page_title: Jethro Tull (band)
section_title: Roots to Branches and J-Tull.com: the world music influences (1995–2000)
hierarchical_section_title: Jethro Tull (band) / History / Roots to Branches and J-Tull.com: the world music influences (1995–2000)
caption_attribution_description: English: Jethro Tull in Jerisalem, 2007
context_page_description: Jethro Tull are a British rock band formed in Blackpool, Lancashire, in 1967. Initially playing blues rock and jazz fusion, the band later developed their sound to incorporate elements of hard rock and folk to forge a progressive rock signature. The band is led by vocalist/flautist/guitarist Ian Anderson, and has featured a revolving door of lineups through the years including significant members such as guitarists Mick Abrahams and Martin Barre, keyboardists John Evan and Dee Palmer, drummers Clive Bunker, Barriemore Barlow, and Doane Perry, and bassists Glenn Cornick, Jeffrey Hammond, John Glascock, and Dave Pegg.
  The group first achieved commercial success in 1969, with the folk-tinged electric blues album Stand Up, which reached No. 1 in the UK, and they toured regularly in the UK and the US. Their musical style shifted in the direction of progressive rock with the albums Aqualung, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play, and shifted again to hard rock mixed with folk rock with Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses. After an excursion into electronic rock in the early-to-mid 1980s, the band won its sole Grammy Award with the 1987 album Crest of a Knave.
context_section_description: Following a further, semi-acoustic 1992 tour (which included Dave Mattacks but not Andy Giddings, and which was documented with A Little Light Music, the band's second official live album), Anderson relearned how to play the flute (after his daughter, who took up flute classes at school, discovered that her father often used the wrong fingering) and began writing songs that heavily featured world music influences. However, the first Tull releases containing the "relearned" flute were the 1993 25th Anniversary Box Set which, as well as the remixes of classic songs and unreleased live material, included a whole CD of old songs from the band's entire career recorded by the current line-up, and the 1993 Nightcap compilation album containing unreleased studio material (mainly from the scrapped pre-A Passion Play album), with multiple flute parts re-recorded.
  Prior to the recording of 1995's Roots to Branches album, longstanding bass player Dave Pegg left the band, wishing to concentrate on Fairport Convention and not being keen on the world-music direction the band chose. Doane Perry (returning as the band's full-time drummer) recruited his friend and widely respected session bass player Steve Bailey to fill the gap: Ian Anderson, in turn, relinquished control of the rhythm section arrangements on that record, leaving them completely to Bailey and Perry. Despite his studio contributions, however, Bailey did not join the band, and Pegg's formal replacement as Jethro Tull bassist was Jonathan Noyce.
  Roots to Branches (1995) and 1999's J-Tull Dot Com were less rock-based than Crest of a Knave (1987) or Catfish Rising (1991). Songs on these albums reflect the musical influences of decades of performing all around the globe. In songs such as "Out of the Noise" and "Hot Mango Flush", Anderson paints vivid pictures of third-world street scenes. These albums reflected Anderson's coming to grips with being an old rocker, with songs such as the pensive "Another Harry's Bar", "Wicked Windows" (a meditation on reading glasses), and the gruff "Wounded, Old and Treacherous".
caption: Jethro Tull performing in Jerusalem, 2007
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