Marsalis Does Not Approve: A Brief History of Fusion and the Reason for Its Critical and Popular Downward Spiral

When I talk to a lot of my friends these days of my love of what's usually referred to as "Jazz Fusion," I tend to get a disapproving look. A lot of times they'll say "OK, I guess that's cool" or "You know, Miles was way better before 1970." When I tell a couple of my friends of my wish to eventually drop playing acoustic bass and focus solely on its electric counterpart, they give me a lecture about how the upright bass "Has the soul of Jazz" or "Just sounds better, you know?" The truth is, I don't know. Why is acoustic jazz seen as better? Why is "fusion" (A genre whose heyday is long past) so derided by traditional jazz musicians? Why does anyone care?

The idea of "Fusing" jazz with other genres of music has been around for a very long time. Jazz itself is, in fact, a fusion of two predecessor genres, Ragtime and The Blues. Dizzy Gillespie performed fusion when he started adding Latin touches to his compositions. Charles Lloyd had experimented with incorporating elements of other genres into his jazz compositions in the sixties, but it is Miles Davis who is usually credited as the founder of Jazz Fusion as a subgenre. On the Albums Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro he started adding electric instruments to his ensemble, sometimes replacing the acoustic bass with an electric or the piano with a Fender Rhodes, as he did on In a Silent Way. But Bitches Brew was the first true Fusion album- Davis ditched the traditional jazz format, rhythms, and harmonic organization almost completely and instead recorded ten-to-twenty minute free-form improvisations that featured R&B and Rock rhythms and sounds.. Accompanying Davis was a huge rhythm section with two drummers, two bassists (Harvey Brooks on electric), sometimes up to three keyboardists, usually playing fender Rhodes electric piano, and a young John Mclaughlin on Guitar. These improvisations were strange and mysterious- the lack of formal structure gave the compositions a misty, dark quality similar in tone to his 1959 album, Kind of Blue. Davis's subsequent studio albums- On the Corner in particular- continued this pattern of development. Davis's ensemble became entirely electric, and the compositions almost invariably stretched on for at least ten minutes, featuring tireless, repetitive grooves which the soloists would weave in and out of in a dreamlike fog. Meanwhile the critics accused Davis of "Selling out" and using R&B and Rock rhythms in his music to try to make more money. But these accusations honestly don't make much sense. This Davis-flavored fusion is probably some of the more inaccessible jazz of the period; the long, formless compositions are often very arcane in nature. Davis was surely not just cashing in.

Davis's 1975 live album Pangaea showed the slow, repetitive jams of Davis's earlier seventies albums erupt into a cauldron of cataclysmic energy. wailing electric guitars, blistering tempos, and apocalyptic power flew out of the band when they performed live. This was a direction that was followed by other fusion artists, most of whom had passed through Davis's bands at one time or another: John Mclaughlin's Mahavishnu orchestra even out-volcanoed Davis's '75 band, Mclaughlin's screaming guitar scribbling fire in the air; Chick Corea's Return To Forever played compositions that had an angular bent melodically and were often performed at lightning speed. Tony Williams' Lifetime was another premier early fusion band. And just like Davis, all were alternately adored for their musical breakthroughs and criticized for their perceived commercial motive and departure from the One True Jazz Path.

The band that garnered the lion's share of the attention was Weather Report. Featuring important Davis collaborator Wayne Shorter on saxophone and In a Silent Way composer Joe Zawinul on Keyboards this band tended not to go for the explosive, Mahavishnu Orchestra style and instead emulate Davis's earlier fusion experiments. Their early albums featured a quietude and breadth that kept critics interested, although there were the occasional shouts of "sellout" from the old guard. A favorite of the critics was Miroslav Vitous, the first bassist (who mainly stuck to acoustic bass on the first albums.)

