The Other Side of Fusion: Jazz Rock

The first generation of jazz rock musicians had been heavily influenced by some of the pioneering jazz musicians who forged jazz fusion, beginning with Miles Davis.  Miles was the first of the great jazz artists to venture into the new, amplified and electronic sounds of 1960’s rock music, and in doing it he recruited a number of very young, incredibly talented, and mostly unknown musicians who became giants in their own right,

As a number of jazz musicians embraced elements of rock music, rock’s audience re-discovered jazz.  Music is a living, breathing part of our culture, it is changeable in the hands of both listeners and players.  We take it up and use it as it gives us pleasure.  Just as jazz musicians were blending rock music into their art, rock musicians were equally influenced by jazz players, and they also added jazz elements into their own music. 

This is the first of a two-part deep dive into the world of jazz rock.  In this episode, you'll see how some of rock's greatest musicians have been influenced by jazz.  We'll also spend some time on a deeper dive into a few of the great jazz rock bands of the past, including Blood Sweat and Tears, and Chicago.  In part two, we'll come back and explore the music of Steely Dan, Traffic and Supertramp.  I think you'll enjoy it!

Music In this episode:

Weather Report: Boogie Woogie Waltz
The Grateful Dead: Help On the Way
John Coltrane: A Love Supreme
Duke Ellington: Take the A Train
The Modern Jazz Quartet: Bluesology
David Bowie: Life On Mars
Keith Richards: Blues Jam
Nat King Cole Trio: Straighten Up and Fly Right
Ornette Coleman:
Jimi Hendrix: South Saturn Delta
John McLaughlin: Devotion
Charlie Watts: All or Nothing at All
Tim Ries: Miss You
Ginger Baker's Air Force: Da Da Man
Miles Davis: Guinnevere
David Crosby: Amelia
Bob Dylan: Like a Rolling Stone
Blood Sweat and Tears: I Love You More than You'll Ever Know
Blood Sweat and Tears: God Bless the Child
The Buckinghams: Kind of a Drag
Chicago: Questions 67 and 68
Chicago: Make Me Smile
Chicago: If You Leave Me Now
Chicago: It Better End Soon
Chicago: Alive Again

Interviews in This Episode
Al Kooper
David Crosby
James Pankow
Danny Serafine

This episode is dedicated to the memories of:
Charlie Watts
Wayne Shorter
David Crosby
Thank you for all the beautiful music!

Transcript

Hello American Song listeners!  It’s been a long while since we’ve been together to listen to a new podcast and check out some great music and musicians.  I apologize for the delay in getting something new out for you, but for the last few months, I’ve been busy teaching a number of college classes at a local university near my home in Southern California.  With my course load and over 200 students, I just haven’t had the bandwidth to work on this project.  I hope you’ve all been well and that 2023 is getting off to a great start for you!

When we were last all together in July, I’d just produced a segment on jazz fusion.  As I rev the engines of my podcast once again this month, I’m heading into closely related territory and an exploration of jazz fusion’s cousin, jazz rock.  

The first generation of jazz rock musicians had been heavily influenced by some of the pioneering jazz musicians who forged jazz fusion, beginning with Miles Davis.  Miles was the first of the great jazz artists to venture into the new, amplified and electronic sounds of 1960’s rock music, and in doing it he recruited a number of very young, incredibly talented, and mostly unknown musicians who became giants in their own right, including John McLaughlin, who later was the leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea, whose work included not just fusion, and jazz rock, but almost every other western musical idiom of the 20th century.  Herbie Hancock – the great keyboardist, started out with Miles and later went on to have a huge career in Soul, Funk, trad jazz, and even hip hop.  Miles also recruited the composer and saxophone player, Wayne Shorter, as well as the pianist, Joe Zawinul, to play in his 60’s era Quintets.   One step removed from Miles, and maybe the greatest bassist of all time, Jaco Pastorius, set the art of jazz bass on its head during this short life, as a member of the jazz fusion band, Weather Report.  His influence on future bass players has been massive. 

