CHAPTER 13

Fusion

OUTLINE

1) New Idioms
a) The late 1960s saw the rise of a fusion between jazz and the rhythms, instrumentation,
and repertory of rock. But fusions have always played a role in jazz history (e.g., among
African, European, and Latin American musics).
b) All musics take from other genres and styles, and jazz is no exception. Third Stream,
discussed earlier, was one example. In the next two chapters different kinds of fusions of
jazz and popular music are explored, beginning in this chapter with the 1940s.
c) Up to this point the authors have discussed jazz as a series of chronologically ordered
creative leaps that are born out of the previous style and reflect their own times.
d) A “fusion” approach provides an alternative way of looking at the history of jazz in that it
looks beyond jazz at the parallel changes in pop culture, including dances styles and uses
of technology, and their interactions with jazz.
e) Early jazz musicians played music and entertained audiences and employers in various
kinds of commercial venues.
f) Although jazz was always played for dancers, a gap grew between those who wanted to
play jazz for its own sake and those who focused on prevailing public tastes, so that by
the 1930s jazz (solos and hot rhythms) was part of a broader pop music phenomenon of
ballroom dance bands.
g) By the 1930s, perceived dichotomies of hot versus sweet and art versus commerce were
in place, and yet bands on each side borrowed from each other (sweet bands played some
jazz; hot bands hired pop singers and played ballads and novelty tunes).
h) Earlier chapters have detailed the ways in which bebop prevailed as post-swing jazz, but
as it fractured the pop-jazz connection, other, more accessible musics became
increasingly popular. As swing faded, it became clear that there were three additional
stylistic successors aside from bebop:
i) Rhythm and blues (R&B)
 ii) Mainstream pop vocals
iii) Latin jazz
i) The R&B Connection
i) 1940s: an offshoot of swing called “jump” focused on blues, fast tempos, brash,
humorous lyrics, and ensemble riffs. This music eventually came to be known as
rhythm and blues (R&B) as the former term for this market—“race records,” popular
music by black artists intended for black audiences—began to lose cachet in popular
trade magazines such as Billboard.
ii) Jazzers, including beboppers, played some of this music alongside R&B musicians.
Numerous big-band leaders put it into the repertoire. It reached the white mainstream
through Louis Jordan.
j) Louis Jordan (1908–1975)
i) Alto saxophonist, singer, songwriter, bandleader. Had sixty hits on both the R&B
charts and predominantly white, mainstream pop charts.
ii) In 1936 he joined Chick Webb in New York. By 1938, he had formed his own band,
Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five. Sounding like a big band, it proved that a small
ensemble could be successful, and, as a result, small bands became popular in jazz
and pop after World War II.
iii) Much of Jordan’s success was due to his use of a southern black cultural humor that
blacks related to and whites could decode well enough. He emphasized the humanity
of being black (a lesson learned from his early experience in minstrelsy), creating
new black archetypes.
k) R&B’s Influence on Jazz
Several musicians of Jordan’s generation managed to succeed on both sides of the R&B-
jazz divide:
1) After alto saxophonist Earl Bostic gained popular recognition for his R&B version of
the earlier Ellington “Flamingo,” he led a small band that became a training ground
for future jazz figures John Coltrnane and pianist Jaki Byard.
2) Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges had a 1951 hit with the R&B tune “Castle Rock,”
which led to a version by Frank Sinatra.
3) Keyboardist/arranger and, later, Hammond electric organ player Wild Bill Davis was
the most influential of Jordan’s sidemen. Developed a piano style influenced by Fats
 Waller and Art Tatum.
4) Arranger Bill Doggett replaced Davis in Jordan’s band. Later scored a number 1
record in the country with his rock and roll opus “Honky Tonk” (Parts 1 and 2).
l) Ray Charles (1930–2004)
i) Ray Charles was born poor in Georgia and raised in Florida. He single-handedly
represented a swing, bop, R&B, gospel, and rock fusion using gospel techniques in
secular music. African American church music had always been connected to jazz,
and complaints about using church music in a secular setting were not new. However,
Charles took it much further in terms of his singing and piano style and use of a choir
of women singers, the Raelettes.
ii) He had an R&B hit in 1954 (“I Got A Woman”). In 1959 he grabbed the white
audience with “What I Say.” Later he had a huge hit with “Georgia on My Mind” and
sang country and western songs.
iii) Vocalists like Charles and others reached a larger audience than jazz musicians
leading their own groups. For jazz musicians wanting to reach a mainstream
audience, the way to go was through soul jazz.
