I like jazz. I like metal. Liking both was a source of great hilarity back in college, even going so far as to co-host a radio show with my roommate that tried to bring both together. The segues between songs were jarring to say the least, as we veered from hip-hop era Herbie Hancock to death metal a la Celestial Season (not the tea) with no transitions whatsoever.
When it came to discovering music that actually attempted to blend the two together, I had a bit of a struggle on my hands. I liked to consider bands like Deep Purple and their ilk "hard jazz" is that it was largely instrumental driven and featured technically accomplished solos. However the rest of the world was content to call them "hard rock" and move on. Clearly the two circles overlapped very little. I know Dave Mustaine hired a fusion guitarist in the early days of Megadeth (introducing very classic jazz drug problems to boot). Once I even scored an EP by a band called Demonspeed which was honest-to-god swing metal. However it was often either a relationship through trivia (in the case of the former) or a novelty (as I am forced to confess in the case of the latter).
So where was the Mahavishnu Orchestra all my life? The road there was long and twisted (and thoroughly enjoyable!), but I finally arrived at Inner Mounting Flame, an album so good that I was actually afraid of playing it too much, as if it would suck me in and tear my old music tastes straight down to their foundation.
In the true definition of fusion, two band members (guitarist/leader John McLaughlin and violinist Jerry Goodman) have their roots in rock (one via a certain notorious jazz trumpet player) and the other three were jazz guys looking for something with a bit more fire than straight jazz. Like the players, the listeners arrive at jazz fusion either via rock or jazz. Obviously for me it was rock. My first exposure came from the early 1970's output of Tommy Bolin, who jammed alongside drummer Billy Cobham (featuring prominently on his solo album Spectrum) and key-man Jan Hammer. He was even importing the works of McLaughlin and Hammer to his own band, Energy. Meanwhile, I knew Jerry Goodman from his work as a latter day member of the Dixie Dregs, playing alongside Steve Morse. However I was strangely hesitant when it came to the Mahavishu Orchestra. I had recently picked up Bitches Brew and was in the middle of trying to figure it out (average figuring out time I've heard is in excess of a year), so the only McLaughlin I was familiar with was buried in mix (brew?) of over a dozen different musicians. That album launched an entire new jazz fusion scene including the likes of Weather Report and Return to Forever, and later participants like Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny. Unlike that album, John McLaughlin is completely unleashed, along with the rest of the entire quintet. Even the "soft" songs crackle and erupt with energy and challenge the borders of jazz and hard rock.
It seems like the fluidity of the jazz and rock scenes crystallized by the end of the 1970's and the rise of smooth jazz in the following decade permanently tarnished the reputation of jazz fusion. Fusion was effectively marginalized by the purists on one end and the commercial conglomerates on the other. In a lot of ways, the sounds of classic fusion were assumed by the latter-day progressive movement. A lot of the progressive bands were stretching into fusion and pretty much took control of that sound by the 1990's, safely couched in a musically-sharp but popularity-starved genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment