ABSTRACT
The main concern of the following pages will thus be to outline how and why certain kinds of music were attributed an unprecedented social and cultural significance from the Jazz Age until the late 1970s, at least in the North Atlantic world. The chapter looks at how its appeal changed significantly, when jazz, and later rock, were transformed from scandalons into art forms. Ironically, it was specifically the psychedelic rock of the hippy culture that though it aimed at creating communal experiences through music, drugs, and sex actually made the public musically passive, and thus reinforced the barrier between the musician as an artist and the musician as a genius. In West Germany, France, and the British Canterbury scene, where jazz-rock was picked up by musicians originating from psychedelic and youth revolt milieus, it became the soundtrack of the 'Freak Left' counterculture, with its own small festivals, which were sometimes raided by the police.