Chick Corea: An American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and bandleader, Corea was also an early pioneer of jazz-rock fusion and his album "Return to Forever" is considered a classic in the genre.

In this way, the influence of jazz music was transferred to a new generation.  Miles’ vision, to breathe new life into an idiom that had begun losing its audience, succeeded.  As a number of jazz musicians embraced elements of rock music, rock’s audience re-discovered jazz.  Music is a living, breathing part of our culture, it is changeable in the hands of both listeners and players.  We take it up and use it as it gives us pleasure.  Just as jazz musicians were blending rock music into their art, rock musicians were equally influenced by jazz players, and they also added jazz elements into their own music.  

Nearly everywhere you look in rock, you’ll see artists who owe a debt to the jazz that came before it.  Rod Stewart names Al Jolson as his all-time favorite singer and has a deep love for the music of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. 

The folk-rock singer, Jewel, does a great homage to the late scat-singer, Ella Fitzgerald when she sings Cole Porter’s song, “Too Darn Hot”.   

Bob Weir, from the Grateful Dead, 

now leads jam band called Ratdog, and with Taj Mahal is composing a musical about the African-American baseball great, Satchel Paige. 

Weir’s said that in the composing it, he’s trying to quote a lot of old greats, like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan; people from Satchel Paige’s era.  The list goes on.

R.E.M.’s  guitarist,  Peter Buck, once said, “I’m a really big jazz fan, although I resolutely do not play jazz.  When I got [Miles Davis’s] In A Silent Way, I thought it was great. And then I got [John Coltrane’s] A Love Supreme. I was 16. The four minutes after the bass solo on A Love Supreme is my favorite music, ever. I listen to free jazz-Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, and some Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. That’s what I think jazz is.”

In another interview, Lenny Kravitz said, “I met Duke Ellington when I was a little kid, so I’m down with that. He was playing at the Rainbow Room in New York, and he and Paul Gonsalves played ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. It was my fifth or sixth birthday. He had long, white hair and a goatee. I knew ‘Take the “A” Train’ and a couple of the tunes, and I thought he was a nice man. But I didn’t know it was Duke Ellington ’til I grew older, and then it was like: ‘Oh shit!’

“My parents took me around a lot to hear music when I was young. I saw Duke, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Kenny Burrell, Miles, Ella, Lionel Hampton, Cleo Laine, Bobby Short. From the age of 6 to 9, these were the kind of acts I used to go see. And, at the same time, I’d got to the Apollo Theater with my mom and see the Jackson 5 when they were young. So I saw a lot of shit at a very young age, and that’s probably why I’m doing what I’m doing today, besides the fact I had it in me.

David Bowie once said, “Jazz was a music that seriously paralleled rock music for me when I was young, between 8 and 12. I don’t know why, but I really felt at home with modern jazz. I don’t know whether it was the clothes, but the Modern Jazz Quartet had a huge appeal to me. And because I liked what it looked like, I wanted to understand how it worked.  My father kindly got me a saxophone on what we call ‘hire-purchase,’ which was a little money down and then pay monthly for… 15 years! I got a white Ebonite saxophone; [top English jazz saxophonist] Johnny Dankworth used to play one. It was flashy, an alto, and it was a sax.  Jazz has inspired me, just by giving me an understanding that it’s okay to drift between the spaces created by the melody. The melody is a schematic, an outline for what you can do. Sometimes mistakes-or events one can consider mistakes-can actually be spontaneous impulses worth building on. The most important thing for me was [learning] that the spaces between the notes are where the action really is.”

