The Eternal Jazz-Fusion Question:

Decide!

mark4art wrote: Surely the poll  should have another option, both of the above 2 options.

Fusion is an official genre of Jazz. I find rock and roll bands like Return to Forever and Mahavishnu in the jazz section at the local pop shop.

Having said that rock and jazz are flexible musics at their art core so jazz has been included in rock (Black Sabbath) while the fusion bands are pure jazz that use the blues basics of a rock tune (e.g Stanley Clarke and George Duke doing Louie Louie... or was it Wild Thing?) to show off, er, that is, to develop stylistically superior themes.

I suppose the ultimate see sawing peak of jazz and rock cannot be bettere defined than the works of Jeff Beck. Sophisticated harmonies and exquisite solos. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat may be the best examle of a rock guy doing justice to say the least to a jazz classic.

and  what of Joni Mitchell with Jaco and Pat Metheney on that fabulous live album. Folk-rock-jazz-fusion? or just Folkjokeopus as Roy Harper may call it.

But realy fusion was born roughly about the time of Miles' In A Silent Way sessions as rock became more interesting and rock was incorporated into jazz.

I know from bitter experience that general public rock and pop listeners hate jazz.


So it's jazz with rock elements (in chicken egg terms.)

Well, it's called fusion for a reason, so it means the rock and the jazz are in there in a balanced degree. Not just one maine component + some other ornament.

i must say that i simply cannot make a single choice-i love both approaches equally, as long as they are rendered in a way i like

This is very tricky and I have to confess not maybe my favourite genre.

For me Jazz fusion is horizontal rock and vertical jazz i.e. predominantly (very complex) rock rhythms wedded to chord and scale choices sourced predominantly from jazz harmonies.

Either way the worst excesses of the genre strike me as a shed-load of chops and a thimble full of memorable melodic ideas.