Jazz has always been "fusion" music. Jelly Roll Morton, the self-described inventor of the music, insisted it must include "the Spanish tinge", and masters like Duke Ellington literally searched the world for music to mash-up with their "American classical music". Dizzy Gillespie wrote "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop", Charles Mingus copped flamenco music in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet swung JS Bach.
But in the early '70s, a particular genre of "fusion" was founded by the collision of jazz and rock, with various prominent musicians finding ways to dress up their improvisations in Sly Stone grooves, Jimi Hendrix psychedelia, or prog-rock filigree. The style — associated mainly with groups founded by various alumni of the Miles Davis groups of the time such as Chick Corea's Return to Forever, John McLaughin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report — filled arenas for a few years, but it soon devolved into fangless Smooth Jazz or (worse?) pointlessly virtuosic noodling.
The term "fusion" was soiled forever.
But I think it's time to bring it back. The best of today's jazz musicians seem intent on a process that really can't be described without using the word "fusion". In fact, today the act of fusing jazz with other forms of music is so essential — and so natural — to what jazz musicians do that it typically involves more than one fusing at the same time.
Better, though, is that today's "fusion" rescues the term from the land of the pejorative or commercial. If '70s fusion was as much a marketing tool (OK, Ghost of Miles, a way of "reaching the people") as a form of artistic expression, then today's fusion emerges plainly from the liberation of free jazz and the remnants of the "downtown scene". Today, as exemplified by musicians such as Wayne Horvitz, Bobby Previte, and Ben Goldberg, "fusion" might actually mean "the future".
Fusion Picked Up Where Fusion Left Off
There's fusion everywhere in today's jazz, but it's instructive to look at some of the musicians who emerged in the '80s around downtown figurehead John Zorn. Few "jazz" musicians have proven more expansive or more visionary in the last quarter-century, and good fortune finds them with new albums out this summer that make my thesis a living, breathing thing.
John Zorn — a composer and alto saxophonist with a considerable hipster-rock following — absorbed jazz, avant-garde, and classical music as a kid growing up in New York City in the '60s. He physically "settled" in lower Manhattan in the late '70s — during the raging years of electric "fusion" — but would soon be roving the full range of settings for his music. One of his collaborators would be a pianist, Wayne Horvitz, also born in New York in the mid-'50s. Horvitz would become a member of Zorn's breakout band, Naked City (also including chameleon guitarist Bill Frisell), which was famous for its restless, expansive repertoire. Naked City played super-tight sets that sounded like they were controlled by a very hip two year-old with a remote control in hand: reggae crosscut to Bugs Bunny music crosscut to death metal crosscut to film noir soundtrack. In that group's first disc from 1989, the gauntlet of the new fusion had been thrown: jazz musicians could now play absolutely anything in their way, but only best would be able to make the great crush of American variety truly their own.
Horvitz went about meeting this challenge with authority. He played from early on with another New Yorker (upstate) who landed downtown around 1979: drummer Bobby Previte. Their Nine Below Zero from 1986 (with cornetist Butch Morris) was the beginning of a long and inclusive partnership. In the late '80s, Previte was playing in the Horvitz group the President, where he brought a snapping rock orchestration to albums like Bring Yr Camera and Miracle Miles, and Horvitz was playing piano and organ on Previte albums like Pushing the Envelope and Claude's Late Morning.
This relatively early work had a characteristic "fusion" sound, but it was hardly the sound of squealingly precise guitars or funked-out jams. Taking their cue from soundtrack music, Camera and Claude's were works of melody, atmosphere, and arrangement, with rock and pop rhythms taking their rightful place beside swing as valid ingredients in a "fused" American music. That these musicians improvised with authority and within a certain musical vocabulary meant that it was still "jazz", but the word was clearly being bent in new ways. In this '80s music by Zorn, Horvitz, and Previte, the dominant influences were no longer straight-ahead jazz and commercially successful pop but, rather, avant-garde jazz and the pop music presence in other collaborative arts such as film, theater, or even circus. Both deeply familiar and edgy (arguably the musical form of the then-current "performance art"), this music was a thousand times cooler than traditional "jazz fusion" and almost a decade ahead of the indie revolution in rock and pop.