But by 1976 Weather Report had begun to fulfill the critic's worst fears as most of the other early fusion bands were starting to fly apart. The band came out with the album Black Market, which featured several peppy arrangements that tended to stick to a shorter length. The addition of electric bassist Jaco Pastorius completed Weather Report's transition to the new radio-friendly format by contributing several upbeat, poppy compositions. The critics were still interested but everyone, even members of the band, began to acknowledge the music's more commercial bend. This is not to say that the music is not good, however; Black Market is an excellent album- the title track has a fun, outgoing energy that does not rely on the chop-centric showing off of earlier fusion groups (although Pastorius would bring this flavor back into the band later.) It's just good music. But the fact that the tunes were beginning to cross over signaled eventual doom at the hands of critics.

The band's next album, Heavy Weather, put the final nail in the coffin of the heyday of Jazz Fusion. With Weather Report the sole major player remaining on the Fusion stage, they were able to shape critics' and fans' expectations of what the genre was single-handedly, and the hit single "Birdland" was just the tool for the job. A bright, poppy tune featuring numerous hooks and a tight, concise form, the composition is of very high quality. But this bright, poppy song and the rest of the bright, poppy songs on the album attracted the attention of musicians that Weather Reporters would later be ashamed to be classified with and was the last straw for critics. Their 1978 album Mr. Gone  went Gold almost immediately but was given an infamous one-star review from Down Beat magazine, the guiding light in jazz criticism. After that the band never recovered its critical acclaim and declined considerably both musically and popularly before finally breaking up in 1985.

In the 1980s a lot of things happened to cement the second-rate status of Jazz Fusion. In 1981 Yellowjackets, a radio-friendly, easy-listening "fusion " band formed and released their self-titled first album. Kenny G began his career the following year. And a young Wynton Marsalis burst onto the scene, bringing the swing back and establishing a new Golden Age of traditionalist jazz. From his throne at the Jazz at Lincoln Center office, Marsalis viciously attacked avant-garde jazz and especially fusion, which he saw as a bastard offspring that was thinning the blood of the True Jazz. This attack from Marsalis, backed up by his posse of critical cohorts (Stanley Crouch in particular,) signaled the end of jazz fusion as an acknowledged, vital branch of the jazz family tree.

During the traditionalist heydayof the 1980s and '90s, most listeners serious about jazz would shun fusion in favor of more Marsalis- approved groups and sounds. Jazz education was just getting off the ground at this time, and this attitude began to enter the universities and high schools as the teachers, many of whom were in awe of Marsalis, began developing curriculums and choosing repertoire. This pro-traditional, anti-experimental stance towards jazz in the schools has helped to keep students from being interested in fusion or even from listening to it. And the popular heyday of fusion in the '70s keeps a lot of the hipper kids in my generation from listening to the music, since it's too "mainstream."

This is why people care about whether or not I play acoustic bass, whether or not I like Weather Report, whether or not I'm interested in playing fusion at all. As long as music has been around, there have been culture wars between what was "acceptable" and what was "not acceptable," and jazz fusion is "not acceptable" at the moment, though players like Robert Glasper are starting to open things up again. But that's OK with me. My love of avant-garde and minimalist classical music has gotten me in trouble with people before, so I'm used to it. All I ask is that fusion be given the benefit of a fair hearing. so put on Heavy Weather one of these days and give it a good, honest listen. What you hear may surprise you.

Thoughts

Here are some ideas for upcoming articles. I'm just trying to get in the habit of posting so when i actually have ideas i remember to write them up.
1. upright vs. electric bass in jazz
2. psychedelic rock
3. the film Brazil
4. Why I stopped playing upright bass
5. fretless bass vs. the cello- similarities, differences, and overall value
6. drugs and music
7. more raging about dogma and taste

give me your thoughts as to what you'd like to see.

The Way Out

My high school has an unusually active musical community. A kid in the class ahead of me was number one on the hardstyle charts in the Netherlands. Our Marching Band was second in the state of Colorado this year in our division. Our choirs attract hundreds of students every year and sings the pop standards of the day, which as anyone would expect rakes in huge amounts of cash. Our orchestra has some really superb players, many of whom make all-state each year. And the jazz bands receive top marks at every competition they go to.

