When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock

by Matt Brennan

In an essay on the future of jazz penned in 1955, Duke Ellington suggested that the new music called rock 'n' roll “is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt.” So why did jazz and rock become separate genres when they shared so many similar musical and cultural characteristics? The rift between jazz and rock - and jazz and rock scholarship - is based on a set of received assumptions as to why jazz and rock are different. In When Genres Collide, Matt Brennan argues that there are other ways popular music history could have been written (and has been written) that call the oppositional representation of jazz and rock into question. The book challenges the traditional divide between jazz and rock by going back to how they were first covered in the two oldest surviving and most influential jazz and rock periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. It examines afresh the critical moments in history when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided in dramatic ways. Ultimately, the book shows how music critics gradually constructed a divide between the two genres that would be replicated for decades to come in both music journalism and music scholarship. This book will be valuable to the fields of both popular music studies and jazz studies, and in fact aims to bridge a gap between these two musical worlds.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2017

About the author

Matt Brennan writes books about music. His latest book, "Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit" (2020) was hailed as "compulsory reading" by Bill Bruford. His previous book "When Genres Collide" (2017) was named as one of Pitchfork's "Favourite Music Books of 2017" and was shortlisted for "Best Music & Performing Arts" book at the 2018 PROSE Awards. By day, Matt is Reader in Popular Music at the University of Glasgow. By night, he plays in a one-man band called Citizen Bravo.

Reviews

[Paul Sharp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and thought provoking review of the history of Jazz and Rock criticism through the history of Down Beat and latterly Rolling Stone and up to the early 70s with passing reference to other music journalism periodicals of the time as well as the shifting views and opinions of how Rock (n Roll) fitted or did not into the Jazz scene through the 40s, 50s and 60s. I am by no means a scholar of the genre(s), but found much of interest and to explore further.

[Agustín Armellini Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What I hope to have demonstrated is merely that music genre discourses did not emerge organically but rather were surprisingly unstable, and remain in a process of negotiation: researching the history of the music press and its legacy in popular music scholarship allows us to bring those rough edges to the surface and reconsider current genre boundaries and rules. I suggest that this is of particular importance when studying the relationship between jazz and rock, because the discourses of both of these genres tend to operate with an all-encompassing logic.”

I find it really curious how genres emerge. It is not only the anatomy of the music that defines them —probably in some cases that’s the least important attribute— but the people that listen to them, the movements that they influence, the supporting press that starts drawing the boundaries between them. Rock and jazz have been at points where it would be hard to distinguish if a song was from one genre or the other by only looking at how they sound. Artists from both genres appeared in both Down Beat and Rolling Stone at that point, the only difference being the audience at which those magazines were targeted to.

There is so much more to music than just the sound of it; what it represents, who it represents! Capturing that in services like Spotify or Youtube is damn complicated! But at the same time so crucial to help people discover and engage with new music. Try to answer to the question of what a recommendation is. It involves sharing new songs that someone thinks are similar to what they already listen to. But what do we mean by similar? Same band playing? Same instruments? Same rhythm? And what about the social part of it? Is it similar because similar people that share the same values also listen to it? Is it similar because it reminds you of that same memory from when you were 15? Is it similar because they have the same genre? Maybe your concept of similarity also evolves with time; most probably it does! Then how do we cluster these similarities to be able to discover great music? What are the links between the songs that we like? What are the boundaries?

The complexity of the problem is just fascinating. It requires a deep understanding of what music means to us, and most of the time that is something that even ourselves can’t define.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, will probably pick up again eventually. Would suggest to anyone interested in popular music history, music journalism, and the struggles of genre definitions/conventions/fusion, or who just wants a thorough and unique overview of 1920-60’s jazz history and early rock history. Learned a lot about the politics of popular music journalism that I would’ve never considered otherwise. Writing is academic but very accessible.