Jazz Fusion

By the late 1960s jazz had lost its young audience to rock and soul, and Miles Davis — already the man who had re-angled jazz twice — decided to go where the audience was. In a Silent Way (1969) and the seething Bitches Brew (1970) put electric pianos, electric bass and rock drumming under long-form trumpet improvisation; Davis booked rock ballrooms like the Fillmore and meant it (Gioia 2011).

His sidemen then founded the genre’s franchises: Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, whose 1973 title album — funk to its bones — became one of the best-selling jazz records ever made.

Fusion completes a circle this site has been drawing all along: jazz, born upstream of rhythm and blues, reaches back downstream and borrows from its own descendants — funk’s groove, rock’s voltage. The web is not a tree, and fusion is the proof: influence flows in both directions once genres coexist.