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Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion
Vital Transformation: Fusion's Discontents
Ironically, fusion was, on the one hand, largely a concern for jazz participants and observers even though they largely denied its value or any valid connection to "real jazz." On the other hand, despite rock and funk critics and musicians' interest in augmenting commercial success with the high cultural cachet jazz might bestow, the largely instrumental output of fusion bands remained outside the tastes of rock's and funk's mass audiences, which overwhelmingly favored vocal music. With the notable exception of successful crossover recordings such as 
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Mahavishnu Orchestra
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1971
Herbie Hancock
pianob.1940
Joni Mitchell
vocalsb.1943
While it is arguable that no one except fusion musicians and listeners "disputes the official version" of jazz history, my interest continues to be in thinking through the way fusion music sounded out the broken middle, performing the endless possibilities of variation and mixture between genres and testing the limits of their artistic engagements against the assumptions and expectations of fans and critics. Though fusion is now seen as one of the more commercially driven of jazz's substyles, most of the early fusion groups remained unknown and largely unheard outside of private jam sessions and infrequent live performances. "Commercial success" was hardly a phrase one would use to describe early fusion bands from the mid-1960s until 1970, with the release of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. But partially because of the commercial success of Bitches Brew, the stigma of commercialism attached itself to fusion quickly and decisively. Indeed, Leonard Feather saw the arrival of fusion as the epitome of commercial interests dominating artistic ones at the time. "If the year 1970 is remembered in connection with any outstanding event in the history of jazz," wrote Feather, "musicologists may recall it as the Year of the Whores. Never before, no matter how grievous the economic woes of jazz musicians... at any prior point in jazz time, did so many do so little in an attempt to earn so much."
Even so, fusion was hardly mainstream popular music in the 1970s, and apart from a handful of bands, fusion musicians never achieved mass audience recognition, much less acceptance, and posted fairly modest material gains, for the most part, compared to other genres of popular music. While it is true that Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters (1973) was awarded platinum status (sales of a million units),
Jeff Beck
guitar1944 - 2023
Stevie Wonder
vocalsb.1950
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Still, it is meaningful that musicians such as Hancock, Beck, Davis, and McLaughli—musicians who gained the most economically during this period through their association with fusion—were fairly singular in terms of achieving financial success and that their marketplace achievements were overshadowed by rock and pop music stars of the period. We should also remember that the more successful bands, such as
Blood, Sweat, Drum + Bass
band / ensemble / orchestraIn fact, part of jazz musicians' antipathy toward rock was a result of the huge largesse given by record labels to the rock stars of the era. The 1970s was a time of unprecedented music industry profits, and rock stars were among the most visible beneficiaries of the growing monopolization of the industry.14 As rock music nudged other types of popular music aside, jazz musicians and listeners were left wondering why the music they believed was superior was beleaguered by attacks of irrelevance and highhandedness. In truth instrumental jazz had never really been popular after the Second World War except, perhaps, for the funky organ trios of soul jazz (and they rarely made the mainstream pop charts) and had, since bebop's heady days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, been increasingly seen as culturally significant but commercially irrelevant by music industry insiders, as well as general audiences.
Another reason we may remain skeptical about fusion's purported economic incentive is that many early fusion musicians incorporated avantgarde techniques borrowed from European art music—an unlikely strategy for commercial success. And even when fusion became an "above ground" success with the release of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew in 1970 and, even more evidently, with the release of Mahavishnu Orchestra's Inner Mounting Flame a year later, fusion recordings' combined revenue gains for the music industry were relatively insignificant in comparison to the sales numbers for rock, funk, and top-forty acts. Many of the biggest fusion bands in the 1970s, including Mahavishnu Orchestra,
Weather Report
band / ensemble / orchestra
Return to Forever
band / ensemble / orchestraYet even if one wanted to insist on fusion's overall commercial success vis-à-vis mainstream jazz as a reason to exclude fusion from serious consideration in the official history of jazz, a quick comparison with earlier jazz history quickly disposes of the charge that commercial success automatically spoils the artistic value for a style as a whole (again, if one thinks of fusion as a jazz substyle, even if tangential to a central core set of practices and aesthetics). For example, big band swing's market dominance for a period did not exclude it from becoming part of the jazz mainstream (except, of course, to moldy figs) and, in fact, played a major role in transforming jazz music from a vernacular or "merely" popular musical style into a sophisticated, even urbane, musical idiom, worthy of serious critical evaluation. Stuart Nicholson makes an important point when he argues that while swing was a commercially successful style of jazz, jazz scholars have focused their attention on artists such as
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
Benny Goodman
clarinet1909 - 1986
Swing masters such as Ellington, Basie, or
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
Paul Whiteman
composer / conductor1890 - 1967
Frank Sinatra
vocals1915 - 1998
However, even as Nicholson correctly argues that "[fusion] realigned jazz alongside popular culture, a position it has historically strayed from at its peril," fusion remained an "ain't jazz" music. Yet this matters only if one insists on aligning fusion with jazz. As I have noted, free jazz musicians and increasingly mainstream jazz ones, as well, were relying on the patronage of elite and professional-class audiences and institutions as a consequence of jazz music's moves away from the social milieu in which it had grown and gained mass popularity. For many jazz artists this meant moving from mass white audiences to elite institutions for support. However, from the viewpoint of rock musicians and listeners, fusion aligned rock with the posturing airs of jazz, threatening to transform rock from an "electric folk music"—a voice of "the people"—into an arty, even pretentious, idiom. Listeners who privileged rock's physicality and libidinous energies bemoaned rock musicians' growing affectations as pretense and feared the loss of authenticity. But there were also large numbers of rock listeners who welcomed the growing sophistication—as long as the connection to earthier sensibilities were not severed to accomplish it. In 1969 Oxford University Press published The Story of Rock, a defense of rock as "folk art (as opposed to fine art)," by Carl Belz, a professor of art history at Brandeis University. Jon Carroll, writing a review of the book for Rolling Stone, sounded remarkably like his peers in the jazz world with his confession: "Personally, I remain unconvinced that rock should strive to be fine art, although the increasing selfconsciousness of the musicians may make it inevitable. It is our last spontaneous art: it would be a shame to lose it, whatever the aesthetic benefits."
Learn more about Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion. © 2011, Duke University Press
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