Historical and Social Development

The development of ‘jazz’ can be traced from early ‘black’ folk music in America. Originally jazz was dance music: a combination of ragtime piano style with blues, spirituals and the brass music of marching bands common at the start of the twentieth century. Soul also developed out of R&B fused with gospel music. Funk and rap followed. It is also around these styles that acid jazz was developed.

The founder of Acid Jazz Records, DJ Gilles Peterson was thought to be the first to coin the phrase ‘acid jazz’, as a response to the new acid house music that was developing in the UK in the late 80s. Although Peterson named this new style, he didn’t really create it. Similar sounds were already occurring in clubs in the UK. These sounds were often called ‘rare grooves’, and were generally reworked old funk tracks. Therefore the music was already being heard although it was not very well defined. The acid part of acid jazz has nothing really to do with the style, and has no connotations to the hallucinogenic drug LSD, as with acid house for example. The acid prefix was possibly used to simply revitalize jazz for youth, as it did with house music. The crucial fact is simply that Acid-Jazz was named after another dance music style as a way of incorporating it into the club scene.

Mark Lovett of the ‘Acid Jazz’ label in Australia said, “Acid Jazz has brought people back to jazz clubs”. According to ‘Thom Stewart’, an acid jazz critic, he says, “…I think it is more the case that it has brought jazz into the clubs (looking past the ‘true’ jazz clubs that still support the bebop sound, and are predominantly listening venues).” In any case the key word involved is ‘jazz’, therefore indicating that acid jazz is really just a continuation and development of the same style (jazz), to suit a more modern audience.

As jazz music was ‘reborn’ into acid jazz in the early 1980s, DJs constantly sought influence from earlier funk, soul and jazz, but over time acid jazz distinguished itself more with its own composition and sampling techniques. Early acid jazz often used ideas and phrases from famous old jazz works, for example, Cantaloop by US3, which uses the material from Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island. As acid jazz developed it involved more original work and less recycled material. For example, the modern mainstream acid jazz group, ‘Jamiroquai’, writes completely original songs.