BOZON

Well, almost lost.

Bozon is one of those fine fusion bands of the late 1970s who had made lots of excellent music for years, but never managed to come up with an antemortem album. And then they sank into oblivion, just like hundreds, if not thousands of other perfectly fine fusion bands of their time. The dusk of disco and the dawn of punk .. not the best alignment of stars for a fusion band to thrive in San Francisco!

The only reason we can still listen to Bozon almost 35 years after their demise is the heroic deed of the band members, who resurrected a bunch of 30-year-old, disintegrating reel-to-reel tapes and processed them into a long album, called Cold Fusion .. as in "fusion that came in from the cold"?

Unfortunately, in the process of salvaging the tapes they had to irreversibly convert the material to digital; I guess they never kept the tapes, and certainly didn't attempt to issue the music on vinyl. Which is a pity, because out of the 74 minutes of the Cold Fusion it would have been possible to make not one, but two records :)

To picture yourself what the purely instrumental Cold Fusion is like, imagine some of the best pieces, produced by the 1970s' Weather Report and Return to Forever, only somewhat more polished, cerebral and evenly balanced. Bozon was a team of five equally competent players; I do not believe they had a dominant front man, or an ambitious "spiritual leader". I think there is only one track that can be listened to on Youtube, but it does give a fairly accurate idea of what the Cold Fusion sound is/was.

It would be my recommendation that every lover of electric fusion should consider adding this album to their collection. Bozon didn't change the path of jazz history, but their Cold Fusion is a very worthy summary of what the genre had to offer in the 1970s.