1967-1969United States

Jazz fusion

Also known as Jazz fusion, fusion jazz, jazz-rock

A jazz-rooted electric style that took shape around the turn of the 1970s, jazz fusion traded polished boundaries for long-form improvisation, amplified textures, and deep grooves.

Origins and context

Late-1960s jazz scenes in the United States, especially musicians absorbing rock, funk, and R&B into improvising ensembles.

United States

History

The label took shape in the late 1960s, but the clearest early turning point is Miles Davis’s electric period, especially the album Bitches Brew, released on March 30, 1970. Davis’s official site describes the record as a collision of acoustic and electric instruments, groove-driven rhythms, and extended studio experiments, and AllMusic places the style’s emergence in the late ’60s as jazz and rock began trading ideas more openly. By the early 1970s, the sound had its own identity in records by artists such as Herbie Hancock and Weather Report, and it branched into funkier and more commercially accessible directions as well as more aggressive, rock-driven ones. AllMusic notes that Head Hunters pushed Hancock into the vanguard of jazz fusion in 1973, while the Miles Davis catalog and later official retrospectives show how the electric approach continued outward into the rest of his early-1970s output.