> In any event, it died sometime in the mid-Seventies.
Myself, I'd date it to 1967, when Hendrix' "Are You Experienced?" and VU's "VU & Nico" came out. If I were a musicologist (or played one on TV) I'd say something profound about how Coltrane took the principle of instrumental variation to its logical limit, pushing beyond the vocabulary of late jazz modernism (the bebop ensemble) and landed on the lunar surface of studio production; the forces of aural production burst the shackles of monopoly-national instrumental forms, etc. Future musicians would take off from this lunar base on their way to the Crab Nebula, a.k.a. hip hop.
I keep hearing good things about Radiohead. Worth buying their albums?
-- Dennis