Oracle - Gary Peacock and Ralph Towner (1994)

I’m not sure if I’ve talked about it on Substack yet, but on the blog I keep a tag to track my contention that 1994 was the best year in music history. There was just so, so much music, in so many different genres, all exploding and innovating and spilling over into the mainstream at the same time. My attitude is largely to do with 1994 also being one of my most formative years as a music listener, of course, but I still think it’s a defensible position to take.

Unfortunately, for all the explosive growth in many genres in the early 90s, the state of jazz in 1994 was kind of a disjointed mess.

It wasn’t that there was no new jazz, but it all seemed confined to the already-defined lanes it had been in for 20 years. Fusion artists played more fusion, post-boppers played more post-bop, free jazz guys played more free jazz.

There were plenty of changes coming, but things like David Sanchez’ modern latin jazz and Medeski, Martin, and Woods’ more dance- and rock-conversant grooves were just things you heard about through the grapevine if you weren’t living at the center of the jazz world.

This one is a great album, but kind of part of the malaise I’m talking about. In this case, Peacock was a veteran of “ECM jazz”, the chill style of melody-conscious jazz centered around the ECM record label. It wasn’t simply easy listening. There were some furious and complex players on ECM like Pat Metheny, Jan Garbarek, and Paul Motian. But there was an emphasis on more conventional listenability and emotional expression that defined a lot of ECM records that made it very much a particular style of jazz.

The label and its associated sound had been around since 1969, so this was yet another already-existing lane that seemed commercially hard to break out of. Peacock was a master of the form, and his interplay with the expressive sound of Towner’s guitar is fantastic.

My point is not that this isn’t a great record. It’s just an example of how the explosion that was happening in hip hop, rock, R&B, and country at the time was a little late coming to the jazz world.