The Sessions
At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 19, 1969, twelve musicians gathered at Columbia’s Studio B in New York City. Miles Davis had given them almost nothing to work with: a tempo count, a few chords, hints of melody. He arranged them in a semi-circle and pointed, cueing solos and shifts in mood with gestures that could change from moment to moment. Two electric pianos (Chick Corea on the right, Joe Zawinul on the left), two drummers, electric guitar, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, acoustic bass, electric bass, congas, and shaker. Davis played trumpet. The sessions ran three hours a day for three days. Producer Teo Macero then took the raw recordings, sliced them into sections, and assembled the pieces using tape-editing techniques borrowed from classical sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation, with looped passages and spliced transitions that predicted sample-based production by two decades. The result, Bitches Brew, was released in March 1970 on Columbia Records. It sold over a million copies, the first jazz album in years to reach that number, and it detonated the boundary between jazz and rock.
Davis had already tested the approach. In a Silent Way, recorded in a single session at CBS 30th Street Studio on February 18, 1969, used looped and repeated sections that Macero assembled in post-production. In the jazz world of 1969, even overdubbing was considered suspect. Looping was unthinkable. Davis biographer Paul Tingen later compared Macero’s role in these electric sessions to George Martin’s work with the Beatles.
But the real explosion was what the sidemen did next.
The Diaspora
Nearly every major fusion band of the 1970s emerged from Davis’s circle. Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, who had first met in 1959 while playing in Maynard Ferguson’s big band, founded Weather Report in 1970. Chick Corea started Return to Forever. John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Herbie Hancock assembled the Headhunters. Tony Williams, Davis’s drummer from the mid-1960s quintet, had actually beaten everyone to it: his group the Tony Williams Lifetime, a power trio with McLaughlin on electric guitar and Larry Young on organ, released Emergency! in 1969, months before Bitches Brew even came out. The album’s collision of free jazz intensity with distorted rock power divided critics in both camps. It is now recognized as one of the first fusion recordings.
Each band carved out distinct territory. The Mahavishnu Orchestra played with overwhelming volume and speed. McLaughlin adopted a double-neck guitar (six-string and twelve-string) that became his visual trademark, and drummer Billy Cobham sat behind a kit so enormous it looked, as one critic put it, like a battleship. Their debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, was recorded in August 1971 at Columbia’s studios in New York with a lineup that included Jan Hammer on keyboards and Jerry Goodman on violin. The compositions abandoned standard jazz solo-trading in favor of braided, simultaneous improvisation, a structure drawn from Indian classical music.
Weather Report took the opposite path: texture over velocity. Zawinul and Shorter built layered, atmospheric pieces where synthesizers, soprano saxophone, and percussion shifted slowly through long-form compositions. When electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius joined in 1976, the band’s sound evolved again. Pastorius played a 1962 Fender Jazz Bass that had been converted to fretless (the fret slots filled with wood putty, the fingerboard sealed with six coats of boat epoxy, each taking a day to dry). His tone, warm and vocal on the fretless, redefined what the electric bass could do. On Heavy Weather (1977), recorded at Devonshire Sound Studios in North Hollywood, his composition “Teen Town” features him playing both bass and drums. Zawinul’s “Birdland,” the album’s opening track, became the closest thing fusion ever produced to a pop hit.
Return to Forever evolved through three distinct lineups between 1972 and 1977. The final classic version, with Stanley Clarke on bass, Al Di Meola on guitar, and Lenny White on drums, recorded Romantic Warrior in February 1976 at Caribou Ranch, a remote studio near Nederland, Colorado. Clarke played an Alembic electric bass through an Instant Flanger. Corea stacked an ARP Odyssey, Minimoog, Polymoog, and Moog 15 modular synthesizer alongside his Fender Rhodes. The album sold half a million copies and reached number 35 on the Billboard 200.
The Funk Turn
Herbie Hancock separated himself from the other Davis alumni with a single ingredient: funk. Head Hunters, released on October 26, 1973, was recorded at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco with a new band: drummer Harvey Mason, bassist Paul Jackson, percussionist Bill Summers, and saxophonist Bennie Maupin. The opening track, “Chameleon,” runs over fifteen minutes. Its twelve-note bass line was played by Hancock on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, not by the bassist. He soloed on the Odyssey and on a Fender Rhodes, switching between them over a groove that owed more to James Brown and Sly Stone than to anything Davis had done. Head Hunters peaked at number 13 on the Billboard 200. In 1986, it became the first jazz album to be certified platinum by the RIAA.
The Spread
By the mid-1970s, fusion had become a broad church. Pat Metheny, who at nineteen became the youngest teacher in the history of the Berklee College of Music, formed the Pat Metheny Group with keyboardist Lyle Mays, building a sound that was spacious, melodic, and accessible. Allan Holdsworth, emerging from the British progressive scene with Soft Machine, developed a legato guitar technique so fluid it barely sounded like a plucked instrument. John Scofield brought a blues-drenched grit to his work with Davis’s early-1980s bands. Each approach expanded fusion’s range, but the genre’s commercial peak had already passed. By the mid-1980s, much of what carried the fusion label had drifted toward smooth jazz, a polished, radio-friendly style that traded improvisation for production sheen.
The substance survived underground and resurfaced. Snarky Puppy, a collective built from University of North Texas jazz alumni, added electronic music, hip-hop, and neo-soul to fusion’s existing template and won multiple Grammys for their live recordings. Kamasi Washington’s nearly three-hour debut The Epic (2015) merged jazz with orchestral arrangements and cosmic funk. The West Coast Get Down, Washington’s Los Angeles collective, had gained attention through their contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly that same year, pulling jazz improvisation into the center of popular music in a way that recalled fusion’s original promise: that the walls between genres were never as solid as the record labels insisted.
Essential Listening
- Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1970)
- Miles Davis – In a Silent Way (1969)
- Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters (1973)
- Weather Report – Heavy Weather (1977)
- Mahavishnu Orchestra – The Inner Mounting Flame (1971)
- Return to Forever – Romantic Warrior (1976)
- Tony Williams Lifetime – Emergency! (1969)
- Jaco Pastorius – Jaco Pastorius (1976)
- Pat Metheny Group – Pat Metheny Group (1978)
- Chick Corea – Return to Forever (1972)
- Billy Cobham – Spectrum (1973)
- Snarky Puppy – We Like It Here (2014)