Out of the Ashes of the Seventies: Cirith Ungol and Grover Washington Jr.

The late 1970s were a hinge moment in popular music. The cultural wave that had carried arena rock, soul, disco, and progressive experimentation was breaking against the shore of a new decade. Punk had already swung its wrecking ball. Heavy metal was taking on a darker edge. R&B was recalibrating itself in the aftermath of disco’s spectacular collapse. What makes this period so rich is not just the high-profile bands who defined the transition, but the artists working slightly off the mainstream radar—those who absorbed the moment’s energies and carried them into new terrain. Two such figures, seemingly worlds apart, were Cirith Ungol and Grover Washington Jr.

On the surface, the connection between a cult heavy metal band from Ventura, California, and a Philadelphia-bred jazz saxophonist might seem tenuous at best. But if we look closer, both represent how musicians at the margins of the late ’70s scene found ways to repurpose fading sounds into something startlingly fresh.

Cirith Ungol: Heavy Metal’s Outsider Architects

Formed in 1971, Cirith Ungol took their name from Tolkien but their sound from the molten overlap of hard rock, doom, and proto-metal. By the late ’70s, the musical landscape was dominated by stadium-filling giants like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith. At the same time, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) was brewing across the Atlantic, pointing toward faster, more aggressive forms.

Cirith Ungol didn’t fit neatly into either box. Their music, first documented on the independently released Frost and Fire (1981), was too jagged, too grim, too strange to compete with polished arena acts. Yet it was also too steeped in American hard rock tradition to fully align with British contemporaries. Tim Baker’s shrill, theatrical vocals and Jerry Fogle’s molten guitar tone pushed them into a territory that felt medieval, apocalyptic, and defiantly out of step.

What made Cirith Ungol vital was precisely this refusal to sand down their edges. They carried forward the occult heaviness of Sabbath, the fantasy-infused epics of Uriah Heep, and the underground ethos of Blue Öyster Cult—but they stretched it into something slower, more forbidding, and more cult-like. In hindsight, they helped lay the groundwork for doom and epic metal scenes that wouldn’t fully bloom until the late ’80s and ’90s. They were preservationists and innovators at once, soldering together the ruins of ’70s hard rock into a template that future generations would rediscover.

Grover Washington Jr.: Smooth Cool After the Disco Crash

At the very same time Cirith Ungol were chiseling their obsidian monument, Grover Washington Jr. was carving out a different kind of niche. By the late ’70s, disco’s dominance had curdled into backlash. The “Disco Demolition Night” in 1979 symbolized not just the end of a fad, but a crisis in R&B, funk, and jazz crossover styles. Many musicians faced a choice: retreat into tradition or risk irrelevance.

Grover Washington Jr. took a third path. Already a respected jazz saxophonist, he leaned into smoother, groove-oriented playing that drew from funk’s rhythmic pulse and soul’s melodic warmth. Albums like Mister Magic (1975) and Winelight (1980) showcased his ability to thread jazz improvisation into radio-friendly textures. His hit collaboration with Bill Withers, “Just the Two of Us,” became a touchstone not of disco excess but of post-disco sophistication—a sound equally at home on late-night FM stations and in the background of cocktail lounges.

To some critics, this “smooth jazz” turn was a dilution. But in reality, Washington was pioneering a genre that offered both accessibility and subtle virtuosity. He translated the sensuality of ’70s R&B into a cooler, more elegant idiom that resonated with audiences exhausted by the over-saturation of disco but still hungry for groove. Like Cirith Ungol, he took what the decade left behind and pushed it forward into uncharted space.

Parallel Paths, Divergent Worlds

What ties Cirith Ungol and Grover Washington Jr. together is not musical similarity but cultural positioning. Both operated slightly outside the main current, synthesizing fragments of ’70s styles into sounds that would resonate more fully in hindsight than in their own moment.

Cirith Ungol absorbed the hard rock excesses of the ’70s and hardened them into a darker alloy, foreshadowing doom and epic metal.

Grover Washington Jr. absorbed the rhythmic sensuality of disco-era R&B and refined it into smooth jazz, creating a genre that would dominate soft-focus radio in the ’80s and beyond.

Both artists were underrated because they didn’t fit prevailing narratives. Cirith Ungol were too weird for mainstream metal and too early for doom’s revivalist cults. Washington was dismissed by purists who equated smoothness with compromise. And yet both proved enormously influential: Washington essentially invented a radio format, while Cirith Ungol inspired legions of underground bands who saw in their work a blueprint for epic heaviness.

Conclusion: The Undercurrents of Transition

The late ’70s weren’t just about punk’s fury, disco’s collapse, or arena rock’s bombast. They were about the undercurrents—those musicians who absorbed the shards of a collapsing era and shaped them into something enduring. Cirith Ungol and Grover Washington Jr., as different as they were, both exemplify this process.

One gave us molten fantasy metal forged in the fires of hard rock’s decline. The other gave us the cool glide of smooth jazz, a balm after disco’s burnout. Both stand as reminders that the true innovators often move in the shadows of history, where genres fracture, mutate, and find their next form.

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