Brass Trax

It was 1970, and jazz was poised for another stylistic revision. The previous decade had upended the art form, introducing chaos and theatre, African rhythms and popular cadences, rigor and its rejection. By the end of the sixties, a jazz musician was just as likely to have university tenure as a nightclub residency.

Jazz had been freed from the obligation to be danceable or popular. It was improvised art music, music to move your sentiments, not your ass.

Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd would eventually reverse the process. Their records Head Hunters (1973) and Black Byrd (1972) would be chart-toppers, sparking a brief but fertile period of jazz fusion that sounded just as good on the dance floor as it did in the headphones.

It’s a sound you can hear in the albums they each released in 1970, a banner year for jazz. That year, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew sounded like the future of music: a dark hodgepodge of rock, jazz, and African rhythms; a bilious 94 minute long trumpet blast with a back beat. It was funky; it was electric. It had overdubs, splices, and loops. Fans didn’t know what to make of the record, and plenty of critics hated it, but musicians heard the shape of jazz to come.

Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi

Herbie Hancock knew it firsthand; it was Davis who convinced the keyboardist to take up the Fender Rhodes electric keyboard. And Hancock’s work on In a Silent Way (1969), to which he added a fat, bluesy funk, would shape Mwandishi, his 1970 foray into fusion.

Mwandishi, Swahili for “writer,” was the name Hancock took during the early seventies, and you can find its African origins in the first cut on the album, “Ostinato (Suite for Angela),” which is in 15/4 rhythm.

The melody, such as it is, only receives a brief statement before the players begin screwing around with it. The rhythm, despite its off-center and shaky momentum, has the surprising effect of balancing the improvisations and establishing a roomy atmosphere. Hancock’s Rhodes, heavily processed, eventually unreels improvisatory screeds that bounce around the beat like a rapper.

“Ostinato” has the all the elements that Hancock would bring to Head Hunters. It’s an undeniable elaboration on Davis’s fusion and a clear precursor to Hancock’s own masterpiece. Listen to the way the reeds on “Ostinato” clear a space for the rest of the musicians to work, then listen to the version of “Watermelon Man” on Head Hunters to see what I mean.

Listen to “Ostinato”
Listen to “Watermelon Man”

On the other side of Mwandishi, “Wandering Spirit Song” expands and collapses the experience of time. Through a structured layering of instruments, the tune builds tension, patiently delineating a staging ground for the cacophonous resolution, filtered through a Echo Plex, during which Bennie Maupin (on bass clarinet) and Eddie Henderson (on trumpet) share a moment that, save for the instrumentation, recalls nothing less than Coltrane’s Ascension. Despite the change in personnel, the track also has an uncanny similarity to “Sly,” Hancock’s Head Hunters tribute to Sly Stone.

Listen to “Wandering Spirit Song”
Listen to “Sly”

Donald Byrd’s Electric Byrd

Trumpeter Donald Byrd had been Hancock’s mentor years before he met Miles Davis. The former Jazz Messenger had given Hancock his first recording gig, on the hard bop date Royal Flush (1961). It’s fitting, then, that Byrd, like Hancock, would become a master of jazz fusion.

Electric Byrd (1970) was a good start. Derided by some critics at the time of its release as a tepid response to Miles Davis’s fusion experiments, the album bears repeated listening today.

“Estavanico,” the first cut, opens with Wally Richardson’s wah-wah guitar, a sound that sets the fluent and trippy tone for the rest of the piece. (It’s also a blaring announcement that this is electric jazz, for those who hadn’t bothered with the album title.) Byrd’s solos, unburdened as always from the requirements of genius, stroke out neat lyrical passages, which Hermeto Pascoal follows with his flute. It’s jazz fusion as a fleeting thought, the bubbles off Bitches Brew in which you can see a funhouse reflection of whatever is behind you.

Listen to “Estavanico”

“Xibaba,” on the other hand, is unmistakably Byrd. (It also bears the stamp of Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, who penned the tune: fusion with a bossa nova accent.) The tune begins by slowly establishing a groove and stating a melody, which dissolves into improvisation, until only the rhythm saves the track from total abstraction. Byrd’s ridiculously buoyant trumpeting sounds, at times, like an alternative universe Miles Davis, where there are no demons to exorcise.

Listen to “Xibaba”

Mwandishi and Electric Byrd serve as conceptual promissory notes. They are the idiosyncratic stamp that Hancock and Byrd placed on early jazz fusion, sketches of the way they would change the game only a few years later.