Miles Davis and assorted Jazz and Fusion Live Recordings from The Land Down Under - Traders Page

Definitions of Jazz/Fusion

Trumpeter and composer Miles Davis had the greatest influence on the development of jazz fusion by a single individual. He popularized several genres of jazz, most notably cool jazz, hard bop, and modal jazz with his first great quintet. By 1963, this quintet had dissolved. Having to build from scratch, by year's end he had settled upon a line-up of saxophonist George Coleman, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. Wayne Shorter replaced Coleman in 1964 for what came to be known as the trumpeter's second great quintet, stable for four years until early 1968. During this period, Davis began to experiment with electric instruments.
The quintet's 1968 album Miles in the Sky is the first of Davis' albums to incorporate electric instruments, with Hancock and Carter playing electric piano and bass guitar respectively on the track "Stuff," and George Benson added on electric guitar to the quintet for "Paraphernalia." Davis furthered his explorations into the use of electric instruments on another 1968 album, Filles de Kilimanjaro, sessions for which had pianist Chick Corea and bassist Dave Holland substituting for Hancock and Carter, the latter of whom departed the quintet, at the time uninterested in Davis' new direction. Despite this, compositionally both of these albums continued in the vein of four released earlier by the quintet.

In 1969, Davis introduced the full-blown electric instrument approach to jazz with In a Silent Way, which can be considered Davis's first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites edited heavily by producer Teo Macero, this quiet, static album would be equally influential upon the development of ambient music. It featured contributions from musicians who would all go on to spread the fusion evangel with their own groups in the 1970s: Shorter, Hancock, Corea, pianist Josef Zawinul, guitarist John McLaughlin, Holland, and Williams. Williams quit Davis to form his own fusion band soon after, and over the course of three days in August Davis recorded the sessions that would be released as the album Bitches Brew in 1970. In addition to the previous musicians, the sessions included Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, Larry Young on electric piano, Harvey Brooks on bass guitar, and percussionists Lenny White, Jack DeJohnette, Don Alias, and Juma Santos. Bitches Brew abandoned traditional jazz in favor of a style of improvisation more typical of rock, with emphasis on the backbeat. The album gave Davis a gold record, and created consternation within the jazz community that remains to this day, many critics and musicians breaking with Davis after his forays into fusion. Davis would continue to work in the genre until his temporary retirement in 1975, releasing the albums A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, In Concert, On the Corner, Dark Magus, Agharta, and Pangaea. Sessions from this period were fashioned by producer Macero and Davis into the compilation albums Big Fun and Get Up With It.

The Pioneers of Fusion

Much of 1970s fusion was performed by bands started by the Davis alumni, including The Tony Williams Lifetime, Weather Report, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band. In addition to Davis and the musicians who worked with him, additional important figures in early fusion were Larry Coryell and Billy Cobham with his album Spectrum probably the best selling fusion album.

Herbie Hancock first continued the path of Miles Davis with his experimental fusion albums, such as Crossings in 1972, but soon after that he became an important developer of "jazz-funk" with his seminal albums Head Hunters 1973 and Thrust in 1974. Later in the 1970s and early 1980s Hancock took a yet more commercial approach, though he also recorded acoustic jazz with a reunion of the mid-sixties Davis quintet with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard in place of Davis. Hancock was one of the first jazz musicians to use synthesizers.

At its inception, Weather Report was an avant-garde experimental fusion group, following in the steps of In A Silent Way. The band received considerable attention for its early albums and live performances, which featured songs that might last 30 minutes or more. The band later introduced a more commercial sound, most noted Joe Zawinul's hit song "Birdland". Weather Report's albums were also influenced by different styles of Latin and African music, offering an early world music fusion variation. Jaco Pastorius, an innovative electric bass player, joined the group in 1976 on the album Black Market, and is prominently featured on the 1979 live recording 8:30. Heavy Weather is the top-selling album of the genre.

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.