About the influence that jazz had on his musical life, Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, said, 

“I grew up listening to the Nat ‘King’ Cole Trio, Wes Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, the lot. My mother was a jazz freak, so I had no choice! But there’s so much in rock ‘n’ roll related to jazz. And they’re both bastards of the blues anyway, which is at the root of them all.  We also listened to jazz because that was the only alternative music. We were stuck with just one radio station, the BBC, where we grew up. And, basically, you got a little bit of jazz here and there, some very good classical music and loads of very turgid, disgusting, middle-of-the road stuff. So you had to pick your spots.  I got turned on to Charlie Mingus at the same time I was listening to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters in 1958 and ’59, when I went to art school. Blues and Roots was the album that turned me on to Mingus. Jazz is something you grow up with, and you realize that there’s a strength in it. I mean, jazz is the best thing America did to the world! When I listen to Charlie Christian, I don’t think, ‘I’m listening to jazz.’ It goes beyond that; to me it’s all just music. You know, I hear blues in Mozart; good music is good music. Give me some of those [Louis] Armstrong cornet records from 1926, and, hey, you’re talking.

“Hearing Ornette Coleman [at Manhattan’s Five Spot in 1959] gave me license to kill. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I heard the show from in the club. I didn’t have enough money, so I heard it from outside. Having said that, Ornette’s free jazz made me think: ‘What a great thing to do on electric guitar!’ I thought a distorted electric guitar sounded like a sax or a sax section.

I was very much moved by that aesthetic, and moved for good.  The thing is, Ornette and his band members could read and write music, and I couldn’t. And they could really play their instruments, and I couldn’t. I wasn’t playing the guitar as a normal instrument, but as a feedback instrument. I thought, with a good sense of pitch, there were wonderful things you could do with it. And if you could be loose with it, you could generate a lot of stuff.”

So we’re on a journey to see how the way jazz’s influence on rock was expressed in the music we’ve loved.

Jimi Hendrix is the fountain head, out of which, generations of rock guitarists have flowed.  Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Joe Satriani, Prince, and David Gilmour have all referenced Hendrix as a major inspiration to their art.  So, is it surprising, that he won the jazz publication, Down Beat magazine’s Readers’ Hall of Fame vote in 1970?   Even though it was a posthumous award, he was the first non-jazz musician to do that.

You can hear the jazz connections from the very beginning of his recording career, Are You Experienced?   He did it within the structure of the day’s popular music, rooted in the rock, blues and R&B tradition.  On this track, Jimi re-defined the very essence of electric guitar.  He didn’t play it as a solo instrument in the jazz tradition, with single-note lines or even chorded passages, but as a source of elemental sound textures.  Like a painter with a vast range of neon colors, Jimi painted soundscapes using his array of feedback techniques.  In this psychedelic age, he created a good musical trip, instead of a nightmare.  In his own way, Jimi was performing a rendition of the wild sounds that were so important in New York City’s avant-garde jazz circles. He did it again in his composition, 'Third Stone From The Sun' and yet again, in the track “I Don’t Live Today”, Hendrix creates another musical melee, by abandoning traditional guitar picking and fretting and choosing amplified distortion and feedback, supported by the pulse of Billy Cox’s main riff pattern and Mitch Mitchell’s drums which were cut loose from keeping any specific metre.  This music, the child of rock and freeform jazz, was spectacular in its impact. 

In the rock category of his day, Hendrix was the only musician who had the chops to create music as adventurous and exciting as this.  However, as we saw in the jazz fusion episode, jazz musicians had been steadily adapting and integrating rock songs into their sets since the Beatles and Dylan had arrived.  But Hendrix’s music threw down the gauntlet, not just to the rock world but to the jazz one also.  In his later life, Miles talked about how James Brown, later Prince, and others had influenced his music.  Hendrix was the catalyst who provided the bridge between rock and jazz that Miles fully realized and led other jazz musicians over.

A lot of his jazz-influenced music has only been released in more recent years.  For instance, 

his composition, ‘South Saturn Delta', is a funky blend of  TV-show theme song, blues and jazzy funk. He plays guitar overdubs in a Wes Montgomery-style, and he added overdubbed brass section of two trumpets and two saxes. Towards the end of his blunted career, Jimi talked about wanting  to record with Gil Evans, Miles partner on albums like Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.  

In early 1969, Jimi invited a handful of young, inspirational jazz musicians to come jam with him.  Among them were Buddy Miles, Jim McCarty, Larry Young, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland and the horn section from the Buddy Miles Express. 

