It's Jazz Rock Week!

[Guybrush]

Yo meine schöne mensch!

Starting from today, it's jazz rock week on musicbanter. So what is jazz-rock? Well, some use the term as synonymous with fusion. The then highly experimental style fusion was created by Miles Davis and his band in the late 60s when they started playing jazz with rock instrumentation. The most influential Miles Davis fusion album was Bitches Brew recorded in 1970. On this album played many highly influential jazz artists, for example Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul who would form Weather Report, Chick Corea who would form Return to Forever and John McLaughlin who would go on to create the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

But, I would argue that jazz rock week isn't the same as fusion week. Perhaps we could regard jazz-rock as jazz on the rockier side of things or rock on the jazzier side of things and consider it a supercategory incorporating whatever as long as the styles mix. Many prog rock bands liked to play around with jazzy sounds, for example many of those from the Canterbury scene, and there's a multitude of other bands and artists like King Crimson, Frank Zappa, Andrew Bird, Screaming Headless Torsos, Soft Machine, Tom Waits and so on that may be worth some special attention this week.

I'll kick it off with a recent favourite of mine and also a homework in our Prog & Fusion Album Club, the song Mirage by french virtuoso violinist Jean-Luc Ponty from his album Enigmatic Ocean from 1977. It has rock instrumentation, rock riff sensibility, traditional time signatures, yet it's jazz and it's excellent. Check out this excellent live version