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Jim Morrison - An American Prayer

Live performances show an equally important, but typically neglected, side of smooth jazz. Live performances enable performers to extend solos, interact with each other, and communicate directly with the audience. While recordings are a useful source for musical analysis, smooth jazz, like other styles of jazz, is an improvisatory music that utilizes multiple sites of production and cannot be accurately judged on recordings alone.

Each of these performance sites hosts specific kind of dialogues. Using genre studies borrowed from literary, popular music, and jazz scholars, I examine these unique interactions based on audience expectations. I argue that audiences expect different musical, social, and physical gestures according to each performance site. These expectations can be complied with, bent, or broken.

Many critics, scholars, and musicians have dismissed smooth jazz as a distant and unappealing offshoot of mainstream jazz, a synthetic and soulless commercial enterprise, or simply as a style not worthy of consideration. My experience with this style has shown that there is as much validity in smooth jazz as there is in any other jazz style. In fact, the disdain that mainstream critics and scholars have for smooth jazz has fueled my interest. After all, the mainstream jazz community has historically expressed contempt for swing, bebop, soul jazz, hard bop, funk, rock and roll, and fusion. My intent is not necessarily to place smooth jazz within the standard jazz narrative but to show that peripheral or scorned jazz styles merit examination.
Source: Caught Between Jazz and Pop: The Contested Origins, Criticism, Performance Practice, and Reception of Smooth Jazz by Aaron J. West


Jim Morrison - An American Prayer
  • Release Date :November, 1978
  • Written by: Jim Morrison
  • Genre: Pop/Rock, Spoken Word

"The Doors were born when Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek who met again, unexpectedly, during the summer of 1965. Morrison was invited to join Manzarek’s group, Rick and the Ravens, on the strength of his poetry. Robby Krieger and John Densmore, who’d played together in the band Psychedelic Rangers, were recruited soon thereafter."

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