Jazz Fusion

The controversy involving the question of Fusions belonging in the Jazz genre parallels the age old question concerning new forms of music fitting into existing musical paradigms. In examining the question of Fusion belonging to the Jazz genre, one observes that various critics in the jazz community perceived jazz music "as” high art” in contrast with the more commercial and less sophisticated rock music which Fusion merges with. “It is just noise,” it has no melody” and “you cannot have artistic integrity through employing artificial processes” were examples ’ Jazz purists believed, when discussing amplification and electronic manipulation of tones, which Fusion artists employed to produce a new timbre of sound. Detractors posited that Fusion was not aesthetically pleasing, and did not conform to traditional jazz standards. However, one can argue that Fusion contains all the hallmarks of Jazz. This music incorporates a jazz vocabulary, soloists with distinctive voices, including Miles Davis, and syncopated rhythmic accents in the melody. To persuade critics of this
Jazz performances involve a collaborative effort between the listener and the artist as the artist creates a freshness fueled by jazz’s defining components, improvisation, syncopation, and deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre. Through the examples mentioned above Fusion pieces such as Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and “Actual Proof” as well as Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew, and Chick Cores “La Feata,” one can conclude that Fusion contains all the earmarks of Jazz. Ultimately, it seems wrong that extremely talented and creative artists such as Davis, Hancock, and Corea to name just a few, who have produce Fusion pieces, do not receive due credit for the music they produced, and a rightful genre status in both recognition and