iv) Soul jazz is based on the hard bop of Blakey, Silver, and Adderley, with a strong
backbeat; an aggressive urban sound; gospel-style chords; simplified basic harmonies
(compared to bop); short solos; clear dance rhythms; an emphasis on ethnic language;
and cultural references such as food, church, and parties.
v) 1960s: the venerable jazz label Blue Note had a series of hard bop hits. Soul jazz
musicians made their own three-minute singles suitable for pop radio.
m) Jimmy Smith (1925–2005)
i) Popular and influential as a jazz and R&B fusion artist in the black community during
the 1950s and 1960s, usually in the context of a trio that included a Hammond B3
organ with drums and guitar or saxophone.
ii) Born in Pennsylvania, he studied piano with his parents and with pointers from Bud
Powell. He played piano for years in local R&B bands and then heard Wild Bill Davis
on organ in 1953 and decided to switch.
iii) The Hammond B3
(1) Smith’s interest in the organ coincided with the development of the Hammond B3
organ in 1955. This was a tidier version of the A model from 1935, which never
 caught on.
(2) Smith’s knowledge of bass and mastery of the B3’s foot pedals allowed him to
play complete bass lines, setting a precedent for jazz organists. He also combined
the virtuosity of bop, R&B rhythms, and gospel, which was commonly played by
the organ.
iv) Smith introduced the trio in 1955 in Atlantic City. He recorded prolifically,
emphasizing the same themes as Louis Jordan: leisure time, church, and food.
2) Singers in the Mainstream
a) The 1950s are often referred to as the golden age for singers of the American songbook.
Four factors account for this:
i) Returning soldiers were used to singers with big bands, which made for a built-in
audience for the large number of vocalists who had graduated from big bands and
were looking for solo careers.
ii) There were many songs from theater, movies, and record sessions still being written,
in addition to the standard repertory from the 1920s–1950s, with many of the
composers still alive and promoting their catalogs.
iii) The 45-rpm record (introduced in the 1940s) was good for single hits, while the 33-
rpm LP attracted more mature audiences for singers.
iv) The rise of television during the 1950s provided exposure for famous wartime singers
on variety shows, which were a staple of early television.
b) Singers from this period grew up with swing and maintained this connection.
c) Rosemary Clooney’s novelty hit of the early 1950s “Come On-a My House,” allowed her
to record LPs with Ellington and other jazz musicians for much of the rest of her career.
d) Nat King Cole was a good jazz pianist who became a very successful pop singer. He had
a hit with a novelty song in 1943 but still was known as a pianist who occasionally sang
R&B.
e) After the war he became wildly popular with songs like “Mona Lisa.” He was so popular
he was the first African American to be offered his own TV show. It was canceled due to
lack of advertising support.
f) Frank Sinatra (1915–1998)
i) Respected by jazz musicians old and new, Sinatra started out imitating his idol, Bing
Crosby, but developed his own style by listening to singers like Billie Holiday.
 ii) Sinatra believed that phrasing should emphasize the lyric. Between 1939 and 1942 he
became popular as a big-band singer under Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. His
female fans screamed and fainted at his live performances.
iii) In the 1940s, he earned his own radio show and started a film career. After the war,
his career fell apart due to resentment on the part of returning servicemen for
Sinatra’s lack of contribution to the war effort and the popularity of newer singers
such as Clooney and Cole. His personal life started to fall apart.
iv) Soon afterward, Sinatra reinvented himself as a hipster, restarted his film career with
award-winning performances, and started to focus more on up-tempo swing numbers
accompanied by large ensembles arranged by well-respected arrangers such as Nelson
Riddle.
v) He did not improvise but rather phrased well and embellished melodies, all with a
rhythmic “businessman’s bounce.” Ellington admired him for making songs
believable.
vi) Sinatra was one of the first artists to think of an LP as a nontheatrical opera wherein
all the songs reflect a theme—otherwise known as a “concept album.” He was also
known as the anti-Presley during Elvis Presley’s rise to fame on 45s.
g) Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990)
i) Sinatra comes from Tin Pan Alley and swing; Vaughan comes from the heart of jazz:
bop harmonies, rhythms, and improvisation. She made jazz accessible like no other,
although many tried.
ii) Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, and learned piano from her church
organist mother. She won the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night when she was
eighteen. Earl Hines heard her there and offered her a job in his band, sharing piano
and singing duties with Billy Eckstine.
iii) In 1946 she headlined New York’s Café Society. She was signed by Columbia
Records in 1949.
iv) Vaughan explored harmony through her piano and applied this to her singing. She
had a range exceeding four octaves and precise intonation, a feeling for the blues
from her gospel roots, and an excellent sense of swing, all of which allowed her to
explore a tune like an instrumentalist.
