Jazz fusion
Jazz fusion (also known as jazz rock, jazz-rock fusion, or simply fusion) 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 began 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.
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Quotes about jazz fusion
[edit]- Throughout musical history, the prevalence of jazz has never particularly waned. Countless musicians have come and gone, each leaving their own unique mark on the genre. Despite the musical differences between jazz and rock, the two worlds are invariably linked.
- When the hot fusion bands came to town, the stage often resembled a mad scientist's laboratory, packed with strange and wonderful equipment of futuristic appearance and unknown powers. This music was often dismissed by purists as a sellout at the time of its initial release, and some feared that jazz was, for the first time in its history, backing away from its mandate to move forward, to experiment, to embrace the most progressive currents. And, true, in some instances, tired commercial formulas got overworked, and the music was dumbed down. But the best fusion work was innovative and expanded the jazz vocabulary at a time when many concluded that everything that could be done in jazz had been done.
- Ted Gioia in How to Listen to Jazz. page 140. Basic Books. (2016)
