Oh dear me. What a touchy area. Certain Jazz purists, mostly African-American, I think, believe that Jazz is just…. hmmm…. I know it when I hear it—the traditional stuff that is straight jazz. It could be inside or it could be outside, but anything mixed with rock or anything else; and anything that does not come steeped in the tradition—don’t you dare call it jazz. People can be very touchy about that.
So my band, even though it was playing music written by someone who had played with all the greats—he wouldn’t let us call it jazz. We played, he said, “in the jazz idiom.”
I guess it’s a political kind of thing. It might be a kind of cultural protection thing. African-Americans don’t want icons of their culture appropriated by whites any more than Native Americans want whites to steal sweat ceremony.
I think it is appropriate to acknowledge the roots of what you are doing, and to separate what you are doing from those roots. It is a gesture of respect to not call it jazz.
And yet, in my mind, what I do is jazz. It is based on the improvisational principles of jazz. Yes, we stretch it and take it into our “white” kinds of places, but we know where it comes from, and the essence of music, anyway, it fusion. It is all about the clash of cultures and the melding of cultures.
I am not going to tell you what I think you should do in terms of what you call what you do. I do think you should acknowledge the history of where your music comes from. Although it’s kind of absurd, because where does rock come from? It’s as if something branched off and then comes back to the family, and because it branched off, it can no longer be considered part of the family.
Anyway, I could be wrong about this, but that’s my perception of what is at play, here.