v) Columbia wanted her to sing with a less creative touch, but even accompanied by a
 large orchestra, she still played with the melody.
vi) By the time she signed with Mercury Records in 1954, she was recording both pop
hits like “Make Yourself Comfortable” and jazz classics with Clifford Brown.
vii) As with Fitzgerald, who was singing American songbook classics and scatting,
Vaughn also fused pop and jazz. She was happy to work in both fields as long as the
music was good.
viii) During the 1960s, a new crop of recording executives tried to rein in her
improvisatory approach to singing. By 1967, she had had enough and quit singing for
four years, after which she reinvented herself by working major concert venues with
just a trio and occasionally a big band with the occasional guest star. Only then did
she return to recording, this time on her own terms.
ix) “All of Me”
A cursory listener is likely to get caught up in Vaughan’s virtuosity, humor,
inventiveness, and rhythmic aplomb. She lets you hear the song pretty much as written, in
the first and third choruses, anyway—although even in them, she alters every phrase and,
in some passages, every syllable. The closer you listen, the more rewarding her alchemy.
She changes her vocal mask from bluesy to operatic, with several variations in between;
revises the chords and melody; and adds intervals of an octave or more that the
songwriters never imagined.
3) Latin Jazz: Cuba
a) Dance beats from the Caribbean have had a long relationship with jazz (Morton’s
“Spanish tinge”). Postwar jazz was especially influenced by Cuban music (salsa) and
Brazilian music (bossa nova).
b) Cuban influence includes the rumba of the 1930s, the mambo of the 1940s, and the cha-
cha-cha of the 1950s. Cuban bands in the States offered little jazz but considerable
rhythmic vitality and great showmanship—a taste of what American tourists found in
Cuba.
c) Violinist and Latin music’s most famous bandleader, Xavier Cugat, grew up in Cuba. His
fame peaked in 1940 with hit records and frequent appearances in movies. He did not
play jazz as such but furthered the vogue for Latin music.
d) The United States’ Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America helped promote his
success during the 1930s.
 i) Latin leading men started to appear in films, but the most prominent Latin artist
featured in Hollywood films was singer Carmen Miranda, who popularized samba in
her own country (Brazil).
e) Mario Bauzá (1911–1993), Machito (1908–1984), and the Dizzy Factor
i) Jazz and Cuban music started to develop a close relationship during the war, a
relationship that became visible only well afterward in the late 1940s. The emergence
of Cubop, an Afro-Cuban style of jazz, was instigated by big-band trumpeter and
arranger Mario Bauzá who, in 1939, started an Afro-Cuban band with bandleader,
singer, and maracas player Machito (Frank Grillo).
ii) Machito was raised in Havana and moved to the States in 1937, where he worked in a
number of Latin bands before joining Bauzá in 1939. This band folded for lack of
work. Bauzá joined Cab Calloway, and Machito joined Cugat before forming his own
Afro-Cuban band in 1940 and hiring Bauzá as director, who, in turn, hired young
arrangers to achieve the jazz sound.
iii) After Machito returned from the army, the ensemble created significant interest
among modern jazz musicians—Stan Kenton even recorded a tribute to Machito.
iv) The basis of Cuban music and Cubop is the clave, an underlying rhythmic ostinato,
quite different from the backbeat-accented forward momentum of swing rhythm. The
rhythm section also has more percussion instruments, including timbales, congas,
bongos, maracas, claves, and guiros.
v) The real breakthrough for the Afro-Cuban jazz movement came when Dizzy Gillespie
started working toward a Latin jazz fusion with his 1946 big band, for which he hired
conga player Chano Pozo and bongo player Chiquitico for a concert at Carnegie Hall.
Although Gillespie had already shown interest in Afro rhythms (e.g., “A Night in
Tunisia”), he knew little about Cuban music until Bauzá started teaching him when
they were both in the Calloway band.
vi) Gillespie gave Pozo free rein in Gillespie’s big band from 1947 to the end of 1948.
