11 May 2008 :: The Undivulged Prolongation respecting Eggs

Retconning


XIV :: Fusion I (Early '70s)
Mark Abraham :: 8 April 2008 |            


Poor beleaguered fusion, the elephant in the room of indie cred. I think part of the problem fusion faced and faces is that, despite a large range of styles, the various strains are often conflated and, outside of On the Corner (1972), reduced to its two worst offshoots. So let’s clarify: while fusion means fusing basically anything to anything it normally means, as I’ve argued before, that fusion was mostly jazz musicians appropriating rock and funk. But more specifically, fusion essentially came in four brands.

First, we have the expanded rock-combo of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago, or Steely Dan. Rock structures, bright horns, occasional flirtation with overblown instrumentals. Second, we have the jazz-heavy type of, for example, Freddie Hubbard; this style made moves to follow Miles Davis down the rock/funk rabbit hole but hedged in order to try and maintain a traditional jazz audience. In other words, slick, firm on the corners, and steady drumming. I mention these two in tandem because they together have had the greatest effect on what today most non-jazz listeners understand as “jazz”: the Kenny Gs, the Diana Kralls, etc. The former—especially if we’re talking Blood, Sweat & Tears—made the mistake of exploiting the sunny hippy-ness of the ’60s in a ’70s that looked back and declared, “no edge,” which in turn did a lot to drive folks to the more ragged work of glam and punk rockers throughout the decade. Whatever. I’m a huge Phil Collins fan too. The latter, in trimming the jazz-fat to be funky, consequently lost all of the internal tension that made bop soloing palatable—instead, the audience was left with slick, streamlined jazz that privileged consistent rhythm over innovation. Somewhere in the middle, a space opened up where more commercially-minded jazz musicians could somehow play at being “traditional” at the same time that their smaltzy crap bore absolutely zero resemblance to bop, swing, or whatever else happened before the ’60s. And, sure, that was a slow, indirect result, given that I’m about to tell you some of these albums are the my favorite jazz records of the ’70s, but that’s there, and it complicates the way fusion gets viewed.

A view even more complicated by the more notorious brand that followed the Mahavishnu Orchestra school of proggy fusion. The least jazzy, this sort of modulates between the more adventurous stuff Mahavishnu Orchestra did and the Weather Report pocket of smooth guitars and bass bending all over one another. Especially by 1976, where approximately 300 albums were released that typify this school. Jaco Pastorius, Bright Size Life, and Hejira—all of which I really like, mind—solidified electric stringed instruments in the context of jazz musicianship in a way that fundamentally modified its sound. And that’s a complicated thing to say, since it has little to do with composition and everything to do with the instruments themselves, but the guitar/bass blurs and hammer-ons and slides that are prominent in this style of play sound nothing like the sharp notes of, say, a trumpet. It’s a frequency thing, or a velocity thing, or just like somebody sanded off all the edges, but this brand of fusion is almost always equated by certain critics with “wankery” or even “self-indulgent wankery,” because, again, no edge, and therefore those certain people react, like: there’s all this shit going on but it’s irrelevant. Which is taste, of course, but then Chicago had to go and release “The Glory of Love” and wrap all this up into the Fogelberg/Loggins/Messina/De Burgh box of easy dismissal. Next time you want to walk up to some Pat Metheny-wannabe in a New York jazz club and say, “You were amazing!” remember: that’s a line in “Lady in Red.”

But also remember that this stuff in context was crucial to expanding pop boundaries (especially in bass playing) in the ’80s and pretty fucking cool on it’s own merits, if you can just listen to it away from some fanboy who’s closing his eyes and dreamily playing air-slap bass while acting like it does have more edge than horn jazz because it’s on a guitar. Not that I’ve ever suffered through that particular experience or anything. It’s dorky on both sides, is my point: people who refuse to hear it, because they think the corners are too curved and therefore there’s nothing to hang onto, and people who can’t get outside of the minutia of what are essentially jazz solos, like Zappa fans who think that every minor drum whatever is somehow synergistically produced as a result of his band’s utter unity and it’s like they’re talking to one another and their instruments are having a conversation and, yes, of course, another legacy of fusion—which, keep in mind, the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah (1975) and Terrapin Station (1977) came out around this time and they are definitely indebted to Mahavishnu—is everybody’s favorite punching bag: Phish.

