Pictured: Warren Haynes [© Jay Blakesberg]

JAZZ + ROCK = FUSION

By John Swenson

The concert that changed my life happened in April of 1968 at the Fillmore East, just days after Martin Luther King's assassination began a year of shattering events that reshaped American history. Pitched battles between the National Guard, police and ordinary citizens were taking place across the country and though New York wasn't on a curfew, people were advised to stay in their homes. Nothing was going to keep me from going to this show, though, and as I made my way from my place in Brooklyn the streets were eerily quiet that night.

Only a few hundred people showed up at the Fillmore East, but promoter Bill Graham insisted that the show go on. The opening act was the Free Spirits, an electric jazz band featuring guitarist Larry Coryell, who played in a style I'd never heard before. I was familiar with the sounds of rock, blues, hard bop and soul jazz, all music with guitar lines that burned over a groove, but Coryell played lines filled with unexpected turns and shocking surprises. It was exhilarating, but it was just the beginning. Buddy Guy followed with a dazzling performance of Chicago blues that rocked this small but appreciative audience hard. He jumped off the stage, raced up and down the aisles and cut every rock guitar hero who'd been on that stage before him to ribbons. Well into a marathon set he was joined onstage by B.B. King and the two giants tore it up.

That performance might have been impossible to follow, but then the world's greatest rock band, The Who, played a set for the ages. The band was making the transition from being a powerful singles group to a performance medium for the large scale concepts that would become Tommy, Who's Next and Quadrophenia. You could feel them growing through this performance, unveiling the long form "mini opera" "A Quick One While He's Away" and playing lengthy instrumental jams during which guitarist Pete Townshend experimented with themes that would soon form the basis of Tommy.

The whole concert was a revelation. I came away from the Fillmore with the sense that all of these musicians were walking through the creative fires of a new, experimental approach to their music, just as those musicians realized there was a new audience willing to go there with them. Despite the dramatic difference in genres the three groups all gave off the sense of a common purpose.

Graham saw that avant-garde jazz and progressive rock, an absolutely new form that had blasted apart the conventions of the hit single, had joined forces, appealing to new audiences that were literally ready for anything. Graham pushed the envelope, putting Miles Davis' Bitches Brew band on the same date with Laura Nyro and Steve Miller.

By the early ‘70s the two disciplines had combined to become jazz fusion, a style that Davis worked in for the rest of his career and reached tremendous popularity in the music of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Billy Cobham, Coryell and a host of acts on the CTI record label. Jimi Hendrix was working on a project with jazz arranger and composer Gil Evans at the time of his death. Had Hendrix fully embraced this style, popular music history might well have taken a dramatically different turn.

The music industry tried to harness this new style, forcing older jazz musicians to plug in, often with horrible results, and fusion fell out of fashion just as progressive rock retrenched into punk and the music industry became enamored with disco. Jazz and rock moved as far apart as the two genres had ever been.

But in the last few years another generation of rock musicians whose roots are not based in the Ramones have joined forces with a generation of jazz musicians who have no interest in repeating the neo-bop conservatism of the post fusion era to make music that has found an appreciative new audience at jazz clubs and rock festivals alike. Guitarist Eric Krasno of Soulive is equally at home playing Grant Green-style grooves and Led Zeppelin tunes with his own band and sits in with a wide variety of rock, soul and jazz bands. A few weeks ago Krasno subbed as the guitarist in the Funky Meters during a headline set at Michael Arnone's annual Crawfish Festival in western New Jersey. That day Kranso played hard funk and blues jams for an audience of dancing ‘69ers and neo-hippies. Krasno also headlined a mainstream jazz show at the JVC Jazz Festival with the well regarded jazz tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman joining Soulive.

Soulive records for the Blue Note label, an iconic jazz imprint that has recently underscored the new links between jazz and rock on a series of releases by such crossover artists as Cassandra Wilson, Terence Blanchard, Norah Jones, Van Morrison and Al Green. The fruits of this renewed alliance are also being reaped on the awards front. The Jazz Journalists Association just honored Herbie Hancock as Musician of the Year; earlier this year Hancock won the Grammy for Album of the Year for his hybrid recording of Joni Mitchell compositions, River: The Joni Letters.

Festivals abound with these cross generic bands. There's no better example of this trend than the biggest American festival, Bonnaroo. Last year Bonnaroo featured one tent of nothing but jazz artists, mostly from the Blue Note label, and this year's event included several performers with feet in both genres. The Wood Brothers, an offshoot of one of the bands that pioneered this new connection between jazz and rock, Medeski, Martin and Wood. Guitarist Derek Trucks, one of the most celebrated young players on the rock scene, also performed at Bonnaroo. Trucks is a dedicated jazz fan who cites Sun Ra and Jeff Beck's watershed fusion album Blow By Blow as major influences on his playing.

One of the headline acts at Bonnaroo, Widespread Panic, has shifted into an overtly fusion direction since bringing in guitarist Jimmy Herring two years ago. Herring is a singular stylist. When he was called on to sub for Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers after Betts was jailed during a tour a few years ago, Allmans guitarist Warren Haynes rehearsed the parts with Herring by referring to changes from Miles Davis compositions that the tunes were based on. Herring also did service in the reconstituted Grateful Dead, but taking the place of Widespread Panic's founding guitarist Michael Houser was probably the greatest challenge he's faced. Houser had a unique style of his own, a poetic, loping folk-based groove that many of the group's fans felt was reminiscent of Garcia's approach. Herring is all hard edges and brilliant, gold-plated surfaces by contrast. He plays at a much higher level of intensity, with a burnished sheen to his lightning fast runs inspired by McLaughlin and Beck but always bringing something of his own to the table. As a result Herring has subtly transformed Widespread's sound since joining the group.

Another Bonnaroo band that reflects this new direction is the Frank Zappa tribute group headed by the late guitarist's son Dweezil, who has put together a group that sounds exactly like the classic Zappa touring bands of the 1970s and ‘80s. Jazz, rock and classical elements mix effortlessly in Zappa Plays Zappa. Somehow it doesn't sound like a copy band, probably because the music was so far ahead of its time.

"It's not only about having the right notes and rhythms, it's about having the right attitude," says Dweezil. "The point of what I'm doing is I'm trying to introduce Frank's music to a new generation. I'm not doing my version of Frank's music, I'm doing Frank's music as it exists on records and as he released it and wanted it to be heard."

"Bonnaroo was fun to play. After the show people were coming up to us and saying they can't believe we're up there playing this stuff and neither can we. Watching Frank's shows as a kid I got that same feeling. How do they do that? We're going to be playing rock and jazz festivals across the U.S., Canada and Europe which in itself is somewhat rare but we're equally as capable playing for those kind of audiences. We're looking forward to playing more for those type of crowds because you're really likely to be introducing the music to someone who's never heard it before."