During this time the band recorded “Cubana Be,” “Cubana Bop” (an early example of
modal jazz arranged by George Russell), and the highly influential “Manteca.”
f) “Manteca”
i) Manteca means “lard” or “grease” and is also slang for marijuana. The piece was
Pozo’s idea and starts with interlocking congas and bass ostinato much different from
 the usual walking bass. The piece is built up from staggered riff entries.
ii) Pozo originally wanted to keep the music completely Afro-Cuban by stretching out
the groove, but Gillespie added some jazz content through a written, harmonically hip
bridge underpinned by a walking-bass line.
g) Bossa Nova: Jobim, Gilberto, and Getz
i) Samba originated in nineteenth-century Brazil as an amalgam of march rhythms and
African dance music. It does not use clave but rather is characterized by two beats per
measure with an accent on the second beat. There were a number of samba hits during
the 1930s and 1940s, which is also when Carmen Miranda was a hit in Hollywood.
ii) In 1958 Brazilian singer and actress Elizete Cardoso released an album based on the
song-writing of Antôntio Carlos Jobim. Cardoso is accompanied on several tracks by
guitarist João Gilberto. The music was known as bossa nova (“new flair”).
iii) Jobim insisted that bossa nova was not just another form of samba but a radical break
from it. Like bop, bossa nova broke with the past in terms of melodic and lyrical
sophistication. It represented a young, new attitude.
iv) Before 1960, bossa nova was mainly a Brazilian phenomenon, but with the Cuban
revolution (1959) cutting Cuba off from the mainland and the discovery of Jobim by
touring jazz musicians, bossa nova became known in the United States.
v) Dizzy Gillespie was the first off the mark in 1961 when he added some bossa
standards to his repertoire, recording them shortly thereafter.
vi) Additionally, acoustic guitarist Charlie Byrd recruited “Four Brothers” reed player
Stan Getz to record. Getz ranked with Gordon, Rollins, and Coltrane as one of the
most influential tenor saxophonists of the 1950s.
vii) The Getz-Byrd collaboration interested American labels in bossa nova. They released
the album Jazz Samba in 1962, and an edited version of Desifinado featuring Getz
from that album became a number one hit. Other jazzers jumped on the bandwagon.
viii) In 1963 Getz recorded Getz/Gilberto with the Brazilian originators of the music.
Gilberto’s wife, Astrud, who had never sung professionally before, sang the
worldwide hit “Girl From Ipanema” at Getz’s request.
h) Salsa
i) Latin influence on jazz was widespread by 1950. Parker recorded with Machito, and
Bud Powell used clave in “Un Poco Loco.” Cuban style became part of a broader
 Latin scene that included the Brazilian bossa nova, the Argentine tango, and the
Mexican mariachi.
ii) Still, dance music in New York was governed by the basic Cuban song structure, the
son, which consists of two sections: the canta, with a melody sung by the vocalist,
followed by the montuno, named for a short repeating passage.
iii) Afro-Cuban musics fused with other Caribbean areas such as Puerto Rico, which
resulted in salsa, a major urban music by the 1970s.
iv) Eddie Palmieri (b. 1936), pianist and leader of the group, La Perfecta, took his
musical direction not only from Latin music but also from a panoply of jazz greats,
including Horace Silver, Bud Powell, and McCoy Tyner.
v) La Perfecta also featured a jazz-savvy trombonist named Barry Rogers.
4) Mass Media Jazz
a) As jazz grew farther from the mainstream public, it began to embody four basic cultural
clichés. Jazz on 1950s and early 1960s television tells the story.
i) One: Jazzers as urban slow-witted outsiders and jive-talking beatniks with “crazy”
head and facial hair, singing aimless scat. They were treated with comical disdain.
ii) Two: The sound of jazz, especially the saxophone, associated with easy women or a
bad part of town. Many detective shows featured jazz scores, some by jazz musicians
such as Count Basie and Benny Carter.
iii) Three: Jazz as adult, sexy, super-hip, and not for squares. Hip comedians such as
Lenny Bruce and writers such as Norman Mailer pondered jazz. This positive but
tiresome image disappeared in the 1960s as rock grew up.
iv) Four: Jazz musicians on variety, talk, educational shows, and specials on jazz (e.g.,
The Sound of Jazz). Although jazz was seen on television at this time more often than
in the forty years since, the representation of jazz was circumscribed by public taste
(singers were favored and modernists were rarely invited) and ideas about race
(African American appearances were limited).
5) Barbarians at the Gate
a) During the 1950s, rock and roll—a mix of the rhythms of R&B with the sound of hillbilly
and country music—led by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and others, started
drawing large audiences of white teenagers.
b) Jazz musicians considered it immature and a fad, unlike jazz, which had a history and an
 adult sensibility.
c) By the 1960s, rock overwhelmed popular music, resulting in much less work for jazz
musicians. Fusion—a pop-jazz mixture—was viewed as one answer and was assumed to
be the next phase of jazz. The term was replaced by “smooth” or “contemporary” jazz by
the 1980s.
