was not a commercial success, however, and only sold 75,000 copies by October 1969. Legacy and influence Song of Innocence was one of many concept albums recorded as rock music was developing in various directions during the late 1960s, following in the wake of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was innovative for its original application of both rock and jazz techniques. According to music journalist Zaid Mudhaffer, the term "jazz fusion" was coined in a review of the record when it was released. Axelrod followed the album in 1969 with the similarly Blake-inspired Songs of Experience, which adapted Gunther Schuller's third stream concept to baroque orchestrations and rock, pop, and R&B rhythms and melodies. Both albums established Axelrod as an unpredictable, challenging conceptual artist. His instrumental interpretations of Blake were the first in jazz, followed in 1971 by Rafał Augustyn's Niewinność and Adrian Mitchell's musical Tyger: A Celebration of William Blake with composer Mike Westbrook; Westbrook later composed more Blake-inspired works, including The Westbrook Blake: "Bright as Fire" (1980). During the late 1990s, Axelrod's records were reassessed and considered innovative by critics, including Song of Innocence, which was regarded as a classic. Mojo cited it as "the heart of Axelrod's legacy", while John Mulvey from NME called it "sky-kissingly high and divine", finding Axelrod versatile enough to "soar above his own pretensions", Writing for AllMusic, John Bush said the album "sounded like nothing else from its era", while Thom Jurek argued that it continued to sound new upon each listen due to a lack of "cynicism and hipper-than-thou posturing" in the music. In a four-and-a-half star retrospective review, Jurek said it was innovative in 1968 and still "withstands the test of time better than the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album that allegedly inspired it". Giving it a five-out-of-five score, Tiny Mix Tapes said it sounded engagingly magnificent and diverse, citing it as one of the most dynamic musical fusions and "one of the most unique and thought provoking musical efforts of the last several decades". Axelrod's music was also rediscovered and sampled by leading disc jockeys in the 1990s including hip hop producers. When sampling in hip hop peaked during the early and mid-1990s, they searched for archived records with atmospheric beats and strings to sample. Los Angeles-based disc jockey B+ recalled finding a copy of Song of Innocence at a