The History of Jazz (74 page)

The mixed reaction to his music was only one of many problems Davis now faced. An October 1972 car accident left him with two broken ankles. His left hip, which had been operated on years before, was increasingly in pain and often left him immobilized. A bleeding ulcer added to his medical complaints, as did nodes on his larynx that constricted his breathing and left him short-winded when playing the trumpet. His drinking and drug problems further contributed to his deteriorating condition. Despite these aggravations, Davis continued an active schedule, undertaking concert performances in Japan in early 1975 that were recorded and eventually released as
Agharta
and
Pangaea
. But these were parting shots. Soon Davis had retired from the music scene. By his own admission, he did not pick up the horn for over four years and rarely left his home.

Yet the fusion movement, Davis’s legacy, was now entrenched as the most commercially viable jazz style of the period. Former members of Davis’s various bands were taking the lead in this area, with three ensembles proving especially influential: Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report, co-led by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul. But this represented only part of the impact of former Davis sidemen on the new idiom. Hancock’s 1973
Head
Hunters
release achieved massive sales and brought many younger listeners into the jazz camp with funk-oriented pieces such as “Chameleon” and an updated version of “Watermelon Man.” This album initiated a bifurcated career for Hancock, with his efforts now divided between mainstream jazz, often of the highest quality, and overtly commercial projects with little jazz substance. His 1979 release
Feets Don’t Fail Me Now
found him lamely singing (albeit with the aid of a voice synthesizer) and regurgitating a vapid pseudo-disco sound—yet around that same time, Hancock participated in a stunning two-piano concert tour with Chick Corea and an impressive reunion with the VSOP band, essentially a regrouping of the mid-1960s Davis quintet with Freddie Hubbard filling Miles’s role. In later years, Hancock would prove to be something of a chameleon himself, with projects that showcased his mainstream jazz skills (
Quartet, Directions in Music
), his world music interests (
The Imagine Project
), his taste for funk and electronica (
Perfect Machine
), and his celebration of diverse songwriters (
Gershwin’s World
,
The New Standard
,
River: The Joni Letters
—the latter release earning a Grammy as album of the year in 2008, the first time a jazz record had been so honored since
Getz/Gilberto
back in 1965). George Benson, whose guitar work had graced Davis’s
Miles in the Sky
release, made a more successful switch to vocal work. His mid-1970s cover version of Leon Russell’s “This Masquerade,” from the
Breezin’
album, initiated a series of pop hits for Benson— a success that threatened to obscure his talent as a soloist in a Wes Montgomery vein. Tony Williams’s Lifetime band, which included organist Larry Young and guitarist John McLaughlin, was not as commercially successful as Hancock’s or Benson’s fusion efforts, but provided an even more sophisticated blending of rock energy with jazz instrumental prowess. Many lesser-known Davis associates—Airto, Lonnie Liston Smith, Michael Henderson, and others—would never achieve the success of
Head Hunters
,
Breezin’
or
Bitches Brew
, but also sought, with varying degrees of success, to seize the momentum of the moment in attracting a crossover audience for their own bands.

Chick Corea had already established himself as one of the most prominent jazz pianists of his generation when he founded his Return to Forever fusion group toward the close of 1971. Corea’s early professional efforts found him working in both jazz ensembles and Latin bands. His mainstream jazz approach, as it evolved, boasted a clean, sharply articulated piano sound, a mix of modal and impressionist harmonies, and a driving on-top-of-the-beat rhythmic feel. His 1967 sideman work on Stan Getz’s
Sweet Rain
project already bespoke a mature piano stylist and composer, and his 1968 leader date
Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
drew much-deserved praise as one of the most creative piano trio projects of the period. Around this same time, Corea joined Davis’s group and participated on
Bitches Brew
and several follow-up recordings, but, by the start of the 1970s, Corea had left the trumpeter to explore freer structures in his Circle band. In addition, Corea’s exceptional two volumes of piano improvisations for the ECM label from 1971 showed him refining a more song-oriented style, one that became even more prominent in Return to Forever. This ensemble, formed in 1972, found the keyboardist assisted by a strong cast of accompanists, especially bassist Stanley Clarke and later guitarist Al Di Meola, both virtuoso instrumentalists who could match Corea in moving from electric to acoustic settings and creating an appealing blend of jazz, rock-pop, and Brazilian/ Latin sounds. Corea was especially adept at incorporating the latter elements into his compositions, as demonstrated by the crossover success of his pieces “La Fiesta” and “Spain.”

