Straight-ahead jazz


Straight-ahead jazz refers to jazz music that eschews the rock music influences that began to appear in jazz during the late 1960s. Instead, performance relies on walking bass and swinging ride patterns. AllMusic describes how, according to purists, jazz fusion was not "real" jazz, and straight-ahead jazz came to describe music that did not employ fusion's innovations, such as rock beats and electric instruments. Tanner, Gerow and Megill trace the "straight-ahead" aesthetic back to the hard bop era, after which some musicians would continue to be guided by jazz tradition when faced with boundary-pushing innovations.. By 1980, Wynton Marsalis had become widely associated with the straight-ahead concept.