Jazz Fusion Songs Free Download
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Jazz fusion (also known as fusion,[2] jazz rock, and progressive jazz[3]) is a popular music genre that developed in the late 1960s when musicians combined jazz harmony and improvisation with rock music, funk, and rhythm and blues. Electric guitars, amplifiers, and keyboards that were popular in rock and roll started to be used by jazz musicians, particularly those who had grown up listening to rock and roll.
Jazz fusion arrangements vary in complexity. Some employ groove-based vamps fixed to a single key or a single chord with a simple, repeated melody. Others use elaborate chord progressions, unconventional time signatures, or melodies with counter-melodies. These arrangements, whether simple or complex, typically include improvised sections that can vary in length, much like in other forms of jazz.
As with jazz, jazz fusion can employ brass and woodwind instruments such as trumpet and saxophone, but other instruments often substitute for these. A jazz fusion band is less likely to use piano and double bass, and more likely to use electric guitar, electric piano, synthesizers, and bass guitar.
The term "jazz rock" is sometimes used as a synonym for "jazz fusion" and for music performed by late 1960s and 1970s-era rock bands that added jazz elements to their music. After a decade of popularity during the 1970s, fusion expanded its improvisatory and experimental approaches through the 1980s in parallel with the development of a radio-friendly style called smooth jazz.[4] Experimentation continued in the 1990s and 2000s. Fusion albums, even those that are made by the same group or artist, may include a variety of musical styles. Rather than being a codified musical style, fusion can be viewed as a musical tradition or approach.
When John Coltrane died in 1967, rock was the most popular music in America, and DownBeat magazine went so far as to declare in a headline that: "Jazz as We Know It Is Dead".[5] AllMusic states that "until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate".[6]
Guitarist Larry Coryell, sometimes called the godfather of fusion, referred to a generation of musicians who had grown up on rock and roll when he said, "We loved Miles but we also loved the Rolling Stones."[7] In 1966 he started the band the Free Spirits with Bob Moses on drums and recorded the band's first album,[5] Out of Sight and Sound, released in 1967. That same year DownBeat began to report on rock music.[7] After the Free Spirits, Coryell was part of a quartet led by vibraphonist Gary Burton, releasing the album Duster with its rock guitar influence.[5] Burton produced the album Tomorrow Never Knows for Count's Jam Band, which included Coryell, Mike Nock, and Steve Marcus, all of them former students at Berklee College in Boston.[5]
The pioneers of fusion emphasized exploration, energy, electricity, intensity, virtuosity, and volume. Charles Lloyd played a combination of rock and jazz at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966 with a quartet that included Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette.[7] Lloyd adopted the trappings of the California psychedelic rock scene by playing at the rock venue the Fillmore West, wearing colorful clothes, and giving his albums titles like Dream Weaver and Forest Flower, which were bestselling jazz albums in 1967.[5] Flautist Jeremy Steig experimented with jazz in his band Jeremy & the Satyrs with vibraphonist Mike Mainieri. The jazz label Verve released the first album (Freak Out) by rock guitarist Frank Zappa in 1966.[7] Rahsaan Roland Kirk performed with Jimi Hendrix at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London.[7]
Although Bitches Brew gave him a gold record, the use of electric instruments and rock beats created consternation among some jazz critics, who accused Davis of betraying the essence of jazz.[10] Music critic Kevin Fellezs commented that some members of the jazz community regarded rock music as less sophisticated and more commercial than jazz.[11]
Davis's 1969 album In a Silent Way is considered his first fusion album.[12] Composed of two side-long improvised suites edited heavily by Teo Macero, the album was made by pioneers of jazz fusion: Corea, Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, and John McLaughlin.
According to music journalist Zaid Mudhaffer, the term "jazz fusion" was coined in a review of Song of Innocence by David Axelrod when it was released in 1968.[15] Axelrod said Davis had played the album before conceiving Bitches Brew.[16]
Miles Davis was one of the first jazz musicians to incorporate jazz fusion into his material. He also proved to be a good judge of talented sidemen. Several of the players he chose for his early fusion work went on to success in their own bands. His guitar player John McLaughlin branched out, forming his own fusion group Mahavishnu Orchestra. Blending Indian classical music, jazz, and psychedelic rock, they created a whole new style just as Davis had. Davis's live albums during this period, including Live-Evil and Miles Davis at Fillmore, featured McLaughlin.
