Doug Watson

In 1969, Miles Davis profoundly altered the genetic makeup of jazz with In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Impressionistic, enigmatic, and intoxicating: the former possessed a concentrated beauty that contrasted with the latter’s oceanic scope. Each introduced aberrant grooves, electric tonal colours, and post-production methods that were then unfamiliar, if not entirely alien, to the jazz idiom. Because of their extensive influence, these two recordings are widely recognized as the ones that crystallized the somewhat nebulous genre of jazz fusion.

Such a notion might satisfy at a superficial level, but to anyone with more than a passing interest it's readily clear that the most celebrated of the fusion groups (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, mid-period Weather Report) were musically at odds with what Miles was turning out during the 1970s. Certainly Davis had tilted the heads of his progeny toward new ways of thinking, yet beyond the basic electrification of jazz—which in any case had become pervasive after the relative commercial success of Bitches Brew—there were few sonic aspects in common. The work of fusion’s most conspicuous artists also seemed to imply that these “new directions in music” (to quote Miles himself) had lost their original sense of freedom and been reduced to the furious convolution and over-composition of jazz-rock or the tight, well-rinsed deliveries of jazz-funk.