And finally, of course, the Bitches Brew/On the Corner brand of fusion, where Davis found catharsis somewhere between voodoo and the urban environment. This is the brand that maintains the most critical legitimacy, even if traditional jazz aficionados haaate On the Corner and you’re most likely to hear it when some skinny white kid decides it’s a good time to explain to me exactly how much it expresses the urban setting. Not that I’ve ever suffered through that particular experience or anything. But whatever, dude. Hint: Davis wasn’t trying to express your urbanity, or mine, so let it be and just listen to the record. It’s amazing and one of the four integral components in the history of hip hop, along with R&B/Funk, Reggae/Dub, and the Lost Poets. I mean, uh, “spoken word poetry.” Since On the Corner isn’t on this list—I’ve done Davis elsewhere, and it should be obvious, anyway—let me just say, Teo Macero deserves a spot right up there with Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby as early innovators in hip hop production.

That fusion came out of jazz is in some ways irrelevant—certainly, the influence of jazz musicians affected the early aesthetic, but in a post-Hendrix/present-Funkadelic world, Davis and his ilk searching for relevance in what was increasingly a post-non free jazz world makes sense. Y’know, plus the heroin. But when free jazz took root in the early ’60s, rock was still a variable, untested and immature. When fusion took root in the ’70s, it was far more cognizant of the effect of popular music and of the shifting political climate. Even if Davis flirted with the dark side of vague voodoo on In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitch’s Brew (1969), it says something that he dropped the world/mystic/goat’s head imagery almost entirely as the United States careened into a ’70s that seemed to betray the promises of the ’60s. Black or white, the musicians who followed him down the road of fusion didn’t necessarily follow him into the occult. But what they did do was take his cue and strongly situate their music in contextual space, whether that space was the Hindu spiritualism of Mahavishnu Orchestra, the galaxy of Herbie Hancock, or the Africa of Phil Ranelin. And that search for meaning in a very interesting way situates fusion in direct opposition to the other preeminent strain of jazz in the ’70s: if free jazz and free improv sought to deconstruct the traditions and values of the old order, fusion nostalgically looked to spiritual imagery with roots in the old world. There’s exceptions across the board, of course, and certainly African-American free jazz was deeply rooted in local communities and the Civil Rights movement, but that to me is the biggest difference: fusion tried to find meaning; free jazz tried to rip it apart. And even at the points where the two met (which happened a lot, but e.g. Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Yo Yo”) that tension played out in interesting ways, showing that both strains—one that defines present tense commercial jazz, and one that defines present tense underground jazz—were trying to make sense of a world that had maybe left jazz behind. Or at least didn’t view Jazz as a thing that meant much as prog and rock musicians increasingly rubbed genres together.

Part one analyzes the early days of fusion, till 1973.




Eddie Gale Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music (1969)

I’m making a bit of an argument here, I know, since Gale is best known for his work with Cecil Taylor—side-note: check out Unit Structures (1966)—and Sun Ra (though I might argue that Sun Ra’s brand of free jazz is more obviously connected to Bitches Brew fusion than, say, Eric Dolphy). That said, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music is like the elongated, epic version of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That?” The most notable thing about the album is the way it flirts with the early funk genre in a way that refuses to actually sound very funky (kind of like Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Yo Yo”). I’ll suggest that this album—and especially the way it uses percussion to emulate corner bustle—is a direct predeccessor to On the Corner. I have no firm evidence that Davis or Teo Macero heard it, but it almost doesn’t matter—if you’re looking for the missing link between Bitches Brew and On the Corner, this is it.

