The Nostalgia of Fusion Jazz
There is a cyclical nostalgia factor in music that always thickens the gumbo. For every batch of contemporary music driving the envelope farther out, there’s usually a connection in some weird way to something from the past. I really don’t know if this phenomenon exists in painting or literature, but nostalgia is a powerful force in musical development. For a few decades, the trends in musical nostalgia were simply a fascination with anything 20 years old.
In the 60’s, there was a significant influence on popular music from the World War II era of the 1940’s. Kilroy made a comeback in pop culture, and all of the greatest drummers of the 60’s pop bands learned how to play drums through big band jazz of the 40’s. It’s easy to hear big band drumming in Ringo’s entire creative output with The Beatles.
In the 70’s, the nostalgia was for the 1950’s, and greaser music made a comeback. TV shows like Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley dominated pop culture in the 70’s, fueled by the enormous success of American Graffiti, and the soundtrack for that movie was highly significant. The musical group Sha Na Na became a thing, as well as other connections to rockabilly and do-wop, and who can forget that Elvis’ second career took off in the 1970’s? This was also the era of the enormously popular musical and movie, Grease.
Continuing the trend, the 1980’s rediscovered the 60’s, as the soundtrack for The Big Chill was simply a 60’s greatest hits playlist. The excessive over-production of disco music from the 70’s evaporated into the raw, classic 3-minute single of the 1960s, and 80’s pop music was dominated by artists who could be creative within those strict guidelines.
The last great era of rock music was the 1990’s, and those bands freely emulated all their heroes from Led Zeppelin, The Who, and AC/DC of the 1970’s. Rock bands fro the 90’s such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Guns ‘n Roses, and Nine Inch Nails were all long-lost refugees from the 70’s, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers even managed to brilliantly merge 70s’ rock with 70’s funk.
Then, something went haywire. As the digital age swept over contemporary music, the nostalgia became harder to identify. I can’t honestly find any any connection between music of the 2000’s and music of the 1980’s that would continue the long-standing 20-year gap nostalgia trend. Likewise, the 2010’s don’t really have much connection to the 1990’s, either. However, I recognize a growing fascination with 70’s-era fusion jazz creeping back into contemporary music of the 2020’s. Of course, that blows the nostalgia gap from 20 years to 50 years, but why not? Also, it’s not so much that I see fusion jazz all over the Hot 100 of today, but I definitely recognize it in the tastes and preferences of my students. For some reason, they know and love 70’s fusion jazz.
What is fusion jazz? In the simplest terms, it’s a truce between rock music and traditional jazz. Historically, jazz musicians expressed great disdain for rock music. Initially, they all hated The Beatles simply because The Beatles were immensely popular. You see, there was this weird “law” that developed in both 20th century classical music and jazz that anything artistically significant would never be popular, and therefore, any music that’s highly popular can NEVER be artistically significant. 20th century composers like John Cage and modern jazz musicians like Sun Ra purposefully and actively worked to discourage anyone from liking their music, due to the aforementioned weird law. Classical music and jazz were both trapped in the act of committing slow suicide until they were saved by The Beatles.
The jazz snobs of the 60’s dismissed The Beatles simply because of their popularity, believing that Beatles music would never amount to anything artistic. However, by the end of the 60s’, lots of crow had been served and eaten. Maybe there was something to this rock music stuff after all. Longtime jazz pioneer Miles Davis got the ball rolling with the inclusion of rock-era keyboards and guitars into his band and recordings of the late 1960’s, and fusion jazz was born.
Miles encouraged his keyboardist Herbie Hancock to explore electronic potential, then fired and replaced him with Chick Corea. Although the music produced by these unusual unions of musical thought wasn’t earth-shattering itself, the after-shocks that followed Hancock and Corea forward into the development of full-blown jazz fusion certainly was. Instead of the Miles Davis formula of allowing rock instruments to join in with his jazz, Hancock and Corea turned it around the other way and allowed jazz instruments into their rock. Miles Davis may have invented fusion jazz, but Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea developed and defined it.
Although the keyboardist was usually the catalyst for the fusion (they easily slid back and forth effortlessly between rock and jazz), it was the inclusion of electric guitar and electric bass that put the hard stamp on fusion jazz. Jeff Beck, Al DiMeola, Jaco Pastorius, and Stanley Clarke were the fire in the iron in the 1970s. Fusion jazz swapped the complicated chord progressions of traditional jazz for the endless two-chord vamps of hard rock, and the horn players had to learn to adapt.
