EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 24 - Jazz Fusion

Genre of the Day - Jazz Fusion

Album of the Day - In A Silent Way by Miles Davis (1969)

August 24, 2024

Just as people do in life, every major genre has to go through inflection points to bridge into new eras and hang on to the shore as the tides turn. Fusion in music is equal parts innovation and a visibility wager to ensure survival; achieving that balance with grace is a challenge in musical deftness. In the late ‘60s, as jazz’s once-predominant role in American musical culture had given way in the popular arena to rock and soul, future-facing jazz musicians strode boldly into new soundscapes.

Like evaporation, jazz’s displacement from the mainstream led to its landscape becoming speckled by oases of avant-garde scenes that were more than ever unafraid to fully wield jazz’s rule-bending compositional ability. The turn into fusion was far from overnight, though, acting another entry into music’s nature as a near-constant continuum of change. Modal jazz had emerged in the 1950s, deviating away from tonal centers and acting as longer meditations in improvisation with a significantly slowed pace of chord changes. It presaged a jazz world that was increasingly teeming with experimentation à la scenes like modern creative. 

A decade later, jazz fusion began to take form as musicians took stock of the fascinating electronic forays of rock and funk musicians. Fusing jazz to those styles meant foregoing some of the more extreme enigmas of free jazz, aiming for a harmonic simplicity that befitted the sound of the genres it was intertwining itself with a bit more. Electric guitars and keyboards reinvigorated the creative output of many jazz musicians, allowing for totally new means of timbral, compositional, melodic and harmonic layerings that were bewitching. 

A two-time visitor to this column now and nothing short (though he was 5’7’’) of a true musical visionary, Miles Davis made the communion of jazz and contemporary rock—particularly the paradigm-shifting electro-psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix—feel like a match made in the stars with his tender grace, best exemplified on In a Silent Way. Come the year to end all years in terms of cultures shifting, 1969 saw the trumpeter assemble a group of musicians including keyboardists Chick Corea and herbie Hancock and guitarist Jack McLaughlin who would help suffuse new colors into his vision. What results is a two-track above-the-clouds reverie, with certain loops and and splices subtly welded together in post-production as another foreshadowing chapter of music creation and the electronic world. The opening feels fantastical—twanging electric guitar, somnolent organ, and quietly cracking drums build gradually as a lush vessel for his unmistakably jubilant trumpet playing in “Shhh / Peaceful.” “In a Silent Way” begins with one of the most bewitching, simmering pieces of proto-ambient music before drums break the spell and Davis enters like a brilliantly blazing sun. It’s an album you’ll want nothing more than to sit with and let fuse with your brain as naturally as Davis set the scene.