Which isn’t, necessarily, to say that it sounds much like either. What it does sound like is a careful blend of non-Western scales, rhythmic percussion, and funk accents, and like the best albums that deployed Black Power as a raison d‘être, the ideology is in the unrepentant tone. As America turned towards the ’70s, Gale turned to gospel, funk, and mysticism to facilitate an epic and dramatic look at the aftermath of Civil Rights and a specific depiction of his life and community in Brooklyn. Gale’s experience in his local scout’s marching band is very apparent; his two-drummer/two-bassist sextet rumbles beneath and between an 11-piece chorus and the vocals and guitar of his sister Joann. “The Rain,” one of the greatest songs of the ’60s in my estimation, is cataclysmic, the band piling in behind Joann’s guitar/vocal introduction. Richard Hackett and Thomas Holman thunder beneath, Judah Samuel and James “Tokio” Reid throw bass licks at one another, and Eddie and Russell Lyle sport free jazz affectations overtop. “Fulton Street” is more traditionally free jazz, “A Understanding” is the type of thing that OOIOO tries to replicate on their slower pieces, but it’s the closing two tracks that really swing. The gorgeous choral arrangements of “A Walk With Thee” spiral over marching band drums and bass before descending into free territory; like “The Rain,” the solo sections are free but the composed sections are inchoate funk. Similarly, “The Coming of Gwilu” flirts with orchestral woodwind arrangements before the drums enter to provide a bed for the funky, atonal bass line. It’s cooler than that maybe sounds; there’s something hypnotic about the track, certainly, and it isn’t just the steel drums. Elaine Reiner leads a beautiful call and response with the rest of her singers and the percussion becomes more and more insistent. This is what Galt MacDermot was going for with “Three-Five-Zero-Zero”; he didn’t come close. That this curious album still seems slept on is, perhaps, explainable: released at the tail-end of Blue Note’s supremacy, too funky to be free and too free to be funky, it’s a victim of consequence. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s really quite brilliant, and a precursor to all kinds of innovations in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today.





Freddie Hubbard Red Clay (1970)

Hubbard’s a weird fixture in jazz. He played on Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, and John Coltrane’s Ascension, while never really embracing free jazz on his own terms. By the time Red Clay arrived in 1970, the funk and soul influences on his slick brand of hard bop were impossible to escape. In part, Herbie Hancock’s the key here—choosing marital bliss over his steady mid-‘60s gig with Miles Davis meant Hancock had lots of free time, and though he wasn’t yet releasing his own brand of future fusion on the world (though he was releasing great music), his playing here hints at the “Chameleon“s that would follow. It’s Ron Carter and Lenny White who really fuse funk to jazz here, though: the former’s bass never strays too far from jazz conventions while kicking up a little dirt round the corners; the latter’s drums are high hat driven in a way that you don’t normally hear in jazz. In fact, I’d almost argue that if the drums had been brought more front in center (a technique still not common in non-free jazz mixing at the time…or, for that matter, now) this stuff would sound even more like funk.

You can hear the way Hubbard stretches his hard bop background over a funk bass, avoiding the elliptical fits that mark hard bop solos in favor of long, pulsing draws. Interesting though, is the way the band gets into all of these neat riffs that echo bop techniques while they sound funky—in a way, you can hear how funk evolved from soul, rock, and jazz by hearing how this quintet tackles the subject. Joe Henderson, rolling away on his tenor saxophone for his solo on “Red Clay,” for example, sounds for all the world like he’s trying to emulate distorted guitar tones. And everywhere you can hear the upbeat non-bop influence of Sly & the Family Stone and Funkadelic. Hubbard’s ability to update old bop tricks is especially apparent on “The Intrepid Fox,” which is in a way the most traditionally bop track at the same time that all the pieces seem pulled from contemporary pop songs. An idea made more immediate when this track is followed by the band’s cover of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.” Well…at least that’s one good version of the song.





Carla Bley & Paul Haines Escalator Over the Hill (1971)

So: jazz opera, yes, and possibly better suited to a Retconning on avant-garde curios, maybe, but Bley’s opus is a monstrosity of crossed genre streams and gorgeous interplay: in effect, it is fusion taken to an extreme. And, whatever a “chronotransduction” is as the cover proclaims this to be, the three years Bley and Haines spent bringing this thing to fruition with a cast and band that includes Linda Rondstadt, Jack Bruce, Don Preston, John McLaughlin, and about 50 million other people resulted in an album that defied definitions of what jazz and avant garde meant. It’s the kind of album that shows why perennial weird-music pick Frank Zappa often came off as amateurish when he attempted something this amibitious—see: Thing Fish (1984), which: ew. Is it a Kurt Weill revival? Is it a jazz album? What exactly is the escalator?

