ESSENTIAL FUSION

Fusion is a pretty big category, and we've lumped a lot of material together here. Basically, these are the grandaddies of the marriage of jazz with electronics, rock, funk, and technology. If you like your music with plenty of guitar and synthesizer work, then this is the stuff for you. But lots of today's top DJs and music fans find plenty to like among the great fusion works of yesteryear. And there's lots of great sample material here as well. So sit back, open up your mind, and check out some of these masterworks of jazztronica's first flowering.

Miles Davis is the grandfather of fusion--but don't tell him that. As he once said, "A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it." Nonetheless, he pretty much started the ball rolling back in 1969 when he released In a Silent Way, an album that uses ambient sound washes created by no less than three keyboards and the guitar of John McLaughlin as a base over which Miles soars.All in all it's a pretty subdued album, but the same cannot be said of the masterpiece Bitches Brew. Released in 1970 as a double LP, it mixed free jazz blowing by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion. The result isn't like anything that had been done up until then, and it doesn't sound much like other fusion, either. Miles followed that up with Live-Evil, a mind-blowing monster album that mixes studio work with live recordings done at the Cellar Door. As on the previous two albums, producer Teo Macero's studio manipulations of the recording done by the musicians is a major part of the album. Tribute to Jack Johnson is pretty straightforward and probably the most rock-oriented album Miles ever made. There's a lot of John McLaughlin guitar work on it as well.

On the Corner started a new phase for Miles, one which was heavily influenced by the funk of Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown, and which ended up being extremely influential on today's DJ culture and drum 'n' bass experiments. The dense, percussion-heavy music heard on this album is very afro-funk/rock centered and remains very controversial to this day among jazz fans. Miles continued to mine this sound on Get Up With It, his last studio release before a five year period of retirement. The album is known for the track "He Loved Him Madly", a tribute to Duke Ellington that inspired Brian Eno's ambient experiments. Also excellent and similar in nature are the live recordings Agharta and Pangea, recorded at afternoon and evening concerts the same day in Japan.

Following his 1980 comeback, Miles played a much more straightforward funky style of music, and his studio recordings often don't convey the musical intensity he and his groups were capable of reaching live. Still, there are some good moments to Decoy and You're Under Arrest as well as the import only Star People. His best post-comeback moments were three albums he did for Warner Brothers with Marcus Miller recording most of the parts besides Davis' trumpet. For all practical purposes, these are the first true jazztronica recordings: Tutu, Siesta, and Amandla. All three are heartily recommended. Still looking ahead, Miles planned an album that incorporated rap, collaborations with Prince, and his own brand of funk/hip-hop, but he died before the project was completed. The album was finished with the help of rapper Cool Moe Be and released as doo-bop. While not worthy of Miles' legacy, it does show that he was on the cutting edge until the very end.

Much of 1970s fusion in the USA was performed by a core of musicians who had worked with Miles Davis on his influential albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. In addition to Davis, important figures in early fusion were John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Billy Cobham (with his album Spectrum), Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea (with his band Return to Forever), Joe Zawinul, and Wayne Shorter with their band Weather Report.

Herbie Hancock first continued the path of Miles Davis with his experimental fusion albums (such as Crossings, 1972), but soon after that he became perhaps the most important developer of "jazz-funk" with his albums Head Hunters (1973) and Thrust (1974). Later in the 1970s and early 1980s Hancock took a yet more commercial approach, though he also recorded some acoustic jazz. Hancock was one of the first jazz musicians to use synthesizers (although at first, he left playing to his sidemen).

In England, the jazz fusion movement was headed by Nucleus led by Ian Carr and whose key players Karl Jenkins and John Marshall both later joined the seminal jazz rock band Soft Machine, oft-acknowledged leaders of what became known as the Canterbury scene. Their best-selling recording, Third (1970), was a double album featuring one track per side in the style of the aforementioned recordings of Miles Davis. A prominent English band in the jazz-rock style of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago was If, who released a total of seven records in the 1970s.

In the early 1980s much of the original fusion genre was subsumed into other branches of jazz and rock, especially smooth jazz. The merging of jazz and pop/rock music took a more commercial direction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the form of compositions with a softer sound palette that could fit comfortably in a soft rock radio playlist. The Allmusic guide's article on Fusion states that "[u]nfortunately, as it became a money-maker and as rock declined artistically from the mid-'70s on, much of what was labeled fusion was actually a combination of jazz with easy-listening pop music and lightweight R&B."Artists like Lee Ritenour, Al Jarreau, Kenny G, Bob James and David Sanborn among others were leading purveyors of this pop-oriented fusion (also known as "west coast" or "AOR fusion"). This genre is most frequently called "smooth jazz" and is controversial among the listeners of both mainstream jazz and jazz fusion, who find it to rarely contain the improvisational qualities that originally surfaced in jazz decades earlier, deferring to a more commercially viable sound more widely enabled for commercial radio airplay in the United States.

Music critic Piero Scaruffi has called pop-fusion music "...mellow, bland, romantic music" made by "mediocre musicians" and "derivative bands." Scaruffi criticized some of the fusion albums of Michael and Randy Brecker as "trivial dance music" and stated that alto saxophonist David Sanborn recorded "[t]rivial collections" of "...catchy and danceable pseudo-jazz". Kenny G in particular is often criticized by both fusion and jazz fans, and some musicians, while having become a huge commercial success. Music reviewer George Graham argues that the “so-called ‘smooth jazz’ sound of people like Kenny G ha[s] none of the fire and creativity that marked the best of the fusion scene during its heyday in the 1970s”.

Jazz fusion has been criticized by jazz traditionalists who prefer conventional mainstream jazz (particularly when fusion was first emerging) and by smooth jazz fans who prefer more "accessible" music. This is analogous to the way swing jazz aficionados criticized be-bop in the mid-1940s, and the way proponents of Dixieland or New Orleans style "jass" reviled the new swing style in the late 1920s. Some critics have also called fusion's approach pretentious, and others have claimed that fusion musicians have become too concerned with musical virtuosity. However, fusion has helped to break down boundaries between different genres of rock, jazz, and led to developments such as the 1980s-era electronica-infused acid jazz.