Forgive me for indulging myself into this little sidetrack, but I’ve always been equally fascinated by the effect of fusion jazz on artists’ record contracts and vice versa. Have you ever wondered why none of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones appeared on each other’s records? The Beatles even composed the first hit for The Rolling Stones, I Wanna Be Your Man, but they never recorded or performed together. The reason was contract exclusivity. The Beatles were signed to EMI Records and The Rolling Stones were signed to Decca Records, and their contracts forbid them from working with anyone from any other label. That was the standard record contract for pop music, and therefore not unusual. If you think about it, nobody really performed as guests with other bands in the 60’s and 70’s. It was an extremely rare occurrence in popular music. However, jazz was different. Due to the improvisatory nature of jazz, the musicians were EXPECTED to perform with other artists on other labels frequently, and the albums would simply include an acknowledgement of that fact, such as “John Coltrane appears courtesy of Atlantic Records.” You saw that all the time on jazz records.
Therefore, when fusion jazz became a thing, rock musicians started behaving like jazz musicians and appearing on each others’ stuff. Every now and then, you’d find a jazz musician who had an exclusive contract and couldn’t legally record on another label with another artist - at least not under his own name. For instance, consider a jazz keyboardist named George Duke, who frequently crossed back and forth between rock and jazz. He played simultaneously with Frank Zappa’s band (hard rock) and Cannonball Adderly’s band (hard bop jazz) in the late 1960’s, but had a very restrictive and exclusive contract as a solo artist. Therefore, whenever he appeared on anyone else’s stuff, he used the name Dawilli Gonga. So, if you find a fusion jazz album from the 70’s listing Dawilli Gonga as the keyboard player, it’s really George Duke.
Another musician named George who went through something similar was George Clinton. He was a member of a do-wop group from the 50’s and 60’s called the Parliaments and he became a songwriter and solo performer. He liked to use the name Parliament for his ever-changing line-up of musicians until copyright, contract, and royalty issues started hitting from multiple directions. His solution was to perform under the name Parliament at times, then change the band’s name to Funkadelic in order to sidestep the lawyers. Even though it was the exact same group of core musicians, the evolving legal battles determined whether they were Parliament or Funkadelic from city to city and year to year.
Lawyers are strange.
By the way, the only thing that really prevented the band Chicago from being considered a fusion jazz band was their incredible skill at turning out powerful 3-minute pop hits for the Top 40. However, artists that were considered to be more jazz than pop also found their way into the Top 40 of the 70’s as well, such as Chuck Mangione, Donald Byrd, Hubert Laws, Wilton Felder, and Grover Washington, Jr.
The main players in 70’s fusion jazz were Herbie Hancock, Return to Forever (Chick Corea’s band), Weather Report, Deodato, the Jazz Crusaders, the Brecker Brothers, and Grover Washington, Jr. Plenty of traditional rock musicians also made the occasional crossover, such as Jeff Beck and Larry Carlton. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Jimi Hendrix had lived, he would have been one of the pioneers of fusion jazz. Side Three of his final album, Electric Ladyland, is a 20-minute jazz/rock free exploration piece. I like to consider the 1970’s as the best time for fusion jazz, because it was still an uneasy partnership between rock and jazz. They were each unique, separate unlikely entities thrown together, and both styles retained all aspects of original origins. By the 1980’s, fusion jazz had finally morphed into its own “thing,” and the individual components had lost their rough edges. Fusion jazz of the 80’s and 90’s is much smoother and slicker, and a lot of the groove disappeared (Kenny G, for example).
(Birdland by Weather Report)
I consider Bruno Mars to be a great representative of a revival of the funk sound of the 70’s, and Kendrick Lamar has released some very provocative fusion jazz-influenced rap songs. Some straight up full-blown fusion jazz groups of today would include Lucky Chops and Snarky Puppy.
(Danza by Lucky Chops)
What does all of this have to do with me, the director of the jazz band at Chattahoochee Valley Community College in little old Phenix City, Alabama? Many of my young, teenage musicians love and follow the music of Lucky Chops and Snarky Puppy (thankfully, the groove is back again). However, when I casually toss around names like Weather Report and Return to Forever, they freak out. “You KNOW that stuff?!?! Awesome! Can we play some?”
Of course we can. Of course we can.