So it's also pretty reasonable to expect that with such a perfect microcosm of the musical community at large the same issues of dogma and purism that have long dominated the music scene around the world exist in perfect miniature on campus. On the one hand we have the purists, people who essentially promote the stagnation of the art in an appeal to the Golden Age of that music. The other side of this divide is the high modernist crowd, musicians who are in a perpetual state of revolution, crucifying composers who are not difficult or modern enough. The reason I am writing this is to show people my own age that it does not have to be this way. I have been on both sides of this extreme in my brief life on earth and I have begun to realize that neither of these attitudes are healthy or appropriate to the natural development of the art.

UPTOWN
In his book "The Rest is Noise," New Yorker music critic Alex Ross presents the idea of the Uptown musicians. These composers, musicians, and ensembles work in academia and perform at prestigious institutions. In the past Uptown has included both the purists and the high modernists, jockeying for recognition by the elite circles of music critics and concert series subscribers. On the university faculties of the sixties and seventies one could find composers like Milton Babbitt, who wrote an incendiary article title "Who Cares if You Listen?" imploring composers of advanced twelve-tone compositions to stop writing for audiences and shut themselves off into cloisters of academic musicians, performing and writing only for themselves in the effort to make music yet more esoteric and inaccessible. In he concert halls of Uptown one could encounter the leftovers of the Copland and Bernstein generations, composers who wrote Neo-Romantic music of the kind that your 80-year-old grandmother, who lives off of Mozart, Beethoven, and Louis Armstrong, would feel comfortable listening to.

Young musicians like myself who have absorbed this music and decided it is not for them have nowhere to go. I see many kids my age attempt to ally themselves with various musicians in these rival camps, mostly those who play jazz, as the genre is just about thirty years behind classical music in establishing an Uptown and, as a result, is exciting to both forward- and backward-thinking jazz musicians in the high schools. I have friends who ardently refuse to listen to jazz written outside of the straightahead camp, rejecting the music of important innovators such as Charles Mingus in favor of old writers like Duke Ellington, who is comparable to Beethoven in that he once changed everything but has long since moved beyond relevance. Others write jazz charts with abstruse harmonies and rhythms and throw themselves into the world of players like Tyshawn Sorey, whose so-called "compositions" have players flying off of the beat that is hardly ever represented and rocketing away from the key signature which might have been established in four notes at the beginning of the "head."
Purist Jazz promotes stagnation and complacency from audiences, who don't want to be exposed to something they haven't heard a million times before. High Modernist Jazz promotes extremism and hostile attitudes to others within the circles who adhere to this style. No one listens to pure classical music anymore for this exact reason: Either it's Mozart and everyone's sick of it, or it's this crazy creepy Stockhausen mess of sound that's impossible for a sane human to listen to. With both of these camps, whether in classical or jazz, the same problem exists: no one can relate to it.
What musicians Uptown don't realize is that there's a way out of this. No one has to listen to Leonard Bernstein or Wynton Marsalis wax poetic about the bygone days of Dixieland and Vienna if they don't want to, and no one has to associate with backstabbing, hyperrevolutionary composers and players at Darmstadt or the Velvet Lounge if they don't want to. There's a way to transcend this eternal back-and-forth; to rise above the eternal squabbles of the two exclusive Uptown cliques.