In the 1980s, Corea increasingly played in a trio format, for a time reuniting with veterans Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitous (who had participated on the
Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
project), and later forming a dynamic ensemble with bassist John Patitucci and drummer Dave Weckl. Like Hancock, Corea was now alternating between electric and acoustic settings, yet without the sharp disjunction of styles revealed by the former’s efforts—indeed the same Corea-Patitucci-Weckl group would perform alternately as the Elektric Band and the Akoustic Band, with the two approaches revealing a marked convergence. Later Corea groups would play variations on these themes and encompass everything from gritty acoustic combos (such as the New Trio with Avishai Cohen and Jeff Ballard, and the beefed-up Origin sextet) to electric supergroups, as demonstrated on the 2008 Return to Forever reunion and the 2009 Five Peace Band collaboration with John McLaughlin. Along the way, Corea has recorded duet projects with everyone from vocalist Bobby McFerrin to banjoist Béla Fleck, performed classical works, and even composed his own piano concerto and string quartet. As with so many of his peers, Corea’s embrace of jazz-rock fusion has ultimately proven to be merely one facet of a career that is ultimately more eclectic than electric.

John McLaughlin worked in Tony Williams’s Lifetime band, as well as on Davis’s early fusion efforts, before branching out on his own with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971. Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1942, McLaughlin was active in the London scene, where he played not only with jazz groups but also alongside rock musicians such as Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, and Jack Bruce, before moving to the United States in 1969. The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s music reflected McLaughlin’s deep rock roots—in many ways Hendrix was more of a role model for these efforts than Miles—an orientation that was heightened by the absence of a horn player in the band. Yet McLaughlin’s interests also ranged over many genres beyond jazz and rock, as witnessed by his facility in flamenco (demonstrated in his later collaborations with Paco de Lucia), Indian music (highlighted in his late 1970s band Shakti), and the classical/acoustic guitar tradition (increasingly evident in the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, in his guitar concerto, premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985). Jazz writer Joachim Berendt seemingly went out on a limb in the early 1970s when he claimed McLaughlin “symbolizes the complete integration of all the elements that have played a role in today’s music.”
¹⁴
Yet McLaughlin’s later career has tended to substantiate this high-flown praise.

Like Corea and McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter worked on the
Bitches Brew
sessions, only to leave to form their own fusion band at the start of the 1970s. The resulting supergroup Weather Report would rank as one of the most popular and influential jazz bands of its day. Both Zawinul and Shorter had come of age in the hard-bop era; Shorter apprenticed with Art Blakey while Zawinul had worked with Cannonball Adderley, for whom he wrote the hit “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” This blues-drenched funk piece must have seemed, to listeners at the time, an incongruous output from the Vienna-born, conservatory-trained Zawinul, yet this same sensitivity to dance rhythms and popular styles assisted Weather Report in its rise to fame. With Weather Report, Zawinul used his many electric keyboards to create orchestral layers of sound and a much more compositionally-oriented style than the other fusion bands of the era were pursuing. The line between soloist and accompanist was blurred; in its place was a flowing, electronic ambiance in which the band would move between different grooves and composed vignettes. The group’s biggest hit, Zawinul’s piece “Birdland” (from the 1976 release
Heavy Weather
), was a stirring example of this approach at its best. The piece shifts between several contrasting moods, underlined by distinctive pulses and textures, culminating in a simple, catchy melody locked atop a perky harmonic and rhythmic foundation. With its sophistication and tunefulness, and above all in its variety and compression, such an approach can be viewed as the aesthetic of Ellington applied to the dominant electronic pop style of the 1970s.

