Not to interrupt your excellent post, which I loved, but it increasingly annoys me that people accept what I call the prevailing critical view for the past fifty years that what happened with jazz around 1960 was a split in two directions, one towards the avant-garde (Ornette Coleman's "harmelodics", Coltrane's modality, Archie Shepp's skronk, etc.) and one towards traditionalism, the same old guys playing the same old sophistimacated changes in the same old small groups. Because there was another way: soul jazz. I'm not talking about fusion or anything Miles or Herbie got up to with electric pianos and Fender basses further down the decade, but the exploration of the parameters of funk in jazz, mostly organ and/or guitar combos, guys like Ivan "Boogaloo Joe" Jones, Charles Earland, Reuben Wilson, and a bunch of others, most of them veterans of Blue Note and Prestige, or still recording for those labels. Avant-garde jazz captured the imagination of brainiac white critics, perhaps because soul jazz was "too black", not just the players themselves but the increasing association with themes of black liberation and black power, which someone with the spiritual aura of Coltrane could make palatable to white critics (especially rock-affiliated ones, who were always highly geared towards worshipfulness, no matter who the subject), but which maybe came across as separatist or angry in the climate of the times. For whatever reason the mainstream of white critics never talk about this music, whether jazz or rock-wanting-to-be-seen-digging-jazz. These artists, in retrospect, seem the most vital of all, at least to me, as they moved toward sounds and rhythms that informed not just fusion, but the high-charting jazz-funk-soul-pop sound of guys like later Benson and Turrentine and Hubbard, and the straight-up funk that took over the soul sound as the seventies wore on. For one thing, it was undeniably DANCE MUSIC, which has been frowned upon by jazz critics since the waning of the big bands (and even then, the critics weren't the ones dancing but the ones crowding around the soloists with arms every bit as folded and heads every bit as bobbing as any indie-rock fan today).

See, there's your coloring-over-the-lines Fnarf ramble for today. As you were.