MILES DAVIS, THE MINIMALISTS, AND THE WAY OUT
Miles Davis, undoubtedly one of the greatest jazz trumpeters ever, once said that Jazz was old-people music. "I find that a lot of old jazz musicians are lazy motherfuckers resisting change and holding on to the old ways because they are too lazy to try something different. They listen to the critics, who tell them to stay where they are because that's what they like." He clearly resented the path of stagnation that was being presented by the young Wynton Marsalis and his supporters. But neither did Davis attempt to join the radical avant-jazz scene that was burgeoning under the watchful eye of pretentious enfants-terribles like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Instead he launched himself into the jazz-fusion scene, most notably with Bitches Brew and On the Corner, two albums that incorporate elements of funk, straightahead jazz, the avant-garde, rock, and pop without sounding like any of them. Critics on both sides of the Uptown divide accused Miles of selling out, but when you listen to music of the kind presented on this record, it's hard to believe that statement. To listen to these albums, with their tireless, grooving repetition and exotic colors (gleaned from newly invented instruments like synthesizers and the electric bass,) is to enter a waking dream state, where form is lost and soloists weave in and out of the dense textures created by the rhythm section. This music was definitely not avant-garde, or straightahead, or pop. It really was something new- it didn't react to the old, standard jazz literature, the way avant-garde jazz did; it simply gave it its due for its role in the genesis of this new direction, then promptly ignored it.

Classical musicians like Philip Glass and Steve Reich were moving in this direction as well. Along with their predecessors in the first New York School and West Coast minimalists like Terry Riley they had been moving away from the classical Uptown Scene since the days of Harry Partch, who was so removed from both the mainstream avant-garde and traditional classical that he even neglected to tune his instruments in equal temperament. These composers also absorbed all the music around them; Reich saw Coltrane at least 50 times, and Glass absorbed Rock and Indian music in equal measure; and like Davis, they picked out elements they enjoyed, jettisoned the rest, ran out the back door with their stash of choice musical ideas, and simply started over. The early music of Glass and Reich is so simple and austere that one could easily claim they were forming a separate avant-garde; but their insistence on transparency and simplicity represented a fundamentally different approach from the lush world of Neo-Romanticism or the Draconically complex and academic circle of the avant-garde. As their careers progressed their music, very accessible but also very different, drew eyes from the popular music crowd; the two composers became beacons to the worlds of rock and electronic music, some DJs paying homage by sampling Reich's works in their own songs. So one could say that, like Davis, Reich and Glass 'sold out,' writing popular works for the new generation. But this is not true either. Works like 'Four Organs,' Reich's piece (Twenty-minutes of the same V-I cadence over and over) that set off the last great scandal concert of the century, or Glass's Einstein on the Beach, a four-and-a-half-hour opera that contains no dialogue or narrative, are far outside the mainstream. What these composers represent is a complete departure from the dogmatic world of institutionalized music. Composers and musicians like Reich, Glass, and Davis found their Way Out, leaving the tired Uptown world for something sophisticated and full of meaning, but also fun, exciting, and new.

WHAT TO DO
My advice for students in the discipline of music isn't to throw themselves headlong into this other way of doing things. That would be defeating the whole purpose, because the same dogma attached to the Uptown music would be carried Outside. Instead, I think that kids should simply play and write what they want to and figure the rest out later. These Outside composers that I've put my faith in never forced any of their music, and I think that's really the lesson here. One thing Reich, Glass, and Davis all have in common is their willingness not only to change their music but also have a good attitude about it. There's a kind of live-and-let-live philosophy to their music that speaks volumes about the direction we, as the musicians of the next generation, should consider taking. Simply put, it's not the twentieth century anymore; the artists have moved on from Dada and Cubism and the eternal pretension of Andy Warhol (although his idea of the cult of personality still, unfortunately, lingers) so we should be able to do the same as musicians.
So schoolmates, here is the lesson. We are all finding our own directions as musicians and as people in general. Be kind to others and understand that just because their taste is more conservative or more liberal, mor populist or more counterculture, doesn't mean that a value can be assigned to it. If there's anything that Davis and the Minimalists can teach us, it's that peaceful coexistence with others in the musical world, and respect for our fellow travelers, may not bring us popularity, but it will bring us happiness.
Thanks to Alex Ross and Kyle Gann for much of the terminology in this article.

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