I’m not going to spend too much effort justifying this as a fusion album; it is to fusion/jazz what Magma is to rock ‘n’ roll, and Bley was absolutely willing to take the entire band down strange tangents and carnivalesque segues in an effort to tell the book’s story, which has something to do with a hotel and…um…stuff happens? Doesn’t really matter, given that Haines is constructing language to field the music, and the music itself is very much a product of late ’60s/early ’70s revolution and alienation. Roping rock, Indian/world, jazz, and orchestral together in a way that emphasizes cultural expansion/confusion and a loosening grip on pre-World War II cultural traditions, Escalator Over the Hill tells the story of America in flux, searching for meaning but searching for it quickly. Like, my interpretation has always been: if the grass is always greener on the other side, why not build escalators to get there quicker? Given late-‘60s complaints by Indian cultural ambassadors like Ravi Shankar that American youth misused Hindu spiritualism as a justification for their claims that LSD awakened real consciousness (that’s a bit reductive, but I’m sure we can all connect the dots) it seems as likely an interpretation as any. But whatever: this album is fantastic, and fantastically dense and weird, and despite it’s release date it might be the final great ’60s American album.





Nina Simone Emergency Ward (1972)

This is what listening to this album is like:

You are watching a songwriter compose a song in real time with a full band behind them, just trying out different shit and totally giving into the depth of the track and taking little segues and sometimes things seem cheesy but they work in this context because the composer believes in trying anything out just to let it fly. And the songs themselves are just fucking heart wrenching and expressionistic anyway and so it all works because the composer is really good at getting inside their song, because it really means…something to them, and what that something is isn’t necessarily obvious, but it doesn’t matter because that’s what works.

Except, of course, that Nina Simone didn’t write three of these songs, and the one she did right is essentially improvised piano under a fucking poem that she interpolates into George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” and that and “Isn’t It a Pity?” are together almost as long as All Things Must Pass (1970) anyway (kidding, sort of) and she’s doing this in front of an audience, and it’s not like it hasn’t been said a quadrillion times before about her, but: fuck. Fucking amazing, brilliant, insane, epic, elegiac, Allen-Ginsberg-throwing-up-in-jealously shit. Talking about this album is like trying to fuck the sun. Which isn’t to say that it’s the greatest album ever—it’s not even an album so much as a brief window into Nina Simone’s…thing. But there you are, bowled over, confused, and in fucking fright that the band is going to launch into another chorus of “My Sweet Lord” because when she sings David Nelson’s lines “I never dreamed—I certainly never hoped—that one day I’d be screaming for something my mother told me I needed in the beginning” and her piano comes in with bright chords that I’m surprised Kanye West hasn’t sampled yet, but that sound like Daft Punk has, and here she is quoting a Last Poet while singing George Harrison, it’s just fucking incendiary and goosebump-inducing and, seriously: Nina Simone for president, even if it’s posthumous.





Grant Green Live at the Lighthouse (1972)

Whenever I do Fusion II I’ll talk about James “Blood” Ulmer and Pat Methany; then we can get down to nuts ‘n’ bolts about the influence of Grant Green. Here he is wailing; here’s the critical influence on the direction jazz guitar would take in the later ’70s; here’s the first bonafied funk fusion album on this list that seems more funk than bop. Live at the Lighthouse is a brilliant view into Green’s extensive chops mediated by his adherence to jazz tropes in a funk’s clothing. On Shelton Lester’s “Flood in Franklin Park” Green takes a 15-minute excursion into the world of the jazz guitar. And, I mean, it’s a sound we here all the time now, but those crisp vibratoed frettings and super-quick runs were, in the early seventies, still a fairly new thing. More importantly, Green isn’t just lick after lick so much as creative phrasing after creative phrasing; his solos wove and darted with the kind of expressionism that Sonny Rollins alway achieved: he’s not just evoking mood but telling you something important.

