It's Halloween. It's a time to scare someone, and to get scared. Some people might play some eerily spooky music for a night like tonight. As for me, I'll play some jazz fusion that's "frighteningly good."
For that, I'll turn to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the band's debut album, "The Inner Mounting Flame." MO set the bar pretty high in the fusion world, led by fiery guitarist Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. But it went beyond him. He had a uniquely trailblazing group of players behind him. On violin, Jerry Goodman could match him note for note. Jan Hammer had a sound all his own on keyboards. Rick Laird was solid on bass, and Billy Cobham provided some of the most muscular drumming around.
It was the kind of jazz that reached across easily to rock fans and touched them in a special way. That was the magic of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
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.
