Southern boys can do jazz fusion. Man, can they ever do jazz fusion.
A breathtaking fusion outfit originated out of Augusta, Georgia, back in the early 1970s, starting with a guitar player named Steve Morse and a guy on bass named Andy West. At first, they were in a band called Dixie Grit. From there, they became a duo known as The Dixie Dregs.
The band continued to evolve. Allen Sloan jumped in on violin. At the band's peak, it also featured T Lavitz on keys and Rod Morgenstein on drums. Later, after Sloan left to pursue a career as a doctor, Nashville session cat Mark O'Connor took over on violin, followed at times by Mahavishnu Orchestra veteran Jerry Goodman.
They were a blend of jazz, Southern rock, classical, and some mighty fine hoedown sounds. These guys could do it all. Morse became known as one of the best guitar players alive today, settling in to the all-important guitarist's spot with rock legends Deep Purple and reigniting a flame in them.
I can say that my love of jazz fusion came later than my love of progressive rock, simply because I was introduced to the "more extreme" fusion later.
Oh, I'd thought I knew what fusion was about in my high school days when I started going ga-ga over girls, and I found myself going for the more romantic, smooth jazz sounds of musicians like Chuck Mangione and George Benson. I thought that kind of music would help me to get and hold on to a girl.
Then came my early college days, and I got a whole different kind of introduction to how intense jazz fusion can really be -- with its screaming rock-style guitar, rhythms more often associated with Latin sounds, keyboards riffing like crazy, and drummers pounding the snot out of those heads.
It meant discovering the guitar mastery of players like John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, Steve Morse, and Allan Holdsworth; bass giants along the lines of Percy Jones, Stanley Clarke, and Jaco Pastorius; violin players as gifted as Jerry Goodman and Jean-Luc Ponty; keyboard wizards like Jan Hammer, Chick Corea, and T Lavitz; drummers like Phil Collins in his Brand X days and Billy Cobham with his powerful shoulders; and groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Dixie Dregs, Weather Report, Return To Forever, and Brand X.
