Back in early 2001 I walked inside the venerable Blues Alley to check Russell Gunn. He had about 89 musicians with him, or at least it felt that way. My walk from the Foggy Bottom stop to the Alley is a good 15 minutes. I spent that whole time listening to one song, “Dance of the Concubine”, off Gunn’s Ethnomusicology Vol. 2 and that was after playing it over and over on the 40 minute train ride. It remains one of the prettiest pieces of music to ever grace my ears. The album came early in what was becoming a burgeoning movement amongst Gen X jazz musicians finally starting to drop more music that features discernible elements of the R&B, hip hop, neo-soul and rock that they grew up on and currently listen to.

Christian McBride, the most accomplished and well-recognized under-40 bassist, has toured college circuits with his Sci-Fi band for the past several years. Same with Nicholas Payton and his Sonic Trance band, a jazz-electronica-hip hop-funk outfit that has managed to score gigs at popular music festivals. Leading up to the release of Sonic Trance (2003) I read a piece on the band where Nic said, “I’m trying to swing as little as possible.” Then he mentioned that he made conscious decisions to ensure that the bass wasn’t “walking”, a term used to describe the standard rhythm of bass lines that resemble the steady pace and sequence of fast walking feet (that’s about the best way to describe it). More than any other sonic component of early jazz, the walking bass lines evoke early jazz and swing music the most. For Nic to slow down the bass lines and give the rhythms much grimier and nasty hip hop feels, is similar to how jazz musicians took cues from Sly and James and Curtis in late 60s and early 70s and (as James demanded) made it funky.

Any talk of jazz fusion wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Miles Davis. We’ll delve into his career much deeper at some point on TIRM, but he can be looked at as the Godfather of fusion. As early as Miles in the Sky (1968), where Ron Carter dropped the upright bass and hooked up and electric joint and Tony Williams added some funk to his drumming on “Stuff”, Miles led the charge of keeping jazz “current”. He refused to be a music relic. It’s no surprise that his sidemen went on to be stalwarts in that movement as well (Tony with the underappreciated Lifetime, Wayne Shorter with Weather Report and Herbie Hancock with his Mwandishi band). The songs included on this page are classic examples of how jazz musicians fused jazz with the music of the day, whether it was Tony evoking a little Led Zepplin or Herbie driving in the Funkadelic lane.

These days, it bodes well for this generation that jazz is finally crawling out of its retro stage. The jazz fusion era of the late 60s and early 70s had a short run. In order to escape the dwindling support and enthusiasm for anything with strong jazz attributes, the late 70s featured some of the worse, watered down, pop music kowtowing in jazz’ history and this is what magazines, radio stations and club owners promoted as what was hip. In an almost allergic reaction to that wackness, the young musicians of the 80s (led by Wynton Marsalis) began a movement back to the core. Gone were the pop music covers and corny rock guitar riffs and courtships with the easy listeners. Instead, there was a hard bop renaissance. This, however, created an unfortunate reticence amongst young musicians to pen music that bore any influence of contemporary, popular genres. It was definitely a necessary thing after the downward spiral of the late 70s and the 80s was one of jazz’ great decades, with an especially talented crop of Young Lions returning jazz’ musical focus to the salient qualities that made it great to begin with. BUT, jazz has always been an evolving, current art form. For jazz musicians to not push overall music forward or at least offer their unique voices and perspective on the current landscape goes against the very nature of jazz, which is why it had been so puzzling that the 90s featured no real musical leap or change or evolution and, instead, more of the early jazz reprisals. That was cool and noble in the 80s; it seemed lazy in the 90s. Then the new millennium arrived and artists like Roy Hargrove, with his RH Factor series, and Terrance Blanchard and McBride started paving the way for younger musicians (Robert Glasper, Stacy Dillard, Jeremy Pelt, etc.) – dudes that went to school and studied Duke Ellington and came home and pumped Tribe or OutKast – to finally start using the jazz language to articulate musical ideas that had no choice but to be shaped by hip hop and Reagan-Clinton era America. On the real, this is the beginning of the next great movement in jazz.