JAZZ FUSION TAKEN TO THE ULTIMATE EXTREME BY THE ELECTRIC TRUMPET OF MILES DAVIS

After I wrote the recent article on Tommy Bolin and his involvement with the jazz fusion album SPECTRUM, I got an email from somebody asking me to go one better and find an even better jazz fusion album than that one that has been long forgotten about.

Well to be perfectly honest, like I did say in that article I`m not the biggest fan of jazz fusion by a long shot, SPECTRUM to me is the one, possibly the only, when it comes to finding any jazz fusion that does have some degree of melody and isn`t just made for intellectual headbangers who only want to get stoned and discover themselves in the world of Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds. 

If that sounds pretty way out by my standards, I do have to admit I am chilling out tonight having a couple of sherbs, and I am sitting by the computer right now downing a port and water (laugh), yes I am showing my age aren`t I? 

I just started typing a few lines out about what I thought might be a blog tomorrow night and I thought, what the heck, I may as well keep going with this son of a gun now. 

SPECTRUM is the best all round jazz fusion album, but the best jazz fusion song ever
recorded in my opinion is RIGHT OFF, one of two songs on the Miles Davis soundtrack album JACK JOHNSON.

By 1970, when Miles Davis recorded RIGHT OFF, he really had gone `right off` the deep end, he obviously had a few drug issues, but for the most part, if you like jazz fusion, Davis continued to be daring and innovative, even if not always convincing with his new-age trumpet playing feats. 

The album just proceeding JACK JOHNSON, BITCHES BREW, is just as innovative as the funk laden rock-jazz of JJ but not nearly as sharp and hook laden. 

I am not a jazz expert, so I wont attempt to try and describe the structure of RIGHT OFF but it is a really exuberant exhibition of what Miles Davis was doing best back in 1970, and that is making jazz rock built on the sound of James Brown and Sly Stone. 

All Miles Davis was doing was mixing funk with jazz, or trying to at least, which he didn`t often do in a real convincing manner.

He was made for be-bop, not acid jazz, but RIGHT OFF is the one exception. The intro by regular collaborator John McLaughlin on guitar is probably one of the great intros in the history of jazz, funky and downright dirty, while Billy Cobham, who was the drummer who recorded SPECTRUM, cooks up a storm behind him on drums with some awesomely powerful playing. 

Mile Davis on trumpet goes absolutely bananas in a few places, he broke the rules before this, but here he really smashed the rules.

Many of his solos on this record, including the ones with the other song, YESTERNOW, have been widely panned as being too eccentric by some jazz critics and taking things too far.

Will allow you be the judge of that. Both songs really have a creepiness about them that you could well imagine would have made them so suitable for use in a Dirty Harry movie, they just have that flower power era San Francisco vibe about them.