Sorry for getting back late.
These labels are just convenient buckets where we put music, for want of a way to define and categorize it. It is artificial and incorrect as music does not fit into buckets. There are no distinct cut-offs between one genre and another; it’s a continuum and we chose, for convenience, to draw an arbitrary line and say the stuff on the left fits in this bucket and the stuff on the right fits in that bucket.
You’re free to call it whatever you want. Most jazz standards were called pop music back in the 30s-40s, many wouldn’t consider that anything Miles Davis did as of In A Silent Way can be called jazz, at the time, most musicians didn’t call whatever Bird, Dizzy, Monk et al were doing as jazz.
In my book, and that is my opinion withe way I draw the lines and define the buckets, Light as a feather is a latin-jazz album but not a jazz-rock album. I wouldn’t call it samba-jazz either. For that you can go to Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 as a prime example. Return to Forever did become a Jazz-rock/fusion outfit as of the subsequent album (Hymn to the 7th Galaxy). But the way, Stanley Clarke plays mostly acoustic bass on Light as a Feather and the 1st album. He switched fully to electric afterwards.
Soft machine started as a Canterbury band (there’s another bucket) or progressive quirky rock and with time became a jazz-rock band. Basically, anything after their 4th album is firmly into fusion territory (including the Bundles that I suggested and the Softs that someone else did). You should listen to those albums. Btw, Gong also started as a weird Canterbury band and morphed into a fusion outfit, basically starting with YOU (iirc).
Colosseum is definitely not a rock band. Hiseman was a jazz drummer, Richard Heckstall-Smith was a jazz sax player. They melded jazz and rock. Same can be said of If (and others).
Also, in my book, there is no difference between jazz-rock and rock-jazz. You’re free to think of it differently (jazzed-up rock vs rocked-up jazz ) but that’s a bit too much for me.
Yes and Genesis are definitely NOT jazz or jazz-rock bands. You can call them progressive rock, classical rock, pompous rock, but there is practically no element of jazz in their music, Genesis prides itself on the fact that most of their solos are written, not improvised. Don’t get me wrong, I love Genesis and Yes, but it’s a long way to jazz from there.
Labels are difficult and to misquote Duke Ellington: “there are only 2 kinds of music, good music and bad music”. The rest is for librarians not music lovers.
PS I was not allowed to post Heckstall-Smith’s known name, so I went for Richard. Is this political correctness gone too far ??