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 tells us a little bit more about why he wrote about this genre and what he’s most proud of.
by Matthew Reed Baker
Well, the thing I’m most proud of is that I finished writing the damn thing, and it’s finally here! Even when the writing was humming along nicely, at all times I felt that I had reams of pages left to go.
I kept my eye nervously on the deadline for the first draft of my manuscript, so I offered myself a simple (if random) incentive to always keep going at an industrious pace. At the time, the members of my family all had trendy Stanley metal water bottles, each one ordered with a customized engraved message. So I drew a cartoonish illustration about 1970s jazz fusion, and told myself that I could order this for myself once I handed in a complete book. Well, I’m drinking from it right now.
Of course, I like my own book, but I ended up liking it much better once I went through the editing process with the very talented Annie Zaleski. Annie is a master of writing music books, and she knows anything and everything about popular music.
I’ve long been a fan of her writing, and as I was writing a book about a genre of jazz that crossed over into popular music, I was particularly thrilled that she would bring her approach to music to editing my book. And over the course of several weeks, she was so friendly and encouraging, but also completely honest about what needed rewriting or restructuring, what needed to be expanded or scrapped entirely. And dammit, she was always right! I’m quite proud that I had a chance to work with her.
One of jazz fusion’s greatest strengths is its inclusiveness, so through this whole writing and editing process, I tried to follow that same spirit for my book. For the past two years, when I told friends and acquaintances that I was working on a book about 1970s jazz fusion, I usually received three types of responses:
1) “Wow, that’s great, I want to read it. I love that stuff!”
2) “What is that? Why should I be interested?”
3) “Uh, okay, really? I don’t like that stuff.”
Obviously, my book shares the celebratory enthusiasm of the first group and provides a wealth of information for the second. But I also aimed my book at the third group, the skeptics who often have identified jazz fusion as bland musical wallpaper, or slick cheese made by commercial sellouts, or boring strings of solos by virtuosi concerned more with technique than vision. And to be fair, not all jazz fusion is good, and I’m honest about that in my book. But then again, that’s true of every genre.
By demonstrating how the 1970s were a golden era when jazz fusion was so brilliant, so innovative, and so soulful, I feel I’ve debunked common snap judgments of the whole genre as mere clichés. So I’m proud that I’ve written a book for the naysayers, as well as for the fans and newbies.
The end result is a book that can be read as individual chapters, if you want, but I prefer to see it as one long story that flows from one facet of 1970s jazz fusion to the next.
For one, I loved focusing on the individual lives of these artists and how their careers intersected. All of them had fascinating life stories: They were geniuses since childhood, and most of them came from regular acoustic jazz backgrounds, then became increasingly interested in expanding their horizons through electric instruments, electronic sound, and elements of other popular music, like hard rock and funk.
As they transformed their music and themselves, they so often found each other as fellow travelers on this wild and wired jazz fusion journey. So if readers approach the book straight through, I hope they will feel like they are traveling in the same path with them.
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.