Of all these encounters, the most celebrated is the session with John McLaughlin. In more recent times, McLaughlin has remembered the gathering as an unstructured jam, where he, personally, played acoustic guitar (his instrument of choice at the time).  Although nothing directly came out of that jam, it does raise all kinds of ‘what if’ questions.  And there’s also the actual hard evidence of cross-fertilization to think about.  Concurrent with that jam, McLaughlin was in the midst of recording his album, Devotion, with Buddy Miles and Larry Young. In that music, you can hear the imprint Hendrix made on McLaughlin’s own genius;  spiky themes, diminished scales, intricate time signatures.  It’s all there.   Many people have wondered if this track, Devotion, if not the whole album, might not have been an homage to Hendrix, after his untimely passing.   McLaughlin double-tracks two solos, like Jimi would have.  The bluesy 'Dragon Song’ sounds like McLaughlin reached deep into Jimi’s tool kit, complete McLaughlin’s heavy  wah-wah peddle.  

Jimi also had plans to record records with Miles Davis and Tony Williams for Columbia and Reprise records but these plans never materialized before his death.  

Sadly, like the Gil Evans opportunity, the music Hendrix might have made with Miles Davis and Tony Williams is another musical mystery we’ll never uncover.  At least not until we get to enjoy that heavenly jam session in heaven.  

In the annals of classic rock, there have been many who were also inspired by jazz.  Charlie Watts comes to mind.  Just take a listen to Charlie, from his jazz solo album, Long Ago & Far Away, and a song called All or Nothing At All, a song originally recorded by the Harry James Orchestra.  Charlie Watts: All or Nothing At All

Tim Ries is a writer for National Public Radio, and a jazz musician who enjoyed a 20-year friendship and musical partnership with Charlie, up until Watt’s death last year.  We’re listening to their recording of the RS song, Miss You, from a jazz-cover album of Stones songs called “Stones World” now.  

In a tribute piece he wrote, Ries recalled this memory, “On nights when I didn't have a gig, Charlie and I would go see which jazz groups were playing at clubs and theaters in the cities our route took us through — not just New York but Chicago, Detroit, Melbourne, Sydney, Mexico City, Tokyo. He was famously indifferent to the glamour of the rock and roll touring life, but when he was on the jazz scene he was really in his element: He could hang with all the cats, because he was one of the cats. Still, even he could be starstruck from time to time. One night in Pittsburgh, we went to hear the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, which featured Frank Wess, James Moody and Jimmy Heath in the sax section. Backstage, Charlie was like a young boy again, in disbelief that he was standing in the same room as three of his heroes.” 

Like the Stones, Cream was another great ‘60’s era band with a huge debt to the blues – and we’ve talked a lot about how the blues and jazz are close cousins.  So, it’s no surprise to know that Ginger Baker was also a massive jazz fan.  In fact, in an interview, Baker once said, ““Cream was two jazz players and a blues guitarist playing improvised music,” Jack Bruce and I had been in jazz bands for years. We never played the same thing two nights running. All that stuff I did on the drums in Cream didn’t come from drugs, either. It was from me. It was jazz.”

In another interview, Baker said, ““I have been playing jazz ever since I started playing.  There is so much more freedom, thus more enjoyment, with each [player] encouraging others. It’s a very healthy situation.”  In 1970, after both Cream and Blind Faith had fizzled out, Graham started a jazz-rock band of his own called Ginger Baker’s Air Force, which also included Steve Winwood.  We’re listening to an live recording of his band playing a composition called “Da Da Man” in 1970.  Here’s Ginger to tell us about his early roots playing jazz.  

