IT IS to music that the most popular concept of the term ‘New Wave’ came to be applied. However, we should not limit the concept of New Wave music just to the specific pop sound that emerged beautifully at the beginning of the 1980s, since a large instrumental and jazz vocal sound emerged in the 1960s and fed some of the leading musicians of the best pop groups with the New Wave tone and eclectic content — groups like THE POLICE, TOTO, BLONDIE, DURAN DURAN, STEELY DAN, THE CARS, JOE JACKSON, MISTER MISTER, and CUTTING CREW.

Jazz influence
Before Rock music climbed to enormous popularity in the 1960s, it was Jazz that provided instrumental pleasure with an inventive lyrical edge; and before White Rock musicians began to extend the rhythms and sensual lyrics of the original Black Rock & Rollers like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, it was the new avant-garde jazz instrumental compositions like Charlie Parker’s ‘Night in Tunisia’,  Miles Davis’s ‘Seven Steps to Heaven’, or Telonious Monk’s ‘Straight, No chaser’ which indicated a direction towards exotic atmospheres and imaginative sound narratives, which later increasingly came to stamp New-Wave pop compositions with a more complex originality, distinguishing it from R &B, Soul, Rock, Disco, Reggae, or any of the recent Rap trends.

New-Wave sensitivity
Yet, there are individual instances where songs in those categories step across their generic line into the New-Wave sound. A most important aspect of the best New-Wave pop has been its soft and peaceful invitations, its tender, laidback sensitivity in lyrics and melodious beat.

We see this in classic New-Wave songs like JOE JACKSON’s ‘Steppin’ Out’,  BLONDIE’s ‘Rapture’ and ‘Call Me’, STEELY DAN’s ‘Aja’ and ‘Home at Last’, TOTO’s ‘Georgy Porgy’, or DURAN DURAN’s ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Save A Prayer’.

The style of music which preceded this is the 1960s/70s Brazilian Bossa Nova sound and sentiment as sung by ASTRUD GILBERTO, and later FLORA PURIM, as well as their Brazilian Bossa Nova instrumentalists like Joao Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, Sergio Mendes, and  Eumir Deodato.

New-Wave pop is a cosmopolitan product resulting from a fine eclectic mix, whose ingredients have almost vanished within to constitute a new, satisfying, homogeneous sound.

Jazz & New-Wave
Often, a New-Wave musical sound is arrived at when a familiar style of music transcends its familiarity and reorganizes its structure, not to become experimentally odd, but experimentally progressive in a structurally melodious way. After the rise of electric Rock in the 1960s, and the decline of Jazz, it was Jazz trumpeter/composer, Miles Davis who got the call to rejuvenate Jazz, and the result was the beginning of breakthrough Jazz albums like  ‘In a Silent Way’, ‘Bitches Brew’, ‘Jack Johnson’, and later ‘Amandla’, among others, which, with their cosmopolitan musicians, rearranged Modern Jazz along new rhythmic and melodious sound structures, and a whole new challenge to modern music on the whole was born.

The amazing Jazz groups that followed, formed by Davis’s brilliant side-men like Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Jack Dejohnette, were given the label, ‘Fusion Jazz’, but it was really New-Wave Jazz, a less restrictive, less trendy, and fleeting direction which defined it.

Similarly, in tropical California, the swinging, richly textured, melodious Jazz of the CHARLES LLOYD QUARTET, with influential albums like ‘Love-in’ and ‘Forest Flower’; and John Handy’s driving lyrical Latin-Eastern Oriental-cosmic Jazz, rode the New-Wave direction like no one else’s.

Behind the sustained accessible structural melodies of this Jazz was the clear, crisp magic formula of DAVE BRUBECK’s ‘Take Five’, which, not surprisingly, in the popular Utopian intelligence of the 1960s, miraculously topped the pop charts! It was the first time an innovative Jazz instrumental had done that!

Significantly, Brubeck and Davis had paid attention to old folk rhythms of their ethnic backgrounds in Europe and Africa to arrive at their successful recordings like ‘Take Five’ and ‘Kind of Blue’.

New-Wave progressions
New-Wave is, therefore, the shaping of the old into the new. In the best eclectic New-Wave Pop recordings, like TOTO’s ‘Africa’ and ‘Rosanna’, we see the influence of such melodious Jazz by these songs’ erasure of the strict compartments of Rock and Jazz.

A famous New-Wave band like THE POLICE, despite their first Reggae beats in a few songs, became loved mainly because of their poetic lyrics in their best songs like ‘Walking on the Moon’, ‘Do Do Da Da’, ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, ‘When The World Is Running Down’, and ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ reflect the group’s interest in the struggle to live as artists overcoming personal and social frustrations.

However, it is DURAN DURAN who best achieved the creative synthesis of New-Wave values in their lyrics, their sound, their videos, and fashion. No other pop band provided such unashamedly touching, poetically perceptive and romantically adventurous songs like ‘Planet Earth’ ‘Please Please Tell Me Now’, ‘Girls on Film’ ‘Save a Prayer’, ‘Union of the Snake’, ‘The Reflex’, and ‘New Moon on Monday’.

DURAN DURAN, perhaps because they had little training as professional musicians, but were aesthetes, simply put together a sound and a look influenced by the music, the personalities, the fine art and movies they liked; and because it was so genuine, sincere, and emotional even children were captivated.

BLONDIE, the leading American New-Wave band, had a sound that was so seductively pleasurable and ecstatic that Debbie Harry was easily the best New-Wave female vocalist.

Similarly, TOTO’s ‘I Won’t Hold You Back’, from their great ‘TOTO IV’ album, but also earlier songs like ‘I’ll Supply the Love’ and ‘Hold the Line’, are classics of emotional and powerful New Wave music.

BOB MARLEY’s ‘Could You Be Loved’ and ‘Misty Morning’ crossed beautifully into the New- Wave progression as well.

New-Wave singles
However, to sustain a New Wave sound is not easy; it is too informal and unique, so except for outstanding singers like CORONA, the Afro-Brazilian genius, who like CHIC and KOOL & THE GANG mastered stunning New Wave dance music, it is mostly individual songs that captured the ongoing New-Wave style.

LAURA BRANIGAN’s ‘Self-control’ is an example of New-Wave bohemian lifestyle evoked in a New York setting by an unforgettable, beautiful and sensual singer.

BALTIMORA’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ is another classic New Wave single, like ‘All That She Wants’ by ACE OF BASE, ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ by SNAP, ‘Broken Wings’ by MISTER MISTER, MICHAEL JACKSON’s ‘Off the Wall’ single, GINO VANELLI’s ‘Another Sunset on LA’, THE CARS ‘I Like the Nightlife’, and most of all, CUTTING CREW’s ‘I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight’ — an instant New Wave classic whose brilliant, punctuated arrangements of bass, keyboards, and drums take us back to the jazz influence in New Wave pop.

We cannot forget the huge Canadian contribution to New-Wave culture and songs, like ‘Echo Beach’ by MARTHA & THE MUFFINS, and CAROLE POPE’s ‘High School Confidential’, which are just samples.

The New-Wave style is not a passing trend, it is a creative value that we always need more of, because it is largely free of drug abuse, violence, and crudity.