Tracklist (CDr)
1-1 | | Psycho Sam | | | 1-2 | | Big Block | | | 1-3 | | Savoy | | | 1-4 | | Brush With The Blues | | | 1-5 | | Roy’s Toy | | | 1-6 | | Goodbye Pork Pie Hat | | | 1-7 | | Nadia | | | See more tracks1-8 | | Seasons | | | 1-9 | | Angel (Footsteps) | | | 1-10 | | You Never Know | | | 1-11 | | A Day In The Life | | | 1-12 | | Sling Shot | | | 1-13 | | People Get Ready | | | 1-14 | | My Thing | | | 2-1 | | Blues Band Intro | | | 2-2 | | Blues Band Intro | | | 2-3 | | B.B. King Introduction Jam | | | 2-4 | | Let The Good Times Roll | | | 2-5 | | I’ll Survive | | | 2-6 | | Bad Case Of Love | | | 2-7 | | Night Life | | | 2-8 | | I Need You So | | | 2-9 | | Caldonia | | | 2-10 | | All Over Now (Instrumental) | | | 2-11 | | Early In The Morning | | | 2-12 | | How Blue Can You Get | | | 2-13 | | Key To The Highway | | | 2-14 | | The Thrill Is Gone | | | 2-15 | | B.B. And Jeff Beck Together Intro Jam | | | 2-16 | | Paying The Cost To Be The Boss | | | 2-17 | | I Know / Band Introduction | | | 2-18 | | Fanfare Outro | | |
* Items below may differ depending on the release.
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Review In 1969, Miles Davis was looking for a way to sell more albums. So the jazz trumpeter delved into rock and R&B on Bitches Brew. When his record sales promptly increased, fusion was born.Eight years later, the genre is having an identity crisis. Once, pegging fusion was easy: it was the rigorously creative effort of Miles Davis, his former sidemen (Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Josef Zawinul and Wayne Shorter) and a San Francisco-based band, the Fourth Way, led by pianist Mike Nock. These days, though, fusion has diffused;… Read More within its extremes of thoughtless, schlocky grafting (e.g., Stanley Turrentine over strings and a funky drummer) and "serious," often ponderous composition and orchestration (the ECM school), there's mostly unfocused music. Fusion musicians don't seem to be bothered. For most of them, "fusion" is simply a marketing tool, a convenient critical invention, nothing real enough to have actual implications. Which makes sense, considering the form began less as an art than as a way to make money, and continues in this reactionary vein: the music Davis created was still way above the common denominator so, many exjazzmen, seizing their big chance to stop scuffling, have eagerly gone more reactionary. (Also, because they are almost exclusively tied to major commercial labels, fusioneers constantly risk being told their work's not marketable enough, a kind of pressure that doesn't aid artistic surety.) Worse, many fusion players embrace diffusion, claiming that labelslike "fusion"only inhibit artistic conception. Well, it's true much of the best fusion was made when the genre was too young to be called anything. But it's also true that much subsequent fusion music pales in comparison, as even those who make it admit. Maybe, in this case, freedom spells flaccidity. And maybe a refocusing of the genre, a turn back to the beginning, is in order. To my ears, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, by Chick Corea and Return to Forever, has "heightening" and "tension and release," the key elements of fusion quality, in spades. Every cut proceeds as a series of small, jazz-based structural twiststime stops, coyly repeated riffs, the rhythm section dropping out momentarily, the melody changing completely and abruptly. And each twist intensifies the album's constant rock-infused energy, setting it up tensely, letting it go, more so than if a rock band just laid out the same feeling without embellishment. The result is heightened rock speaking purely musically, since fusion's lack of lyrics deprives it of a dramaturgy. But, using similar instrumentation, fusion records give us varying numbers of aural climaxes per song, while ZZ Top and James Brown get us off only once. (And in other ways, of course, fusion is also heightened jazz.) Sad to say, RTF's subsequent LPs became so contrived in this direction they lost spontaneity, as did most other fusion artists. After
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