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When I first started playing guitar I began devouring guitar magazines in lieu of any sort of formal (or even informal) musical instruction. This was way, way pre-internet so the info I could glean from those periodical pages was all the info I got. There was no looking up the obscure names like Larry Coryell or Mike Stern that I was reading about and there was certainly no chance of actually hearing any of their music. Sure, I knew what Foreigner and The J. Geils Band sounded like but a high-brow lesson-oriented publication like Guitar Player didn’t pay much attention to the sort of bands that I had been hearing on Moncton’s AM radio station.
Actually, in that era (the early-to-mid 1980’s) the mags all seemed to feature “fusion” groups, and man, no matter how much I read about them I had no freakin’ idea what the heck “fusion” music was, let alone what it sounded like. I wasn’t alone, as the Letters section in any given issue would invariably be littered with questions and arguments about fusion this and not-fusion that. All I knew was that these fusion guys played fast, they used weird things called “modes”, and they all had very non-flashy hard-to-remember names like Allen Holdsworth and Pat Metheny.
I wonder how many times I read the name Al Di Meola in these magazines and immediately forgot it again? Probably dozens. If so then I certainly would have come across the name Chick Corea a few times too. And how many articles did I read about Return To Forever, never once imagining that on June 26th, 2008 I would be standing in Ottawa’s Confederation Park, all grown up with a beer in my hand and bunch of esoteric jazz knowledge bouncing around my head (not to mention a pretty clear comprehension of those mysterious “modes” I had so often read about) watching both Chick and Al (along with Stanley Clarke and Lenny White) revisit one of the most influential jazz fusion groups of all time?
About “fusion”: it’s basically fast, hyper-intelligent jazz that isn’t skiddly-doo-wah like bebop was, and it is usually played by new-agey spiritual white dudes. About “modes”: in a nutshell, they are the different note combinations one finds when they start other scales on different notes. Like, imagine the major scale goes 1234567. Thinking of the scale like 2345671 or 3456712 would be thinking “modally”. Don’t worry about it, for a long time I didn’t understand it either.
About Return To Forever: Essentially the poster child for jazz fusion groups, R2F was founded by ex-Miles Davis keyboardist Chick Corea (1941-2021) and bassist Stanley Clarke (who, incidentally is not a new-agey spiritual white dude, though he was into Scientology). The original guitarist was replaced by Al Di Meola when the phenom was just nineteen years old, while drummer Lenny White had joined the group a year earlier (Lenny is also not a new-agey spiritual white dude…I guess I was mostly thinking of fusion guitarists. Okay, I was thinking of John McLaughlin).
Essentially, Return To Forever was a who’s who of jazz, of fusion, of players and wow, their set at the jazz festival was impressive. I’m not sure what a young Bon Jovi-loving me would have thought about it but boy-oh-boy the aging jazz semi-aficionado me dug it quite severely. And not only was the music intellectual, challenging, and quite brilliant, it was also invigorating to have so many questions long-since answered in my mind. Yes, this is jazz fusion. Yes, they are jumping between modes – like dorian, phrygian, and lots and lots of mixolydian – as the harmony calls for it. No, the Mahavishnu Orchestra isn’t an actual orchestra. The melodica is a keyboard that you blow into. Chick Corea is (was) a dude. Flat nines work pretty much everywhere, all the time. Reinforced holes in things are called “grommets”. “Khaki” does not rhyme with “talkie”.
Prosciutto is meat, bruschetta is bread topped with tomatoes, raga is Indian classical music and chlamydia is not a flower. It’s good to know stuff.
Todd Man Out 