“Walk in the Night” allows his band to flex a bit of muscle too. The whole mood relies on Greg William’s high hat play, while Claude Barte and Shelton Lester color Green’s phrasings on sax and organ respectively. Wilton Felder’s bass is primarily responsible for the funk feel on the track, though Lester’s left hand chords play along too. “Jan Jan” rolls on Gary Coleman’s vibes and Bobby Porter Hall’s percussion, a route of ascending chord formations and quick riffs. Thoughout the album the septet relies on crisp shifts and subtle color, and while this kind of jazz might be scene as too slick for some, it’s rare that you have to listen so close to hear all the endless detail.





Roy Ayers Ubiquity Live at the Montreaux Jazz Festival (1972)

Ayers’s is likely the most direct heir to the Miles Davis fusion legacy, mostly because where Hancock slicked everything up Ayers still sounds like he’s creating funk out of whole cloth. As with all things vibraphonist, this live album is driven by quick riffs and odd chords, but it’s the bass and drums of Clint Houston and David Lee that keep things in the pocket. Harry Whitaker is also essential; his electric piano is the slow, considerate thinker in the midst of a storm.

Flirting with free jazz and funk in a way that doesn’t fall off the R.I.O. cliff (which…basically doesn’t happen any more), Ayers created Acid Jazz on this album (which…has never sounded this good since). His sound admired by hip hop artists since the Brand Nubians sampled “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” Ayers is a curious figure in funk, R&B, and jazz history, very active in shaping sounds even at this early time to fluctuate between those poles. On “Move to Groove,” for example, you can here the song become more and more crisp and the vocals become more insistent. His cover of “In a Silent Way” is more insistent than the original at the same time that it doesn’t seem to ground that airy piece in a way that defeats its purpose. Even a slower track like “Sketches in Red, Yellow, Brown, Black, and White,” which sounds like incidental music from Free to Be You and Me manages to work precisely because the band just pushes the interplay throughout. “He Gives Us All His Love” and “Your Cup of Tea” (Ayers’s ode to Dinah Washington) back load the ballads, but even that doesn’t really sink the album. The quartet’s cover of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” brings the funk back in the most ebullient way possible. For an album that starts off so dark and erratic on “Daddy Bug,” it’s a surprisingly satisfying end.





Steely Dan Countdown to Ecstasy (1973)

For an album that starts off like Yet Another Bad Company Hockey Anthem the jazz tinges take only a few seconds to assert themselves. “Bodhisattva” throws pianos, those fluid guitar lines, and hand claps into the Steely Dan mixer and comes out the other end with a strange blend of intensity and rollicking boogie woogie. It’s a strange tension-y mix the band maintains throughout; Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have always been known for their studio finesse (often disparagingly, which…why?); their second album clears the gut from their first offering while still seeming inspired and improvised enough to avoid the pristine complexities of their later albums.

This kind of fusion is an acquired taste, certainly—many punk-flavored fans see this as Blood, Sweat and Tears, and while I get that, there’s a little more fun being had all around on this particular album. “My Old School” is one of the greatest tracks ever; it’s a blistering rout of horn sections and gorgeous piano. 7-minute “Your Gold Teeth” begins as typical Steely Dan smooth funk, complete with the shifting jazz chords on the highlighted lyrical phrase. The guitars of Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias throughout toe the line between rock and jazz. Jim Hodder’s percussion, here and elsewhere, is bustling with tight EQ-ed energy. “Razor Boy” is a weird little number, undercutting its own bossa-lightness with weird lyrics that suggest violence. “Pearl of the Quarter” employs Baxter’s steel guitar brilliantly, sounding like a long lost Todd Rundgren track. Not surprising, given that Steely Dan and Rundgren exist at the intersection of glam and fusion, a tight little corner in the music world where the studio is primary, certainly, but some pretty great songs emerged from within.





