Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 16: The Inevitability, and Necessity, of Fusion
I had the right profile to become a fusion fanatic. Prog, too. A white adolescent suburban male who played an instrument. Which basically meant that I thrilled at the chops involved. I even remember having a debate with friends once about which prog keyboardist played fastest. As if music is a competition and speed holds some kind of aesthetic value. For the record, I believe we settled on Keith Emerson. On the jazz fusion side, you can make the case that the fastest guitar player was John McLaughlin, founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Later, when McLaughlin teamed up for an acoustic guitar trio with Al DiMeola and Paco DeLucia, it's their warp-speed picking that thrilled audiences most, as evidenced on their popular live album, Saturday Night in San Francisco. Another example: the jazz-fusion bassist Stanley Clarke played that instrument faster than anyone had ever had.
As the 70s progressed, and as the music scene changed and my musical taste evolved along with it, I started to move on from fusion, putting it away like those childish things. A Damascus-type moment was seeing the Band's The Last Waltz. Here was an emphasis almost entirely on the songs themselves, each presented in as direct and heartfelt manner as possible. It's not that The Band and guests didn't have chops; it's just that they were deployed fully in service to the songs. I became obsessed with two performances in particular, both high water marks of "blue eyed soul": Rick Danko singing "It Makes No Difference" and Van Morrison singing his own "Caravan." At the same time that Waltz came out rock music was moving into punk and New Wave. The Ramones were the polar opposite of prog and jazz fusion, and seen as way, way hipper. I joined in, becoming a hundred times more likely to listen to the Clash's London Calling than Mahavishnu's Inner Mounting Flame.
So that was it for me and fusion. Until, that is, a few years ago when I finally signed up for a streaming service, in my case Apple Music. It became cost-free to go back and investigate all those fusion bands I loved, and to now listen with neither adolescent worship nor hipsterish dismissiveness. It made sense to start with the Big Three: Weather Report, Return to Forever (RTF), and the aforementioned Mahavishnu Orchestra. Actually, Weather Report had never fallen out of my rotation, given that they were the most unimpeachable in terms of taste and vision. I also had been revisiting RTF after they regrouped for a big reunion tour in 2009 or so. But it was time to get serious. First, some quick capsule notes on each band, all of which sound really good to my old-yet-unjaded ears.
Weather Report, led by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter was the most artful of the three, with an emphasis on tone and texture courtesy of Zawinul's array of synths and Shorter's sometimes-moody and always-probing sax work. They also incorporated all sorts of rhythms from various global traditions, as well as funk-based rhythms. Actually, I once read an interview with Zawinul where he said that when he travels the world, it is the speech patterns and cadences of regular people that provide him with inspiration for his compositions. I recommend the LPs Mysterious Traveler and Tale Spinnin', as well as their biggest selling record, Heavy Weather.
Return to Forever was led by the jazz master Chick Corea, who was joined in their most famous manifestation by the virtuosos Al DiMeola, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White. At the time, I would say that they were my favorite of the three. Why? Well, they had a thrilling and majestic sound. They also engaged in some very intricate playing, baroque in tendency. Of the three they could veer closest to prog rock, which isn't necessarily the most tasteful thing, but true to the times. I should note that I also listened to the solo albums of all the players, and they are all very good, especially Stanley Clarke's. Of the RTF records, my fave was Where Have I Known You Before? I loved that record to the extent that my neighbors in the dorm got tired of hearing it.
John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra was the band that really defines fusion. They were all-in on creating a jazz sound that had the full impact of rock music. Fiery, intense, and loud, they were maximal in every sense, which is at should be since those were maximal times. Consider it the opposite of the introverted music people make at home now on their MacBooks. Like Corea, Zawinul, and Shorter, McLaughlin was a member of the Miles Davis ensembles that launched the whole fusion genre in the late 60s. With Mahavishnu you had the added bonus of McLaughlin really leaning into the whole 60s-70s alternative/Eastern spirituality trend. I won't call it a fad, since I consider myself a product of that scene. Speaking of sideman recordings, drummer Billy Cobham made some of the best jazz fusion records of all time, many with wicked-hip horn arrangements. I recommend all of his 70s records, including Spectrum, whose lead track "Quadrant" was sampled by Massive Attack in the 90s, providing the rhythm track for one of their biggest hits.
But really, there were dozens of good-to-great jazz-fusion bands, all of whom approached the music from different angles. You can include in their ranks bands such as the Crusaders who led the soul-jazz movement, a trend that also included great recordings from the jazz trumpeters Donald Byrd and Blue Mitchell, as well as the genre-defining work of Grover Washington, Jr. The question at the heart of it is this: Was Donald Byrd "selling out" when he recorded Black Byrd? For that matter, was Miles selling out when he "went electric"? Was Herbie Hancock lowering himself when he recorded the landmark jazz-funk album, Head Hunters? It certainly was the opinion of jazz traditionalists that all these great artists were simply going commercial, in pursuit of dollars, and taking the jazz art form down with them. Stanley Crouch, whom I greatly admire but do not agree with in this case, was of this school.
