You know sometimes I just wish people didn't feel like they had to label every single last permeation possible when it comes to music. At least we've got to draw a line somewhere don't you think? Jazz/Funk fusion I can cope with; maybe I can even get my head around Jazz/Funk/Blues, but Trip/Hip-hop/Funk/Pop/House/Punk/Blues- Jazz? That's a little much don't you think?
Okay so that doesn't exist, but you could almost believe it can't you? If I had left out House and maybe the hop of Hip-hop you would have bought it for sure. That's not the point anyway; the point is doesn't there comes a time when the non-musicians need to shut up and let the musicians play?
Every time somebody so much as even thinks about another genre of music while playing, the hyphens start flying. You know it's all in fun until somebody loses an eye kids, and the way hyphens are getting chucked around music these days we're lucky most bands aren't called "So and So and their guide dogs."
You know what makes the whole fusion thing even more ridiculous? Show me one genre of popular music dating back to the early 1900's that's not the result of the fusion of two different types of music and I'll be really shocked. Hell, try to find any form of music dating back as far as you want into human history that's not fusion and you won't be able to. But do we call Beethoven Romantic/Neo Classical/Choral/Orchestral/Chamber/Baroque Fusion? Of course not, that would just be silly. But he did take all those elements and draw upon them for his orchestral works, because they were his musical influences.
Sort of like what Miles Davis must have done when he was creating music in the late 1960's and giving credit to James Brown for his influence. I'm wondering if the problem might lie with Jazz "purists" who don't want their pure blooded Jazz music to be diluted by anything as unsophisticated as Funk. I guess you don't have to know very much music history to be a Jazz purist, do you? Otherwise, they wouldn't be such dumb-asses to not know that Jazz and Funk come from the same source.
It might have been Miles who first started experimenting with combining Jazz and Funk, but it was people playing with him at the time that would go on to be that style's biggest proponents. Wayne Shorter played with Miles before he was part of Weather Report. In its heyday, Weather Report was the predominant modern Jazz band, the yardstick against which all other "fusion" bands were measured.
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