Davis dropped out of music in 1975 because of problems with drugs and alcohol, but his sidemen took advantage of the creative and financial vistas that had been opened. Herbie Hancock brought elements of funk, disco, and electronic music into commercially successful albums such as Head Hunters (1973) and Feets, Don't Fail Me Now (1979). Several years after recording Miles in the Sky with Davis, guitarist George Benson became a vocalist with enough pop hits to overshadow his earlier career in jazz.[9]
While Davis was sidelined, Chick Corea gained prominence. In the early 1970s Corea combined jazz, rock, pop, and Brazilian music in Return to Forever, a band which included Stanley Clarke on bass guitar and Al DiMeola on electric guitar. Corea divided the rest of his career between acoustic and electric music, non-commercial and commercial, jazz and pop rock, with a band for each: the Akoustic Band and the Elektric Band.[9]
Tony Williams was a member of Davis's band since 1963. Williams reflected, "I wanted to create a different atmosphere from the one I had been in...What better way to do it than to go electric?" He left Davis to form the Tony Williams Lifetime with English guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young. The band combined rock intensity and loudness with jazz spontaneity. The debut album Emergency! was recorded three months before Bitches Brew.[7][17][18]
Although McLaughlin had worked with Miles Davis, he was influenced more by Jimi Hendrix and had played with English rock musicians Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger before creating the Mahavishnu Orchestra around the same time that Corea started Return to Forever. McLaughlin had been a member of Tony Williams's Lifetime. He brought to his music many of the elements which interested other musicians in the 1960s and early 1970s: counterculture, rock and roll, electronic instruments, solo virtuosity, experimentation, the blending of genres, and an interest in the exotic, such as Indian music.[9] He formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra with drummer Billy Cobham, violinist Jerry Goodman, bassist Rick Laird, and keyboardist Jan Hammer. The band released its first album, The Inner Mounting Flame, in 1971. Hammer pioneered the use of the Minimoog synthesizer with distortion effects. His use of the pitch bend wheel made a keyboard sound like an electric guitar. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was influenced by both psychedelic rock and Indian classical music. The band's first lineup broke up after two studio albums and one live album, but McLaughlin formed another group in 1974 under the same name with jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, one of the first electric violinists.
Rock bands such as Colosseum, Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chase,[21] Soft Machine, Nucleus, Brand X, the Mothers of Invention and IF blended jazz and rock with electric instruments.[22] Davis' fusion jazz was "pure melody and tonal color",[22] while Frank Zappa's music was more "complex" and "unpredictable".[23] Zappa released the solo album Hot Rats in 1969.[24] The album contained long instrumental pieces with a jazz influence.[25][26] Zappa released two albums, The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka, in 1972 which were influenced by jazz. George Duke and Aynsley Dunbar played on both. 1970s band Steely Dan has been lauded by music critic Neil McCormick for their "smooth, smart jazz-rock fusion."[27]
The jazz artists of the 1960s and 1970s had a large impact on many rock groups of that era such as Santana and Frank Zappa. They took jazz phrasing and harmony and incorporated it into modern rock music, significantly changing music history and paving the way for artists that would follow in their footsteps. Carlos Santana in particular has given much credit to Miles Davis and the influence he had on his music. While Miles Davis combined jazz with modal and rock influences, Carlos Santana combined these along with Latin rhythms and feel, shaping a whole new genre, Latin rock. Other rock artists such as Gary Moore, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and The Allman Brothers Band have taken influences from blues, jazz, blues rock, jazz rock and incorporated it into their own music.
According to AllMusic, the term jazz rock "may refer to the loudest, wildest, most electrified fusion bands from the jazz camp, but most often it describes performers coming from the rock side of the equation...jazz rock first emerged during the late '60s as an attempt to fuse the visceral power of rock with the musical complexity and improvisational fireworks of jazz. Since rock often emphasized directness and simplicity over virtuosity, jazz rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late '60s and early '70s: psychedelia, progressive rock, and the singer-songwriter movement."[28]
According to jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, jazz rock paralleled free jazz by being "on the verge of creating a whole new musical language in the 1960s". He said the albums Emergency! (1969) by the Tony Williams Lifetime and Agharta (1975) by Miles Davis "suggested the potential of evolving into something that might eventually define itself as a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before." This development was stifled by commercialism, Nicholson said, as the genre "mutated into a peculiar species of jazz-inflected pop music that eventually took up residence on FM radio" at the end of the 1970s.[29]
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