Musicians like Hendrix wrenched jazz from its historical setting. In part the changes that they brought to jazz reflected larger social and cultural changes with black communities in the United States: As these communities changed so did the music that black musicians and black audiences (as well as the increasingly non-black element of the jazz world) change as well. But the changes brought about in jazz in the middle decades of the last century were also driven by new technologies, not simply new epistemologies. Jazz as sung and played by Hendrix and Davis and their peers owed its existence to the same cultural and social changes that would bring about the Civil Rights Movement – and to the Fender guitar, the stomp box, and the wondrous aural pleasures of distortion.