Mahavishnu Orchestra Birds of Fire (1973)

Maybe it’s just because McLaughlin is British, but the fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra is the closest to prog that jazz gets. It doesn’t even sound much like jazz, but as McLaughlin unrolls his influences out in front of you, the intersection of Mingus and Indian spiritualism does make sense, especially if you’ve heard My Goal’s Beyond (1971), his solo acoustic album. Featuring a band filled with notable session players (violinist Jerry Goodman is better known now as Jean Luc Ponty; keyboardist Jan Hammer would eventually write the Miami Vice theme; drummer Billy Cobham had been instrumental in Mile Davis’s fusion work; and, uh (cough), Rick Laird on bass.

Okay, so: let’s face it. This band scored with the same audience that liked the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein,” catching lightning in an early-‘70s-fascination-with-King Crimson bottle. Birds of Fire is a good album, certainly, but it’s unlikely that this band would have received near the same success if that (brief) sea change in the early seventies hadn’t opened up audiences for them in a prog/post-Zep’s first four albums world. This album has lost a little with age (the guitars are mixed way too high, but it snacks on that sweet spot, launching hyperbolic riffs with ample purpose, combing then-called-Eastern world influences at a jazz/rock wall and seeing them stick. And that’s what you’re getting, since the whole album is basically that, and talking about individual tracks is like comparing one punch in the face with another. But for all the prog here, there’s something more scathing and visceral that could only come from jazz; we’re just teleporting off the corner and into some human/Gods tragedy.





Herbie Hancock Sextant (1973)

The intro to “Chameleon” may be more iconic, but nothing Herbie Hancock ever did was as shocking as the intro to “Rain Dance.” That ARP figure takes fusion into space, lounging, decompressing, and recoiling like a close-miked accordion mechanism. The edits are a bit obvious, maybe, but the brief interruptions serve to reinforce just how smooth and slick (in the awesomest of ways) the track is. It undulates like a cloying predator, spilling out over 9 minutes as Hancock works through his arsenal of funk fusion keyboard mods: a Rhodes, a Hohner clav run through an Echoplex and a Fuzz-Wah, a Steinway, and a Melotron. His band is texture more than rhythm: Bernie Maupin, Julian Priester, and Dr. Eddie Henderson sound more like stray bits of space junk on horns and reeds. Buster Williams (bass) the his percussive duo (Billy Hart on drums and Buck Clarke on percussion) fill in gaps and push noise forward, pin down debris to elongated jams that move like funk but sound like comets. Easily my favorite Hancock album, Sextant shows his Mwandishi sextet seemingly effortlessly merging electronic music, funk, and jazz in a way that is easy to listen to again and again as its always-rewarding sounds seem to shift and re-orient themselves with every spin.





Bobbi Humphrey Blacks and Blues (1973)

Humphrey was the first female instrumentalist to record for Blue Note.

...yeah. Wild, I know. In any case, Blacks and Blues is a flute clinic of epic proportions, replete with strange tangents (the gritty electric guitar on “Harlem River Drive,” for example) and bouncing rhythm sections that defy any accusations that this is elevator music (though it certainly is a landmark in the development of that kind of jazz). The title track benefits from Larry Mizell’s production wonderfully; the pianos skirt around the channels as the extended band fills in gaps in the spectrum. The flute and synthesizers work particularly well in tandem on this track (elsewhere the synths sound a little too Rick Wright-on-_Wish You Were Here_) and the builds are constructed from the interaction of the instruments moreso than the individual playing.

Which is not to say that Humphrey isn’t a brilliant flautist. Her solos incorporate lovely little moments where rock riffs and jazz tropes are converted into funky soundbites that push the band into new phrasings. “Jasper’s Country Man” glides darkly on throbbing clavinets and canned cellos before Humphrey reinterprets the whole mood with a rousing flute solo that alternates between elongated squalls and flitty quick notes that echo the clav lines. On “Baby’s Gone” she slows things down too explore the tonal qualities of the flute, expertly snapping notes off as her vocalists hum away in the background. It’s the kind of fusion that would become most notorious as music, sure, but that’s only after all of these brilliant ragged edges were burned away.