A Richness of Options
What kept the "downtown jazz" scene so fresh for so long — from the late '70s through today — is the seemingly endless breadth of musical traditions it was willing to draw from and fuse with. A dominant but amazing malleable form is klezmer music.
Beginning in the early '90s, Zorn became intensely interested in exploring his identity as a Jew with roots in Eastern Europe, writing an intense suite of music about the 1938 Nazi "Night of Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht, 1993), and then forming a new working band, Masada, dedicated to performing klezmer-styled melodies with the intensity of a punk group and the instrumentation of the original Ornette Coleman quartet. Zorn soon formed his own record label, Tzadik, dedicated to avant-garde music but with a forceful sub-speciality in what the label calls "Radical Jewish Culture" — essentially brilliant fusions of klezmer with everything from jazz to trip-hop. What might seem to be the most narrow of minority tastes, however, has blossomed outward.
Zorn's Masada work was preceded by the gutsy blowing of the New Klezmer Trio, a San Francisco group featuring clarinetist Ben Goldberg and drummer Kenny Wolleson. Their work was soon being distributed and released by Tzadik, and Goldberg and Wolleson became downtown denizens themselves, playing in groups having nothing to do with klezmer music. For example, the 1997 album Light at the Crossroads, co-led by Mr. Goldberg and downtown reed player Marty Ehrlich, is a set of tone poems for clarinet and bass clarinet with Wolleson nudging the proceedings along with somber swing. Was the clarinet — long neglected by modern and avant-garde jazz and relegated to cheesy Dixieland players in red-and-white striped shirts — making an improbable comeback?
Another cat associated with klezmer makes precisely that case. Don Byron is not the typical klezmer musician but an African-American from an outer borough with as much experience and knowledge in Latin and classical music as in Eastern European minor modes. Appearing frequently at the Knitting Factory (where Mr. Zorn built his reputation early on) with the likes of Frisell, Byron was as likely to record an album of the music of Mickey Katz as he was to produce an angry hip-hop album or an album based around Lester Young's bass-less "Ivey Divey" trio. Spanning arias, lieder, Sondheim, R&B, rap, klezmer, swing and much more, Byron also represents a "downtown scene" (Byron is currently based in the Bronx) of voracious eclecticism.
Today: Many Flowers Blooming
The fermentation of so much "fusion" is now producing a contemporary jazz scene of unprecedented variety and real brilliance. The question is whether the term "jazz" really applies any more.
Byron's most recent work is typically expansive yet specific. A Ballad for Many is a recently released collaboration with the Bang on a Can All-Stars on Cantaloupe Music. This is the first music of Byron's recording career that suggests his own composing in a classical "new music" style, though the disc is still shot-through with improvisation and a chamber-jazz interactivity that distinguishes it from "classical" composition. (October will bring his latest on Blue Note, Do the Boomerang, an interpretation of the music of soul saxophonist Junior Walker, with the leader mainly playing tenor sax.) And Byron is hardly the only jazz musician with a sense of classical connection.
Last year Frisell released a wildly idiosyncratic disc, Richter 858 (Songlines) consisting of new music writing for three strings (Jenny Scheinman's violin, Eyvind Kang's viola, and Hank Roberts's cello) as well as his own shard-like guitar under significant distortion. Based on viewing a book of work by the German painter, Gerhard Richter, this is Frisell's most challenging and dissonant work in over a decade. The strings bend and grind on each other, and Mr. Frisell smashes his too-easily earned rep as a kind of folky white guy who digs Charles Ives. Is it really jazz at all? Only if you begin to define "jazz" as boundless, contemporary (partly) improvised music.
This February brought classical composition from Horvitz as well. His Whispers, Hymns and a Murmur (Tzadik) features two extended pieces for string quintet (the Koehne Quartet plus Eyvind Kang on viola) that blend moody romanticism with a certain American pastoral quality. There is little trace of jazz here, though on a selection like "Hymns II", Horvitz seems to throw in electronic processing and viola lines (presumably Kang) that sound or possibly are improvised. It is music that defies benchmarking but demands attention. One comparison (perhaps not ultimately useful) is to the pop and "Americana" composing of classical stalwarts like Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor. Meyer's recent eponymous solo album on Sony is a series of pleasant folk compositions on which the great bassist overdubs every part — piano, dobro, mandolin, and so on. It's all fine, tuneful fun, but it reeks of pop slumming and crossover appeal, much like the old '70s "jazz fusion" that Horvitz avoids so easily. Whispers, Hymns and a Murmur may not be as easy or as snack-food-like, but it's something substantial. A "jazz musician" out-seriousing a classical cat? Yup, and in good measure.
