Alrich, a musician himself, had a deep and abiding interest in both classic and avant-garde jazz forms and immediately began booking major jazz acts. However, the rise in jazz performance did not occur out of thin air, nor was it due solely to Alrich's personal taste. In fact, jazz performance spiked a year earlier, in 1975. Over the course of that year, a number of young artists began to embellish their rock performances with jazz aesthetics, leaning more heavily on improvisational passages and horn sections in ways that straddled the line between jazz and funk. Local bands that played together on bills and hewed to this developing jazz-rock or fusion aesthetic included Cool Breeze, Eric Johnson's Electromagnets, the Jazzmanian Devils, the Point, Starcrost, Steam Heat (later Extreme Heat), and 47 Times Its Own Weight, many of whom joined the roster of Michael Mordecai's Fable Records. The presence of this scene lent weight to Alrich's later decision to book more jazz acts and suggests a consistent, though admittedly small, audience for jazz.

After 1976, the calendar positively sparkles with jazz performance, including such legends as Count Basie, French violinist Stephane Grapelli, Sonny Rollins, and Charles Mingus, along with the pop jazz of Chuck Mangione and the kind of jazz rock associated with such progressive rock bands as Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Nova. Bookings even extended to the more difficult reaches of free jazz and jazz fusion with John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny, Old and New Dreams, and Weather Report. Alrich recalls that the Armadillo became one of the few venues between the coasts to book many of these artists: "When Carla Bley toured, Armadillo World Headquarters was the only Carla Bley Big Band gig between New York City and the West Coast scene.... I brought artists that nobody else in Texas brought. When I booked Pat Metheny, almost nobody outside the Northeast knew who he was." The presence of a jazz contingent among the Armadillo performers is surprising, in part, because it departs from the pastoralist romance that drew the Texan and American counterculture to both country and the blues.