Yet there were crucial differences between Ellington and Weather Report. Duke’s band had been marked by a consistency of personnel, with many players staying for decades, while Weather Report went through frequent changeovers, with only Zawinul and Shorter maintaining the band’s continuity. But even more telling, where the Duke had built his compositions around his soloists, Zawinul preferred to submerge the individual musicians into the total atmosphere of his pieces. In time, Wayner Shorter’s fans began to grumble that one of the great saxophonists in jazz was being relegated to occasional fills and interludes, and would point to Shorter’s mid-1970s work with the VSOP Quintet and his stellar 1974 leader date
Native Dancer
(with Milton Nascimento) as better vehicles for his talents—not to mention his classic Blue Note leader dates and Jazz Messenger efforts from the 1960s. Yet to Zawinul’s credit, one must acknowledge that this “negation” of the soloist allowed him to craft an innovative, quasi-conversational approach to composing. Melodic fragments might be stated by any instrument and inspire a response from an equally unpredictable direction. Stitch by stitch, these scraps of sound were woven together into impressive large-scale works.

The arrival of electric bassist Jaco Pastorius in the band during the mid-1970s represented a jarring contrast with this collectivist ethos. Brash and flamboyant, Pastorius defied the stereotype of the bassist as the behind-the-scenes member of a jazz combo who hid out next to the drummer. He was a charismatic figure who dazzled audiences and introduced legions of rock fans to the intricacies of jazz. Who else could have inspired countless teenage bassists to learn Charlie Parker’s intricate “Donna Lee” bop line on their instrument? Yet Pastorius’s flashy recording of this piece proved to be one of the most admired and emulated fusion outings of the decade. Critics sometimes dismissed his onstage antics as the work of a superficial showman, but Pastorius usually backed up his posturing and pouting with prodigious technique and remarkably pure intonation. His presence energized the
Heavy Weather
recording, as well as many other sideman and leader projects.

One of the most noteworthy of these sideman appearances came on
Bright Size Life
, a 1976 release that represented the debut leader date for guitarist Pat Metheny. Metheny arrived on the scene at a late stage in the jazz-rock fusion movement, and his career can be seen both as a final culmination of this movement’s potential and also as a sign of the jazz world’s desire to move beyond the constraining formulas of the genre. Certainly Metheny’s music has frequently defied categorization, running counter to the expectations of the fusion audience. One suspects that much of his artistry is intertwined with this very ambivalence about adapting to commercial demands. At the height of his career, Metheny recorded a densely atonal project with Ornette Coleman, almost as a way of distancing himself from the increasingly vapid commercial jazz scene with which he was associated. A few years later, Metheny once again surprised his audience by taking on a sideman gig with young tenor titan Joshua Redman. But even back at the time of
Bright Size Life
, Metheny showed a knack for integrating pop-rock elements into a probing jazz style, while studiously avoiding the clichés of both idioms.

Although Metheny is a masterful technician (teaching guitar at the Berklee jazz conservatory while still in his teens), his playing avoids the empty demonstration of finger facility so common among jazz-rock guitarists. Instead, he has refined a lucid, melodic style that, at its best, merits comparisons with the incisive electric guitar work of Wes Montgomery. The addition of the like-minded keyboard soundscapist Lyle Mays to Metheny’s band in 1976 spurred an especially fruitful partnership documented on recordings for the ECM and Geffen labels. Metheny’s most impressive achievements in the fusion idiom have been a series of genre-crossing recordings—
Still Life (Talking)
from 1987,
Letter from Home
from 1989, and
Secret Story
from 1992—that incorporate advanced jazz compositional techniques with pop-rock and Brazilian elements. These are highly original projects that sound deceptively simple, yet include some of the most sophisticated jazz writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Periodically Metheny has returned to more mainstream settings, most notably in collaborations with Charlie Haden, Brad Mehldau, and Jim Hall, where he reveals a chamber jazz sensibility that contrasts markedly with the loud and boisterous tendencies of the fusion style.