Horvitz has yet another new disc on Songlines with his "Gravitas Quartet" — Way Out East. This is even more impressive and mashed-up: Horvitz's piano, Ron Miles on trumpet, the cello of Peggy Lee, and Sara Schoenbeck on bassoon playing chamber music that organically combines written passages with improvisation. While Horvitz describes the music as "essentially a contemporary chamber ensemble", Miles and Horvitz move through the music like jazz players, coloring each line individually and playing with the rhythmic fluidity of improvisers. The result is neither a jazz group swinging the Brandenburg Concertos nor a classical arrangement of "Take the A Train". Instead, Horvitz has reached a true "fusion": American chamber music of a new kind, modern US music that references its roots in blues and concert hall without forgetting simply to be a straight-forward reflection of its composer.
Previte, at the same time, has released Coalition of the Willing (Rope-a-Dope), a kind of "fusion" record that is both much more familiar (electric instruments, plenty of backbeat, even a guest star in drummer Stanton Moore from the funk-jam band Galactic) and more screamingly bold. Willing relies on a bashing organ-combo sound that will remind you of Horvitz's group Zony Mash. Willing features Jamie Saft (organ) and Charlie Hunter (guitar) on almost every track, and the tunes are written for rhetorical impact — with the song titles evoking either 1984 ("Oceania", "The Ministry of Love") or George W. Bush's executive power-trip of a nation ("Airstrip One", "Memory Hole"). His earlier My Man in Sydney had a similar bar-band feel, but this one is better. Previte reworks some of his older tunes for more direct communication, then he litters the basic organ combo sound with Steve Bertstein's blurting trumpet and some tenor sax screams. With "Wake up everybody" printed on the album's inside cover, Previte means to provoke, and he does so with a wailing guitar feature on "Ministry of Love" and blues-variant Led Zeppelin guitar chunking that gradually gives way to a kind of heavy swing under the horns. "The Inner Party" lets Hunter get off some slide guitar, not mention tasty harmonica from Stew Cutler. There aren't really solos in the usual "jazz" sense — with the players lining up to blow over a set of chords. This is a band that plays mostly together, creating a single sound. The overall effect: musical mélange more integrated than old-school fusion used to be and certainly a lot more fun. With no apparent trickery, Previte's band rocks like a rock band should, even if that's not quite what they are.
Finally, Goldberg also has a recent album out: The Door, the Hat, the Chair, the Fact on Cryptogramaphone. This last disc may sound the most "jazz" of all, what with acoustic bass, tenor saxophone, and often-brush-played drums fleshing out a quintet that leads with clarinet and violin. Tracks like "Song and Dance" have a swung-boppy sound that is certainly "jazz" and the improvisations here come closest to the inside-out jazz sound of Blue Note in the mid-'60s. But much like the chamber jazz of Way Out East and the whole-band interplay of Coalition of the Willing, Goldberg's music on "Long Last Moment" and "Blinks" is so integrated that it becomes a category of its own. A violin brings echoes of country sounds. A wordless vocal on another track suggests eerie soundtracks and nightmares. The gentle interlocking of lines in open harmony seems like chamber music from Aaron Copland. The clarinet is dry like Benny Goodman and blue like Charlie Parker. It's American music. It's Ben Goldberg music. It's good music.
The "Fused" State of the Music Today
Of course discussing Byron, Goldberg, Horvitz, and Previte is a hardly a total view of what "fusion" currently means in jazz. But that's the point. This relatively narrow slice of musicians putting out albums in the first half of 2006 from a single, interwoven scene is scattered all over the map of potential forms of music. Today in jazz, fusion is no longer a marketing strategy but a fact of creative life. Even Wynton Marsalis and the folks carrying more traditional or repertory-based flames will tell you it's true: jazz grows into the future through continual recombination and mutation. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington will always be great, but what made them great was a magical malleability.
Today that kind of plasticity is alive and well with folks like Mssrs. Horvitz, Goldberg, Byron, and Previte.
Find your own fusion. Listen up!
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