The Music That Turned My World Inside Out
(Fusion: Part 3)
This is the third in a series on “fusion,” the intersection where rock collided with jazz starting in the late 1960s.
The first two articles are here and here:
Fusion: When Music Went Nuclear (Part 1)
The explosive merger of jazz and rock, featuring Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock and more.
What Was on Your College Soundtrack?
(Fusion, Part 2: Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report)
I arrived at college for my freshman year, a poor yet sheltered kid who knew mainly classical music, jazz, and Top 40. The first two I owed to my family, the latter to my high-school classmates. I also had a cool aunt who snuck me albums by Cream and the Doors, among others, giving me a peek into an alternative reality.
Upon landing at college, I moved into a dorm with three roommates, thinking that my meager collection of a half-dozen classic rock and two jazz albums would make me cool. Boy, was I in for a shock. They were all musicians, and they listened to stuff I had never heard of.
My albums never made it onto the turntable after the first week, except my vintage copy of “Thelonius Monk Alone in San Francisco,” which was my main source of cred. And I was perfectly okay with that, because what I heard when my roommates chose the music was beyond anything I had ever imagined.
It was much harder-edged, darker, almost Baroque in its complexity. A lot of it vibrated with energy and sheer virtuosity. It was the kind of stuff my roommates — all quite accomplished already — aspired to play.
It was also the stuff that turned my world inside out.
These new (to me) genres of music became the core of my college soundtrack. Sure, I partied to Disco and Springsteen along with most of my classmates, but on my own time, I was besotted with proto-metal bands like Rainbow, King Crimson, and Black Sabbath, and fusion bands like Return to Forever, Weather Report and Herbie Hancock.
This series has focused on fusion. For more on the metal side of things, see the series I’m doing with Anthony Overs. The first two installments are here and here:
(A Beginner’s Guide to Heavy Metal
Part I — origins, classics and a peak down some branches)
(Just What Is Heavy Metal, Anyway?
Part II of The Beginner’s Guide to Heavy Metal)
In this third installment of the Fusion series, I feature some musicians who I found independently of my roommates. Of course, they knew most of these artists, but by midway through the fall semester, I was scouring the record bins for new stuff and finding it all on my own.
As I learned about it, I also realized that the fusion movement was driven by a tight-knit circle of musicians , most of whom had played together. I began to develop a mental map of the connections and relationships that made the fusion movement a family affair. Here are more of the key players:
Tony Williams Lifetime (with Allan Holdsworth) “Fred”
Williams had been a member of Miles Davis’ quintet, which he joined when he was only 17. By the late 1970s, he was considered by some to be the best drummer in the world and was leading his own band.
When Williams restarted his band Lifetime in 1975, after a short hiatus, he invited Allan Holdsworth to join. Holdsworth was young but already making a name as one of the world's most creative and technically adept guitarists.
Their album “Believe It” was one of the albums that set the standard for fusion. Here is one of the pieces from that album, perhaps my favorite.
Tony Williams, Jaco Pastorius and John McLaughlin: “Dark Prince”
This is from a one-time performance in 1979 at the Havana Jazz Festival. It united three of the major players in fusion and three of the greatest instrumentalists of all time. In addition to Williams:
Pastorius made a name for himself playing jazz on fretless electric bass and had recorded with major names like Pat Metheny, the Brecker brothers, Hubert Laws, and Wayne Shorter. He was coming off three years with Weather Report (I featured them in Part 2 of this series). Music instructors today still use videos of Pastorius to teach their students advanced technique, but what set him apart was that his bass lines were not just technical but lyrical and melodic.
McLaughlin was an integral member of Davis’ ensembles in the 1960s and then founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which I featured in Part 1. He was one of the pioneers of highly technical guitar soloing and incorporated influences from worldwide into his playing.
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Jean-Luc Ponty (with Allan Holdsworth)
Jean-Luc Ponty was a multi-instrumentalist who grew up playing classical music. He graduated first in his class at the Paris Conservatory, and embarked on a classical career, but found himself drawn to jazz. The 1960s found him jamming late at night with some of the major names in the 1960s Paris jazz scene.
The violin was his fourth or fifth instrument, and he played lines more reminiscent of a saxophone than a violin. His unique style and extreme skills rapidly gained him fame as a jazz violinist.
Some of his major influences included the great Gypsy musicians like Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli (one of my personal heroes.) In a sense, Ponty became the heir to Grappelli’s throne as the world’s greatest jazz violinist. The two of them recorded and toured together on and off until Grappelli died in 1997.
Ponty would go on to work with many of the top experimental musicians of the 1970s, including several from the Berklee College community. That led to him becoming one of the inventors of fusion. His instinct for gorgeous, melodic compositions with lots of emotional hooks set him apart from some like McLaughlin or Larry Coryell, who are more dissonant and experimental. His playing is simply lyrical. He remains one of my favorite musicians of all time.
Allan Holdsworth “Looking Glass” (live 1997)
Holdsworth became well-known through his collaborations with other top fusion artists (that’s how I first learned about him.) Other musicians highly regarded his own solo work, but he did not break through commercially with a wider audience. Some of his peers advised him that he was too theoretical and too technical to appeal to the mass market, and unfortunately, they were right.
Holdsworth never let himself get side-tracked into doing poppier stuff; he just kept doing his own thing. But he certainly knew how to write euphonic lines. This piece is both extremely technical and, in spots, beautifully melodic, full of hooks that anyone can appreciate. It just goes to show great musicians can do whatever they want.
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Thank you to Steven Hale for suggesting I include a piece by Allan Holdsworth. Good call!