Into The Music
Jazz fusion is the genre that got away with everything. It took jazz’s harmonic language, rock’s volume and rhythmic aggression, funk’s groove, and in some iterations, electronic music’s textures, and it built something that critics often hated and musicians quietly respected. The results were sometimes overblown and self-indulgent. They were also, at their best, some of the most technically astounding and emotionally complex music the twentieth century produced.
The origin story is usually traced to Miles Davis and the sessions that became Bitches Brew in 1970. Davis had been absorbing Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown with the same systematic curiosity he’d applied to bebop a generation earlier, and the resulting album was genuinely disorienting, electric instruments in new configurations, rock textures colliding with jazz improvisation, and Davis’s trumpet cutting through all of it with that signature tone that suggested he knew exactly what he was doing even when the music sounded like it was falling apart.
What followed was a genuine explosion. Weather Report, co-founded by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, spent the 1970s making records that redefined what a band could sound like. John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra brought a ferocity to the guitar that jazz had never accommodated before. Herbie Hancock moved between acoustic jazz and synthesizer-heavy funk with a fluidity that suggested genre categories were simply administrative. Chick Corea’s Return to Forever ran from Brazilian-influenced chamber jazz to guitar-heavy progressive rock across different lineups and albums.
The genre had a complicated relationship with commercial success. Some of it sold extraordinarily well. George Benson, Al Jarreau, and Spyro Gyra found large audiences, but critical consensus eventually sorted this lighter, more polished end of the spectrum into a separate subcategory called smooth jazz, which became a pejorative almost immediately. The division was partly real and partly snobbery, partly a genuine musical distinction between records that pushed at something and records that chose comfort over tension.
By the 1980s, the fusion moment had largely passed in the mainstream sense, but the music had already done something irreversible. It had given a generation of musicians a way to think about genre as a tool rather than a container. The players who came up through fusion, and there were many of them, carried that approach into everything they did afterward.
The revival conversation has been running in cycles since at least the 2000s. The honest version is that fusion never fully went away. It just stopped being called fusion. When you hear Thundercat’s bass work, you are hearing the direct lineage from Jaco Pastorius through Stanley Clarke through what the Brainfeeder aesthetic does with that history. When you hear Snarky Puppy, you are hearing a large group working through exactly the same questions Weather Report was asking in 1975, with different tools and a different historical context. When jazz musicians and hip-hop producers have been cross-pollinating for thirty years now, that is fusion in practice even when nobody uses the word.
What fusion gave the world was permission. Permission to combine things that were not supposed to be combined, to take technique seriously without letting it become the point, to be loud and complex simultaneously, to be emotional and precise at the same time. That permission has propagated through enough music that the genre’s name has faded in significance even as its influence has grown.
The records that hold up best are the uncomfortable ones. Not the smooth ones, not the technically impressive-but-cold ones, but the ones where you can hear musicians taking risks they might not have taken in a purer tradition. Head Hunters. Romantic Warrior. The Inner Mounting Flame. Mysterious Traveller. These are records that still sound like they haven’t been fully figured out, which is the highest compliment you can pay to music that was trying to go somewhere new.
Jazz fusion is genuinely one of the few moments in 20th century music where the genre conversation collapsed entirely and something new had to be invented just to describe what was happening. You had Miles Davis on one end with Bitches Brew doing something so structurally alien that even jazz critics weren’t sure what language to use, and then Mahavishnu Orchestra on the other end basically turning the volume up until the argument became irrelevant. What I find compelling is that fusion borrowed from every tradition it touched without fully belonging to any of them, which is also why it got dismissed so readily once the moment passed. Prog rock had similar problems, the Yes albums or the long-form concept work of bands like Einstürzende Neubauten’s quieter forebears, but fusion had the additional burden of cannibalizing the parent genre. Jazz purists never quite forgave it, and rock audiences didn’t always follow far enough in. That tension is what makes it fascinating to go back to now.
Oh this is a topic I love! Folk and trad folk people like me sometimes get snobbish about fusion but honestly the audacity of it is something to celebrate. Taking harmonic language from jazz and smashing it into rock’s raw energy? That’s exactly the kind of creative recklessness that keeps music alive. I came to fusion late through a Celtic jazz crossover record I found at a market stall in Edinburgh and it completely rewired how I think about what tradition is even for.
The phrase “got away with everything” is doing real work here. Fusion got away with extended soloing that would’ve been called self-indulgent in any other context, time signatures that actively dared you to dance, and production choices that went way past what the market usually tolerates. What I find interesting from a compositional standpoint is how the funk influence kept a lot of fusion grounded when it could’ve gone fully abstract. Headhunters-era Herbie Hancock understood that the groove is what gives permission for everything else.