Two things. First, if you forget about the dollars as the angle for approaching this and focus on the corollary of popularity, it can be argued that it was fusion that was being truer to tradition by uniting jazz with musical forms that were organically appealing to regular people, which is how it was in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. What makes something pop is that you don't need to learn to like it. It's like falling off a log. That's what rock music was for my boomer generation, along with all the soul and funk that was exploding then. To engage with this music, then, was . . . fun.
The popular appeal was not only stylistic, but also technical and aural. That is, fusion was jazz's way to incorporate electronic instrumentation. In fact, after Miles returned from his "silent-years" hiatus in 1980 he would employ electric guitar, bass, and keys nonstop until his death in the 90s. The only musician from Miles' stable to fully reject electronic instruments was Keith Jarrett. To him they sounded like crap and didn't offer the responsiveness he needed. But for many or most of us boomers there can be great beauty in electric sounds, maybe even the greatest beauty of all. Think of Santana playing "Europa" or "Samba Pa Ti": Gorgeous and so very restorative of the soul. Yet, even today when I listen and am moved by sounds such as these, I still often think how strange it is, really, to find pleasure in this artificial sound-world, this synthetic aesthetic. Yet isn't it also natural? Isn't our physical environment, including the air and our bodies, charged with electrical currents? Nevertheless, it's certainly an understandable stance to prefer the acoustic sounds generated by human breath and touch.
So, not for everyone. But listening again to the fusion masters, I can hear that both Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, and Herbie Hancock for that matter, all of whom started on acoustic piano, really relished the challenge of electronic expression, and developed great facility with synths in no time flat. And for Zawinul especially, synths would become his primary mode of expression for the rest of his life. A quick memory/illustration of how Zawinul employed electronics in service of his art. I once was listening to Weather Report while looking at a book of Monet paintings, and I realized that Zawinul's notes shimmered around the edges just like those water lilies, dissolving into space and silence in a way fully other than the way that acoustic sounds fade. Electronics thus enabled a fully new mode of musical impressionism. Satie never did that!
My second point is that for the jazz art form, fusion, or the aggressive, conscious mixing of forms and influences, was the only thing left to do. In the evolution of the music we have a familiar set of signposts. First came ragtime which morphed into the looser and funkier small group jazz of New Orleans and Chicago, exemplified by Armstrong. Then, in the 30s came swing in both small group and big band form, creating a smoother and more propulsive sound perfect for both dancing and improvisation. The Billie Holiday small group sides on Columbia Records represent the quintessence of this style. Then, in the 40s came be bop, or just bop, which upped the harmonic and rhythmic ante, introducing a new self-consciously artistic mode of jazz often only grasped by the cognoscenti. Think Charlie Parker. Next, in the 50s we saw extensions and recontextualizations of the bop language. In the 50s and 60s, hard bop worked in some bluesier sounds. Think Lee Morgan. At the same time, post-bop utilized wide-ranging influences and incorporated rhythms and harmonies that went beyond anything that ever had been associated with jazz. Think Charles Mingus or Wayne Shorter. Across the postwar years, crossovers with classical music stretched tonality and timbre and time. Finally came the imperative to throw out all the rules and everything that had represented "progress" and play "free," a topic I discussed earlier in this series. Even though this mode could be hard on the ears, it nevertheless constituted a return to innocence. Ornette even recorded an album with his 10-year-old son Denardo on drums.
Thus, with every dimension of jazz having received expression, the only direction left was to go all in on fusion. This also represents innocence, mixing and matching without concern for what is supposed to constitute "real" jazz. Actually, this is what differentiates jazz-rock fusion from what came before. The hallmark of jazz, as defined by the exalted drummer Elvin Jones is that it can take any musical influence and incorporate it -- often even in real time, spontaneously expressed during a solo. But, prior to the 70s, these influences were always tastefully employed within music that was inarguably jazz. The difference with the jazz-rock fusion movement is that the balance frequently tipped away from the jazz side. Funk rhythms and rock tonalities could seem the predominant aspects, with jazz adding flavor to these instead of vice versa. Interestingly, jazz was also influencing rock, with improvisation playing a bigger role than ever before. Arguably, the Grateful Dead and the Altman Brothers were as much heretical jazz bands as they were rock bands.
If hard-core jazz-rock fusion eventually receded, perhaps because everyone tired of the too-muchness of it, in effect losing the battle, it nevertheless won the war. There is nary an eyebrow raised now when musicians mix and match anything at all. It's almost expected. What fusion did was take a sledgehammer to the idea of rules in jazz, a development of which I heartily approve. If there is no god, then everything is permitted, we are told. Well, yes. If we encounter lapses in taste in pursuit of new fusions, then so be it. Is that any worse than straight-ahead jazz that bores? The permissible-yet-poor expressions of the music are a necessary part of the process to getting us to new places, sublime places, places we needed to get to. As I write this I'm listening to Harry Miller's Isipingo, a melding of European and South African jazz. I like a world where this happens. And note: since everything is permitted, that means rectitude still has a place, but now it is a choice, not a command. Indeed, as the dust settled on fusion, in the 80s we experienced a major return of acoustic jazz based on the old verities. They called it the Young Lions movement, with Wynton Marsalis at the head of the pack. I like that music. I can listen to music that builds on the old Blue Note classics all day. It provides a framework for jazz improvisation that is unparalleled. But I'm not listening because I'm supposed to.
The Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence Series
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