innovative as that of Hendrix (surprise!) A number of big band leaders attempted to appeal to younger audiences (often quite successfully) by using electric guitar and playing arrangements of popular rock tunes, but few were as convincing as the Evans Orchestra is here. Next up is sax/flute player Harold Alexander with a group that includes bassist Richard Davis and drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, a veteran of recordings by artists as diverse as King Curtis, Donny Hathaway, Tom Jones, and Steely Dan. “Mama Soul” is just a funky blues featuring Alexander doing some outrageous flute vocalese a la Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Singer Esther Marrow checks in with a vocal rendition of Joe Zawinul’s composition “Walk Tall (Baby That’s What I Need)” that shows just how closely jazz musicians were influenced by blues and gospel at the time.

Of course, not every experiment or attempt to update a group’s sound can be successful, and the Lambert, Hendricks, and Bavan track “Yeh-Yeh” is a prime example. Recorded in 1963 at Newport, it comes off as one of those “hep” groups on an episode of the Flintstones (the Way Outs or the Beau Brummelstones) despite the solo turns of Coleman Hawkins and Clark Terry. Nothing else here is quite that egregious, but Tom Scott’s “Head Start” also sounds pretty dated, like something from an episode of “Mannix.” There are, however, some truly groundbreaking tracks here. Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” recorded in April 1971, is definitely one of the blueprints for rap music. There were precedents—the Last Poets released their first album in 1970—but “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” comes across as the ultimate link between the jazz/Beat poetry of the ‘50s and early ‘60s and the hip-hop/rap of the late ‘80s and 1990s. The group playing behind Scott-Heron is most certainly a jazz group, including the flute of Hubert Laws, Bernard Purdie on drums again, and Miles Davis veteran Ron Carter on bass and electric bass (interesting, since it is often assumed that one reason Carter left Davis was because he didn’t want to play electric bass). But they play the most righteous funk/soul beat you’ll ever hear, which is surely one reason for the track’s success. The lyrics are fiercely funny, recalling a time when social commentary could use such effective tools as sarcasm and outright humor and actually reach people.

>>Continued