David Crosby’s guitar tunings, chording and vocal phrasing, and adventurous musical spirit were informed by jazz since his earliest days in the mid-’60s with the Byrds.    Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, and Bill Evans all figured prominently in  David’s constellation of Jazz Stars.  For example, in 1970, Miles Davis covered Crosby’s matchless ballad, “Guinnevere” and included it on his landmark album, Bitches Brew, which was covered in our last episode about jazz fusion.  His first hearing of Miles’ recording was at Miles’ home.  In an interview, Crosby remembered the occasion like this:

“Miles asked me “What do you think?” I said, “It doesn’t sound like ‘Guinnevere.’ There’s no recognizable part of ‘Guinnevere’ in there at all.” I was really disappointed. I was hoping he would do something far more normal. It’s a nice piece, but I told him he should change the name and get the publishing, which pissed him off. He threw me out. It was stupid on my part; it was an honor that he did it. One of the greatest musicians of our time chose to do my song and, in hindsight, it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”  And, according to Croz, the Byrds were signed to Columbia on Miles’ advice to the label.  Here’s Crosby talking about that situation:  

In recent years, Crosby also started a collaboration with Michael League, from the jazz group Snarky Puppy.  From Crosby’s album, Sky Trails, produced by League, here’s his cover of Joni Mitchell’s song, Amelia from her own very jazz-influenced album, Heijera.

Blood Sweat and Tears

During these same late sixties years, there were other rock artists chiseling out their own places in the musical pantheon.  Al Kooper was a session player who, by the end of the 1960’s, had played some of the biggest artists of the era.  

Al Kooper on playing w Dylan

His resume includes having played

·      organ on Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" (1965) and "Like a Rolling Stone"

·      keyboard on The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

·      guitar and organ on Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland"

·      organ on Cream's "Wheels of Fire" (1968)

·      organ on The Who's "The Who Sell Out"

·      keyboard on The Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"

·      organ on The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band" (1965)

·      organ on Johnny Winter's "Second Winter" (1969)

In 1968, Kooper hand-picked a number of musicians who shared a similar vision to create a rock/ jazz fusion.  Inspired by the "brass-rock" of the Buckinghams (they were a band from Chicago who’d had a big hit called ‘It’s Kind of a Drag”), as well as the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra.  

Kooper brought his bandmates, Randy Brecker and guitar/ vocalist, Steve Katz from the Blues Project into BS&T when the band was launched.  The Blues Project, from Greenwich Village,  only ever  recorded two albums, a live album and a single studio album, Projections and while their run was super short, at least it provided the runway for BS&T and on Projections, you can hear where Kooper was heading.  The music on Projections is a mélange of blues, R&B, jazz, psychedelia, and folk-rock. The centerpieces of the album were an 11-and-a-half minute version of Muddy Waters' blues standard "Two Trains Running" and an Al Kooper instrumental called "Flute Thing". With this first release, no American rock group ever started with as much daring or musical promise as Blood, Sweat & Tears, or realized their potential more fully -- and then blew it all as quickly.

Blood, Sweat & Tears took the jazz feel much further than Blues Project had.  Their sound is a blend of brass with rock instrumentation. They wrote their own compositions and also covered songs by James Taylor, Carole King, the Band, the Rolling Stones, Billie Holiday and many others. They also included elements from classical music, adapting music from Erik Satie, and Sergei Prokofiev into their arrangements.  

Child is Father to the Man, was a critical success, named Album of the Year in 1968 by Cash Box magazine, and the hit from the album, “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart that same year.   Despite their success, after the album’s release, Al Kooper, Randy Brecker and sax and flute player, Jerry Weiss,  left the band over creative differences with Bobby Colomby and Steve Katz.

This left the remaining two original members to pick up the pieces and assemble a new band.  The next album out was simply called Blood Sweat & Tears, and included a number of hits on it, including Spinning Wheel, a second version of You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, and “And When I Die”.  The public loved it, the critics, not so much.  In fact, Rolling Stone’s founder and journalist, Jon Landau wrote at the time that, "The listener responds to the illusion that he is hearing something new when in fact he is hearing mediocre rock, OK jazz, etc., thrown together in a contrived and purposeless way."  Maybe so, you be the judge.  Still, fifty-five years since the album’s release, it’s continued to sell and has now gone platinum four times.  What’s more, it’s been voted number 660 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums and is included in the 2006 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.  In 1969, the band headlined Woodstock and even won album of the year, beating out The Beatles’ Abbey Road at the 1970 Grammys.

