Matthew Reed Baker takes over the 33 1/3 blog this week with a deep-dive into his upcoming addition to the Genre series: 1970s Jazz Fusion. Today Matthew shares the story of how he became a fan of this influential musical hybrid.
by Matthew Reed Baker
My fandom of any music, like so many people, began with how I grew up. I was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and I’d love to say that I lived in a house full of music, but that might imply that my parents were musicians. In fact, my father was a lawyer and my mother a Spanish college professor. But music did fill our house, as my parents were massive music enthusiasts.
I learned from them that no genre of music is off-limits, as long as it stimulates you and makes you see and feel the world differently.
The first jazz tune I remember knowing well, by anyone, is “Watermelon Man,” by Herbie Hancock.
My maternal grandmother had been a piano teacher in Iowa, and so my mother was also adept on the 88 keys. And the big treat for me when she would sit down to play was when she pulled out a book called The Best Of The Seventies, because it contained the sheet music for “Watermelon Man.”
At age four or five, I couldn’t quite understand the cultural import of the song, but I could certainly understand the lilting sass of its chorus, and for years it was my number-one request.
Soon I discovered that my mother had Herbie’s records in our house, and I not only heard his original straight-jazz version of “Watermelon Man” from 1962, but also Mongo Santamaria’s vocal version that was a radio smash the following year. I also put on a 1973 album by Herbie called Head Hunters, knowing nothing about it, other than it too had “Watermelon Man” on it. And how different the track sounded!
The irresistible melody was still there, but was now subsumed by deep funk and electronics that sounded much more like the bass-heavy R&B grooves you’d hear on New Haven radio stations in the late 1970s. And from then on, I wanted more.
Fortunately, my teenage years ended up filled with jazz as well. My big sister Liz not only turned me on to all sorts of new wave and postpunk, but she also shared her Keith Jarrett and Weather Report records. And in a great stroke of fate, a surprisingly large handful of my high school friends became musicians, most of them entirely consumed by jazz. Through them I first listened to jazz closely: how to count bars, how improvisation works, how musicians have different voices on their instruments.
Through my friend’s teachers, I had access to some great jazz shows in New Haven and New York, and would occasionally meet jazz greats like Doc Cheatham, Geri Allen, and Elvin Jones.
It was electric Miles Davis that showed me that jazz fusion was a genre that could really have no limits.
Back in the 1980s, it was a much-maligned term, seeming to reflect only the most slick and plastic music that you’d hear while shopping for school clothes with your mom. But Bitches Brew and Weather Report’s early albums were adventurous and mind-blowing, and Head Hunters was invigorating and completely fun. This was not background music at all, but pleasurable music that awakened all your senses.
All this was highlighted when I experienced my first jazz fusion concert, by a most unlikely artist: free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and his electric band Prime Time.
Prime Time combined Ornette’s theories of harmolodic free jazz with thrilling beats and a rumbling bottom end, and he had a group of Indian percussionists with him who helped bring the polyrhythms to a mesmerizing boil. This was yet another vital iteration of jazz fusion to me, so when I later took my jazz studies class at Yale, I was grateful that my professor, the great jazz writer John Szwed, felt the same way.
Over the course of a full year, he covered the range of jazz history from Buddy Bolden in New Orleans through the present day, and he never hesitated to bring in outside music for comparison—one day he even played a long track by krautrock legends Can to show us how bands around the world could blend free jazz-like improvisation within a rock context.
So by the time I became an adult, I had immersed myself in jazz and jazz fusion. By this point too, I had immersed myself in hiphop, and in the pre-Google era of the 1990s, I would comb countless album credits and magazine articles to learn the original jazz fusion sources of my favorite hiphop samples.
As a result, my album collection has kept growing, as has my library of jazz history books, and I’m grateful to live only a few miles from Berklee now, where you can literally go downtown and hear the next generation of talented musicians woodshedding in venues around campus. And if there’s one lesson I’ve learned about jazz fusion all these years, there is always more to learn—that’s the best thing about loving a genre that has no limits.
To help you join along with the listening journey I’ve described above, here is a simple playlist of three of my favorite jazz artists that appear in my book, and how their music eventually shifted into jazz fusion:
Matthew Reed Baker
has been a writer and editor for almost three decades. He was the research and arts editor at Boston Magazine for 14 years, where he is still a contributing editor, and has written for The Boston Globe Magazine, ForbesLife, and National Journal. He lives with his wife, two children, and their cat in the Boston area and Midcoast Maine.
1970s Jazz Fusion is available to buy in bookshops and online, including at Bloomsbury.com.
