When DownBeat declared jazz dead, Miles Davis plugged in and proved otherwise
In 1967, with rock ruling American charts, DownBeat ran a headline announcing that jazz as people knew it was finished. Within two years Miles Davis, listening to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, had traded swing for a rock backbeat on Bitches Brew, and a new hybrid called fusion was pulling in gold records and furious critics.
Fusion joined jazz harmony and improvisation to the instruments and rhythms of rock, funk and rhythm and blues. Players who had grown up on rock and roll brought in electric guitars, bass guitars, electric pianos, organs and synthesisers, often in place of acoustic piano and double bass. Arrangements range from a single-chord groove with a simple repeated melody to intricate progressions and odd time signatures reminiscent of progressive rock, but nearly all leave room for extended improvisation.
The two worlds had been almost entirely separate until about 1967, though there were early crossings: the Daevid Allen Trio, later Soft Machine, formed in 1963, and the jazz label Verve released Frank Zappa's debut Freak Out! in 1966. Larry Coryell, a guitarist some regard as the movement's godfather, summed up his generation by saying they loved both Miles Davis and the Rolling Stones. Charles Lloyd played rock-tinged jazz at Monterey in 1966, performed at the Fillmore West and gave his albums psychedelic titles like Forest Flower. One journalist traces the term jazz fusion itself to a 1968 review of David Axelrod's Song of Innocence.
Davis's In a Silent Way of 1969, two long improvised suites heavily edited by producer Teo Macero, is counted as his first fusion record, featuring future leaders of the movement such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul and John McLaughlin. Bitches Brew went gold, yet some critics accused him of betraying jazz, seeing rock as cruder and more commercial. His alumni pushed further: Hancock fused funk and electronics on Head Hunters in 1973, while Corea's Return to Forever mixed jazz, rock and Brazilian music.
After a peak in the 1970s, fusion kept experimenting through the 1980s alongside a gentler, radio-friendly offshoot called smooth jazz, and it continued evolving into the 2000s. Rather than a fixed style, it is better understood as an approach to combining traditions.
Source: Jazz fusion