6) Jazz-Rock Background
a) Rock and roll was a new source of popular songs, many of them written by a coterie of
New York songwriters who aimed for the teenage market and characterized by puerile
lyrics and relatively unsophisticated harmonies.
b) The late 1950s also saw a folk revival that brought a simpler moralistic aesthetic to
popular music, part of which was to eschew “commercial” music.
c) In 1964, British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones revived pop styles of the
1950s, including urban blues, along with an antiestablishment attitude. They also
established the singer-songwriter as a mainstay of pop music, leaving jazz musicians out
in the cold, although they did try to play some of this music with a jazz approach.
d) Still, the business model shift did not occur overnight: songwriters still wrote pop
“standards,” and Broadway supplied hit songs, which jazz musicians continued to mine.
But even this source dried up by end of the 1960s as record sales in rock grew
astronomically.
7) The Challenge to Jazz
a) By the late 1960s, album-oriented, loose, improvisational, blues-based rock became
popular; some people compared it to a kind of electrified jazz. Jimi Hendrix exemplifies
this trend.
b) The resulting obstacles for jazz musicians can be classified into five categories:
i) Youth: the new young, relatively well-off baby boomer generation wanted to listen to
musicians who were also young, not older jazz musicians who had been honing their
art for decades.
ii) Electronics and Recordings: amplifications and electronic manipulation of sound
produced a whole new range of timbres with which jazz musicians found it difficult
to keep pace. Rock depended on studio production techniques, something that many
jazz musicians disdained, believing that recordings should re-create the live sound of
a band.
 iii) Rhythm: by the 1960s, rock was played in an even-eighths groove as opposed to a
swing groove. Many jazz musicians refused to adjust on aesthetic grounds, or found it
difficult to adjust even if they wanted to.
iv) Groups: rock focused on the group in contrast to jazz, which focused more on each
contributing musician. Jazz eventually developed a group-oriented creative process.
v) Virtuosity: since the time of bebop, jazz musicians had been expected to have a high
level of virtuosity. Earlier rock musicians disdained this capability in favor of a “do-
it-yourself” ethic of folk and blues, which shifted focus from the individual musicians
to the band, song, and songwriter.
8) The Renewal of Funk
a) Fusion eventually met each one of these obstacles. The answer came from the
contemporary version of “race music” known as soul and funk.
b) Soul music dates from the 1950s, when Ray Charles used religious grooves in secular
music and when soul-jazz artists such as Horace Silver and Jimmy Smith emphasized
backbeats. The new funk was exemplified by James Brown’s rhythmic, crossover
arrangements.
c) In funk, layering is more independent than in rock, allowing each player to play more
inventively: drummers had to switch to a funk groove from swing; bassists could play
more syncopated lines; and soloists played lines that fit into the overall texture.
d) Funk allowed for both more sophisticated, chromatically colored harmony and modal
playing since it often featured long stretches of one chord.
e) Funk was dance music, allowing young musicians to explore sophisticated jazz harmony
while the dance beat held the audience’s attention.
f) 1967: jazz was in crisis; Coltrane died, clubs were closing, concerts were drying up, and
the press was starting to take rock more seriously. Young jazz musicians needed to adjust
to the change—something needed to be done to bridge the gap between jazz and pop.
g) One of the first groups to bridge the gap was led by saxophonist Charles Lloyd, featuring
a young Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette playing within the loose cultural boundaries of
the San Francisco scene in which jazz performances intermingled with other popular
music genres like rock. In 1968, Miles’s drummer Tony Williams started a group with
British guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young called Emergency, which
revived the organ trio setting—this time including more of a harmonic, improvisatory,
 and timbral edge that pointed the way to the basis for fusion.
9) Miles Ahead: The Breakthrough
a) 1968: Miles had grown tired of postbop jazz. Miles was looking for a simpler, less-
abstract style, which he heard in the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters.
b) Davis electrified his rhythm section by bringing in Dave Holland on electric bass (Ron
Carter didn’t like electric bass) and Chick Corea on electric piano. He also renewed his
off-and-on collaboration with Gil Evans.
c) The results can be heard on Filles de Kilamanjaro (1968), which is characterized by a
combination of bass ostinati, modal jazz, and floating harmonies over a steady beat. In
his promotion of the album, Davis was careful to claim that referring to his music as jazz
was old-fashioned.
d) After Davis added the electric guitar of John McLaughlin, In a Silent Way was made
partially over a surreptitiously recorded E major chord (a simplification of Joe Zawinul’s
original chord progression), catching the spontaneous interaction of a group who thought
they were in rehearsal.
e) Davis came increasingly to rely upon post-production to affect his later albums. He edited
what he saw as the raw material produced in the studio. Producer Teo Macero was
Davis’s partner in this regard. Much like the Beatles’ George Martin, Macero was given a
free hand to edit and recombine the hours of recording made in the studio to make two
long tracks for In a Silent Way that established a satisfying, persistent groove.
