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Overview

During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, there were many approaches to labeling jazz. These include jazz-rock, soul-jazz, jazz-funk or funky jazz, jazz-rock fusion, or the generic or all-encompassing term fusion. Moreover, there were different opinions as to the initial trailblazers that inspired these approaches to jazz.

Be ready to:

Identify several musicians who recorded and performed with Miles Davis who went on to form successful groups.

List the constituent sections of Birds of Fire by John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Identify several artists in soul-jazz.

Compare and contrast differences between jazz-rock and fusion with smooth jazz.

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Fusion

By the late 1970s, the jazz-rock sound began to change. First, the name itself gave way to the more generic label "fusion." The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever disbanded by 1977, and Weather Report's album sales declined significantly until it too dissolved in 1985. Meanwhile, bands such as Spyro Gyra (" Morning Dance♫," 1979), the Yellowjackets (" Matinee Idol♫ ," 1981), the Crusaders (" Street Life♫ ," 1979, with lead vocal by Randy Crawford), the Pat Metheny Group (" Jaco♫," 1978), and the Jeff Lorber Fusion (" The Samba♫" 1978) became very popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. However, these bands played a style of music that largely abandoned the experimental philosophy of the early jazz-rock bands, substituting a more formulaic and predictable style that emphasized more traditional harmonies, diatonic melodies, and more conventional song structures and arrangements. The experiments in timbre, texture, complex forms, nonfunctional harmonies, and extended improvisations that had marked early jazz-rock were largely absent from these groups.

Pat Metheny Group

Dexter Gordon

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

Wynton Marsalis

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.