Although the jazz world was unaware of the fact, by the early 1960s its last period of cultural ascendancy was coming to an end. Within a few years, and especially after the stunning impact of the Beatles on the USA in 1964, rock would begin to take the place of jazz in all the culturally prestigious areas in which jazz had seemed to be the most expressive and important modern popular musical form. Jazz was still heard up to the mid-1960s, for instance, in film music, but rock would soon take over this function, as it would a few years later take over the job of being the most creative, even avant-garde and experimental musical form, suitable for expressing the radical political and artistic notions that swarmed around the upheavals of the late 1960s.

For jazz musicians, the Beatles and everything that followed them were an economic disaster. The bottom fell out of the jazz business within a very short time, and the slump lasted until well into the 1980s. The established US stars carried on unaffected by this, but the most dramatic change for the average jobbing jazz player was the loss of the prospect of steady work in clubs and bars, and employment in bands providing music for TV and radio, advertising jingles, stage shows and the like, as the public preference changed once and for all towards a rock-flavoured music.

But jazz left its trace, even on the music, art and poetry of the late 1960s that seemed in some ways to be its antithesis. The cultural scene that followed jazz would not have been as it was without the presence of jazz just a few years earlier. Some of the artists concerned, notably Adrian Henri, acknowledge the direct influence of jazz on their work; but the more pervasive influence of jazz is found in the general mindset that the jazz scene had created when it was alive, visible and important.

Jazz had different identities in its international, national and local (in this case Liverpudlian) settings.