f) Bitches Brew
i) Davis liked to leave lots of room for his band to improvise textures in a context of
“controlled freedom.” By the end of the 1960s, Davis was playing with large
ensembles of young musicians and with doubled or even tripled rhythm-section
instruments to create a dense but light texture in a style he insisted was “black” more
than rock.
ii) Bitches Brew (1969) proved Miles’s claim to Columbia record executives that he
would sell more if they stopped marketing him as a jazz man. Although it could never
be considered a “commercial” album because of the length of each piece (even after
post-production editing), the considerable levels of harmonic dissonance, and dense
textures, Bitches Brew found a niche on album-oriented rock stations and sold
500,000 copies in its first year. Bitches Brew heralded the arrival of “fusion.”
10) Mahavishnu, Return to Forever, and Weather Report
a) Bitches Brew launched fusion but could not act as a model for other musicians. It was the
Mahavishnu Orchestra with its electric guitar focus that offered a workable fusion
template.
b) Mahavishnu was created by John McLaughlin (b. 1942), a British guitarist influenced by
black bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter) as well as
1960s rock, among other music genres.
c) He immersed himself in Indian classical music, with its sophisticated system of meter
(tala) and improvisation. His first two commercially successful albums—The Inner
Mounting Flame (1972) and Birds of Fire (1973)—proved that the music of a so-called
jazz fusion musician could be commercially competitive with rock.
d) The music was loud, fast, virtuosic (raising the bar for rock guitarists), intense, and
distorted, much like concert rock and unlike a club jazz.
e) It was also inventive, with complicated meters inspired by tala, often in odd-numbered
meters and slash chords—triads over bass roots outside the chord, resulting in dissonant
harmonies.
f) Chick Corea’s Return to Forever was modeled after the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s style as
a way of discovering an artistically and commercially viable mode of fusion.
g) A Boston native, Corea learned jazz by transcribing the voicings of Horace Silver and the
solos of Bud Powell. After leaving Davis in 1970 he joined Anthony Braxton for six
albums, after which he began to find free improvisation alienating. He formed Return to
Forever in 1972.
h) After hearing Mahavishnu, Corea wanted to play and write more dramatic and intense
music. He started playing synthesizers and hired guitarist Bill Connors and then Al
DiMeola, a technically spectacular player.
i) At fifteen years, Weather Report was the longest-lasting fusion group as well as one of
the most artistically and commercially successful. It also centered on Davis alumni, in
this case Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter.
j) Shorter was with Davis during the 1960s, led his own postbop groups, recorded
copiously, and wrote many compositions.
k) An Austrian World War II survivor and the mainstay of the group, Joe Zawinul came to
the United States in 1959. Most notably he joined Cannonball Adderley’s 1960s soul jazz
 band as the only white musician.
l) Zawinul first started to use the electric piano in the mid-1960s after hearing Ray Charles.
He used it to compose Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” He mastered the
synthesizer and even created his own timbres, which he preferred to the instrument’s
preset sounds.
m) The band moved away from free-jazz improvisation and textures to African American
pop (or “Afro-pop”) grooves during the mid-1970s when they hired a new bass player,
Jaco Pastorius. He did not play acoustic bass, only electric bass.
n) Pastorius removed the frets from the standard electric bass and created a singing sound on
the instrument. He sealed his claim on the jazz tradition by playing an unaccompanied
version of the notoriously difficult “Donna Lee” on his first album.
o) After a few years with Weather Report, Pastorius started using drugs heavily. By 1982 he
left the band and died four years later.
p) In Weather Report, Pastorius played melodic lines like a guitar player and attracted a
young white audience. The band’s 1976 recording Heavy Weather was a best seller and
featured “Birdland,” a Zawinul composition.
q) “Teen Town”
i) Named after a Miami neighborhood. Pastorius plays bass and drums here over an
ambiguous chord progression of major triads. It sounds improvised, but it is mostly
composed.
ii) Much of the performance is in the form of dialogues between Pastorius and Shorter
and Pastorius and Zawinul. The dialogue opens up near the end of the piece, a section
that is extended in live performance.
