The 1970s has been a vexed and vexing decade in the field of jazz studies, as it has been in other areas of historical and cultural analysis. As a relatively proximate "time of great uncertainty," as Beth Bailey and David Farber note, we still struggle to make sense of it. The decade suffers as well from its comparison to the 1960s, as we often assume it lacks the "passion, grandeur, and tragedy" of its temporal predecessor. 1 Yet the 1970s still carry the weight of many of the unresolved issues that came to the fore during the 1960s. In other words, even as the 1970s remain somewhat marginal in the historical imagination (if not in popular music and visual culture at the present moment), the interpretations that do exist are often saturated with strong feelings, pro and con, about the 1960s. The relationship is made ever more complicated by the fact that social transformations do not adhere neatly to decadal transitions. One can argue, for example, that the 1960s, if defined by its more radical social and cultural movements, ran from about 1965 to 1975; with the 1970s, as an uncertain period marked by reaction to that which preceded it, following for the next five, ten, or even fifteen years. Musicians, critics, and fans affiliated with jazz had their share of uncertainty during the 1970s, as phenomena that had emerged or been exacerbated during the previous decade continued. Declining record sales, club closures, and racial tensions were among the many issues that caused hand wringing about the state of the art form and its future. The variety of musical fusions and experiments that emerged at the end of the 1960s or during the 1970s caused much consternation as well, inspiring Duke Ellington in 1973 to put a somewhat different spin on his long-standing suspicion of the term "jazz": "I don't know how such great extremes as now exist can be contained under the one heading." 2 The 1970s often fare poorly in this century's jazz histories. The decade is sometimes viewed as a period defined more by its aesthetic failures than by its successes or simply as a moment when "nothing was happening" in the music. This is evident, among other places, in Ken Burns's much-celebrated and much-pilloried 2001 film, Jazz, which proclaims the music dying along with Ellington and Louis Armstrong in the early part of the decade, and then the film's audience hears that the music is officially pronounced dead by Miles Davis in 1975. According to this documentary's