Fusion ok - official

He’s probably not the first saxman that comes to mind as a jazz-rocker (Mike Brecker, Tom Scott, Wayne Shorter?), but Dave Liebman mounted a laudable defence of fusion in interview in the New York Times on Friday.

He says that when he gets the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in January, it will mark the establishment’s de facto validation of the fusion aesthetic, because few, if any, recipients of the award since its inception in 1982 have been as strongly identified with fusion and its challenge to mainstream jazz conventions.

His statement ought to provoke an interesting reaction from critics such as Gary Giddins who hold that fusion was an unfortunate temptation to which jazz musicians of good taste were driven by the privations brought about by the advent of rock.