11) Chameleons: Herbie Hancock (b. 1940)
a) Hancock was a complex postbop pianist and composer who, in the 1970s, created a
popular, relatively simple funk-jazz mixture that was held together by extended,
syncopated bass lines.
b) Pianist Keith Jarrett, who despised rock and its electronic accoutrements, made some
popular recordings, including The Köln Concert, by also using extended repetitions of
gospel grooves and ostinati.
c) Chameleon-like, Hancock keeps several careers going at once: postbop pianist, 1970s
funk pop performer, 1980s hip-hop fusion artist, duo pianist with Sting, Christina
 Aguilera, Josh Groban, and Nora Jones. In concert he is as likely to play acoustic jazz on
a Steinway as he is contemporary R&B on the innovative “keytar.” His 2007 album,
River: The Joni Letters, was the first jazz recording to win the Grammy Award as album
of the year since Getz/Giberto in 1965.
d) Born in Chicago, he played classical music as well as R&B in his youth. He learned a
bluesy jazz style by listening to Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans and developed a good ear
for harmony. He had an early hit with “Watermelon Man,” which was recorded by
Mongo Santamaria. In the 1960s he composed and played on modal pieces like “Maiden
Voyage” and slash chord-based pieces such as “Dolphin Dance.”
e) “Cantaloupe Island”
i) His much-covered “Cantaloupe Island” has a rollicking rhythm created by the contrast
between the underlying four-beats-to-a-bar meter and the marvelously distinct piano
vamp that was more difficult to execute than it appears. This performance was the
thirteenth take.
ii) “Cantaloupe Island” makes for an interesting contrast with Horace Silver’s “Song for
My Father,” also recorded for Blue Note in 1964 (four months later), though Hancock
sounds more modern—in part because he uses advanced harmonies and a keyboard
touch that suggests a cooler, clearer attack as compared with Silver’s aggressive style.
f) Headhunters
i) After leaving Davis in 1970 he followed up on his fascination with synthesizers and
formed an experimental group that played postbop music. When the band struggled,
Hancock—inspired by James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Tower of
Power—turned to funk.
ii) His new band included funk musicians Harvy Mason (drums), Paul Jackson (bass),
and percussionist Bill Summers, who played West African percussion. The 1974
album (named after the group) produced the hit “Chameleon,” consisting of a bass
line, clave, a couple of chords, and layers of electric keyboard sounds. Some
criticized the album for being neither jazz nor funk. Later, Hancock effectively
combined the complexity of jazz with the simplicity of funk grooves on the albums
Thrust (1974) and Man-Child (1975).
iii) Then in the early 1980s he heard some hip-hop tapes by the group Material. He added
a melody and released it as “Rockit” in 1983. It became an underground success
 complete with a video on MTV.
12) Keith Jarrett (b. 1945)
a) An idiosyncratic pianist, he vocalizes and gyrates while he plays, and he is notoriously
intolerant of distractions during performances. Nevertheless, he has a wide audience.
b) Born in Pennsylvania, he was a classical music prodigy. He played with Art Blakey’s
Messengers, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis. Even though he hated fusion, he liked what
Miles was doing.
c) The Köln Concert
i) Jarrett recorded a number of long solo piano concerts. The best known is The Köln
Concert (1975), which is a double LP and is one of the best-selling jazz recordings of
all time even though, according to Jarrett, the piano was wrong, the food was wrong,
and he hadn’t slept in two days.
ii) Inspiring a number of “new age” pianists, this recording was noticed by non-jazz fans
who were attracted by the mixes of jazz and gospel, folk, and other kinds of music.
13) From Hard Fusion to Smooth Jazz
a) Fusion entered a new stage with a new generation who had been brought up on pop and
rock music.
b) Guitarist Pat Metheny originally studied Wes Montgomery’s techniques but was also
influenced by the music of Dylan, the Beatles, the country music of Waylon Jennings,
and bossa nova.
c) He made his first recording in 1975 with Jaco Pastorius (Bright Size Life). His sound is
warm and rich, with broad melodic lines, which he plays on original compositions. He
composed with pianist Lyle Mays, with whom he started the Pat Metheny group in 1977.
d) For his generation, Metheny reclaimed the guitar for jazz. The sound is often electronic
but also melodic and informed by the jazz tradition.
e) He also recorded free jazz in 1985 with Ornette Coleman (Song X), adding to its
“harmolodic” texture.
f) Fusion also uses music outside the United States, producing what is typically referred to
as world music.
g) Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is a good example. Growing up in Norway, he became
fascinated with Coltrane’s use of Third World music in the 1960s. Garbarek became a
jazz ethnomusicologist, learning folk songs and using them in his music, which he
 refused to call jazz.
h) A name evoking diversity, the Paul Winter Consort took on the entire earth as a resource.