English-born and Canadian raised, David Clayton-Thomas, followed Al Kooper as lead vocalist for the next three albums.  Clayton-Thomas started his musical career in the early 1960s, working the clubs on Toronto's Yonge Street, where he discovered his love of singing and playing the blues. During those very early years, Clayton-Thomas fronted a couple of local bands, first The Shays and then The Bossmen, who were one of the earliest rock bands with significant jazz influences.  

His real success came when he joined Blood, Sweat & Tears. The second album released in January 1969, was a change from the first album.  The sound was more commercial - smoother and more melodic than Child is Father to the Man. Also, by editing the album cuts to shorter, radio-friendly versions, they got a lot more airplay.  A few really big hits came from the album, such as this one - "You've Made Me So Very Happy,  This one, "Spinning Wheel, was also a huge success.  The LP also won the Grammy’s Album of the Year award.

Like the Buckinghams that I briefly mentioned a few minutes ago, this next band also hails from the Land of Lincoln.  Unlike the Buckinghams, most people have heard their music, in fact, the band, Chicago, is one of the longest-running and most successful rock groups in history.  

This self-described "rock and roll band with horns" started out to be a politically charged, sometimes experimental, rock band.  

We’re listening to a track from CTA called Questions 67 and 68.  This was Chicago’s jumping off point and their very first single.  Written by Robert Lamm, the song is about a relationship he had between 1967 and – you guessed it – 1968.  With what would become Chicago’s trademark use of brass, the song carved out a unique identify for the band from the very beginning.

Like most of the baby boomers though, they later softened, becoming pretty soft in the middle, with their heads in their bank accounts, still able to crank out hits, but without the fiery sense of urgency they’d had as young men.  Second only to The Beach Boys in Billboard singles and albums chart success, Chicago was the leading US singles charting group during the 1970s.  Over their entire career, Chicago has  sold over 38 million units.  Their albums have gone gold 22 times, platinum 18 times and multi-platinum 8 times.  If that’s not enough, Chicago’s had five number-one albums and 21 top-ten singles.

But they cooked in their early years!  They had a strong talent for writing a unique blend of rock with jazz overtones.  Let’s listen to their early hit, 25 or 6 to 4, from their second album, Chicago II, for an example. 

The guys all met while in college in midwestern universities; Loyola, Columbia College of Chicago, DePaul, and Kent State. They started off as a covers act, calling themselves the “Big Thing”, playing a set composed of Top 40 hits.  Being great players, they wrote their own extended arrangements – stretching their musical abilities. It wasn’t much of a leap from that to eventually writing their own songs.   This track off of Chicago Transit Authority, “I’m A Man”, is a cover of a Steve Winwood penned song which he wrote during his tenure with the Spencer Davis Group.  While it’s a cover, the band’s arrangement makes the song new again! 

Starting in 1968, they started playing under the name the Chicago Transit Authority, moved to Los Angeles, and signed a recording contract with Columbia.  The band’s manager, , James William Guercio, managed to convince Columbia to allow Chicago to debut with a double album -  unheard of for a new band at that time!  It was a top 20 success.

Between 1968 and 1970, the real CTA objected to the band’s use of the name, sued and Chicago droped the “Transit Authority” part of its name.  Chicago II was also a double album, this time reaching the top 5 position in the charts in the US and #6 in the UK.

About the first album, singer, keyboardist and composer, Robert Lamm has said, “We were fortunate that the first record captured the integrity and potential of a young band who were all about celebrating our talent. We had never had any aspirations to be rock stars. What we wanted to do was show off every aspect of what we could do as artists. We never held back on anything. The aim was always to express ourselves.”

Lamm, who composed many of the band’s biggest hits, including 25 or 6 to 4, Saturday in the Park, Beginnings, and Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is? , recruited the band’s phenomenal guitarist, Terry Kath, into the band in 1967.  Chicago Transit Authority had played a gig at the same club, Kath’s band, the Missing Links, played that night.  After hearing Kath play, he introduced himself began a very important relationship that led to Kath joining.  He soon became a very important member, contributing compositions, vocals, and his amazing guitartistry.  