Saxophonist Winter soon began using wolf howls and the singing of humpbacked whales
as sources on recordings such as Common Ground (1978). He has also recorded in sacred
spaces and in the wilderness.
i) Formed in 1970, Oregon is a breakaway group from the Consort that included composer
Ralph Towner. Each musician plays a number of instruments: Towner mainly plays six-
and twelve-string guitar but performs piano and even French horn. Bassist Glen Moore
also plays violin and flute; Paul McCandless, oboe (rare in jazz); and percussionist Colin
Walcott, tabla and sitar. Oregon exemplifies serene, intricate, and interactive New Age
jazz.
j) Smooth Jazz
i) Kenny G is an exemplar of smooth jazz. The term first appeared in the 1980s, but the
style, consisting of an inoffensive blending of jazz and upbeat R&B and funk, dates
back to the 1960s and 1970s with Wes Montgomery’s covers of Beatles songs, which
were produced by Creed Taylor. Taylor’s CTI Records recorded George Benson,
among others, in an easy-listening atmosphere.
ii) The audience was affluent African American professionals. The music was driven by
radio. By the late 1980s, a new category of radio emerged called “new adult
contemporary,” “jazz lite,” “quiet storm,” or “smooth jazz.” The target audience was
affluent twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds who wanted something less abrasive than
rock but did not want to make the leap to jazz. In 1987 Billboard introduced a
“contemporary jazz” category for this music.
iii) Kenneth Gorelick, or Kenny G, is the best-selling maestro of smooth jazz, although
some jazz musicians consider his music “lame noodling.”
iv) Smooth jazz finally did away with the real-time interactivity of jazz by using pop-
music recording techniques of overdubbing layers of music one at a time.
14) Jam Bands
a) Smooth jazz is consumed through recordings and radio play, but other kinds of fusion are
not. The roots of jam band jazz come from the 1960s, especially the long improvisations
of the rock group the Grateful Dead.
i) Phish is a more contemporary version of a band devoted to open-ended
 improvisation, but is not a jazz band. Publicized by Phish, Medeski, Martin and
Wood (MMW) was started by classical pianist John Medeski. He eventually left
classical music and went to the New England Conservatory of Music, where he met
bassist Chris Wood and then drummer Billy Martin at a gig.
ii) Starting out as a piano trio in New York, they started to tour in the early 1990s,
playing on the same gigs as rock bands like Los Lobos and Dave Matthews. Medeski
soon started playing an array of electronic keyboards, each with its own amplifier.
iii) Medeski does not like the term “jam band,” but it fits his group’s music. It builds on
grooves of earlier fusion groups. The group also places their recorded concerts on
their website. Many of the recordings have been shaped by hip-hop artists.
15) Acid Jazz and Hip-hop
a) The term “acid jazz” comes from the English “rave” scene. When DJ Chris Bangs decided
to play an alternative to the usual repetitive, bass-oriented, hypnotic electronic music for
dancers, he used soul jazz tracks. The rave’s “acid house” music suddenly became known
as “acid jazz.” This was a pathway for young people into the jazz tradition.
b) Acid jazz revivified soul jazz, which was pushed to the fringes of critical attention during
the period of Coltrane, Mingus, and Coleman. Though some viewed soul jazz as trivial
and too commercial, it persevered. Later, when these DJs looked for music as a new
source for acid jazz, they would find it in ample supply.
c) Hip-hop is the latest music to inform fusion. Starting in Brooklyn during the 1970s and
spreading worldwide in the 1980s, it did not have much impact on jazz musicians
(Hancock’s “Rockit” is an exception) and, unlike jazz, was countercultural, youth-
oriented, and in touch with black street life.
d) Two things had to occur for this particular fusion to work:
i) Hip-hop musicians had to start listening to jazz. Early examples include Digable
Planets and A Tribe Called Quest, who started sampling their parents’ Blue Note
recordings. In 1994, Us3 had a big hit with “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” a
transformed version of Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.” Blue Notes’ sales rose.
ii) Jazz musicians had to find a way to use hip-hop. The financial incentive was very
clear. Older jazz soloists were put together with hip-hop tracks. Branford Marsalis’s
fusion group, Buckshot LeFonque, employs both a rapper and a turntablist.
16) Fusion and Rock
a) As early as the 1930s, jazz musicians showed that anything could be jazzed or swung, just
as a few decades earlier ragtime pianists boasted that anything could be ragged.
b) Rock arrived at the very moment when jazz pushed toward the seeming anarchy of the
avant-garde. Rock fans dismissed the older style of pop song as arty, old-hat, and dull,
while jazz musicians, already leaving Tin Pan Alley song behind, derided the new rock
tunes as simplistic and childish.
c) In 1973, the bop saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef made an album called Part of the
Search, exploring his memories of black radio hits, from Billie Holiday and Jimmie
Lunceford to Ray Charles and the Five Satins, replacing the silences between tracks with
station-tuning static.