Terry Kath was Chicago’s original lead guitarist and was also a mighty fine vocalist.  While his name is not as well known as some of the other rock Gods from the annals of Classic Rock, Kath’s name has achieved a kind of reverent respect music fans.  Walt Parazaider, Chicago’s original saxophone player, shared this story from the band’s early club-playing days in Chicago.  
 
 He said, “I felt a tap on my shoulder after playing a gig.  I looked around to see who it was, and there was Jimi Hendrix,” Parazaider said, smiling.

“He’d just watched us play our set.”  He said, “Walt, the horns are like one set of lungs, and your guitar player is better than me!”  That’s how good Terry Kath was.  He went on to be hailed by many as one of rock’s greatest – today, he’s a mostly “forgotten guitar god” who was “criminally underrated.”  Chicago’s trumpet player, Lee Loughnane says that, “Terry could play a rhythm guitar part, a lead guitar part and sing a lead vocal simultaneously. I’ve never heard anybody that could do that.”  Chicago got their big break when Hendrix asked them to tour with his band.  (CNN Films’ “Now More than Ever: The History of Chicago.”)

In a statement on Facebook, Jeff Lynne from ELO, wrote that Kath was “the fastest guitar player he’d ever seen.”  Joe Walsh, lead guitarist for the Eagles, and definitely no slouch himself, said that Kath “was one of the most underrated guitar legends of the ’70s.”

Soundgarden’s frontman, Chris Cornell, once described Kath as a vocal inspiration. Check out his singing on Make Me Smile for example. Make Me Smile

I personally think that Chicago did their best work through most of the 1970’s.  With each successive album, they continued to evolve as a unit, improve as musicians, and craft an increasingly wider pallete of musical textures.  

 “I was living with a bunch of hippies up above Sunset Strip. One of the advantages of this particular house was that I could look out over the city late at night. I wanted to try to describe the process of writing the song that I was writing. 

"So, 'Waiting for the break of day, searching for something to say, flashing lights against the sky' - there was a neon sign across the street. I looked at my watch; It was 25 or 6 to 4 in the morning.- I was looking for a line to finish the chorus.”

The song was also a vehicle to let Terry Kath let loose with a ripping wah-wah pedal focused guitar solo.   Just listen to this.   

In 2014, Guitar Player magazine called Kath’s work on another early cut, “Free Form Guitar”, “astounding.”  On Free Form Guitar, you can hear just how deft and agile he was.  His fretboard work, and use of effects were way ahead of his time. There are moments when he plays around with “two-handed tapping,”  a technique that wouldn’t really be seen again until Eddie Van Halen revolutionized guitar playing as the lead guitarist of Van Halen.  

The band had an amazing palette of colors they painted with.  They could be light and breezy, like this song, Saturday in the Park from Chicago 5, in 1972, or softly romantic, like on the classic, If You Leave Me Now, from 1976, on Chicago X,– to Vietnam protest songs like this one, It Better End Soon, from Chicago II, in 1970, or an exquisite love song like (I’ve Been Searching) So Long.

Tragically, Chicago’s rapid leap into the charts – right from the very beginning – nearly came to an end in 1978 when Terry Kath accidentally shot himself and died.  He’d been cleaning the barrel of the gun, having been careful to empty all the rounds.  Unfortunately, he forgot there was still one in the chamber, and in a moment of horseplay, pointed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.  He was dead instantly.

 Vowing to carry on, the remaining members convened in the studio to record what became their 10th original album, Hot Streets. “I think we realized that Terry was gone, but the rest of us were still alive and viable. Terry would have wanted us to continue.” Multi-instrumentalist Donnie Dacus picked up lead guitar duties that would have fallen to Kath. “The hardest thing was trying to replace Terry, which was impossible. So we did the best we could with it, and started writing music and going in to record.”

Let’s listen in as Chicago’s long-time drummer, Danny Serafine, talks about the period following Kath’s sad passing.