U.S. Jazz Fusion: 1972

Hi,

In my ears, these were more adventurous pop music, than fusion ... and while they had some small flashes here and there of some jazzy stuff, in the end, I never looked at them as fusion or anything related to jazz at all. And they were played on the FM radio dial a lot, not because of the jazzy touches, but because they were well recognized as rock bands.

I kinda think of fusion as having a 50/50 rock jazz atmosphere, which we can see in the Return to Forever material. The rest, I probably would consider more jazz, than I would fusion for my tastes. But in those days, you can see that many bands were taking the hint from a lot of jazz folks, for their adventurous work, which was rather tough on radio ... the FM dial was strong within a rock context and the newer stuff, but the jazz side of it, was almost strictly on large cities, and it lost its touch the further you got away from them. 

The well versed academic locations, though, with a large number of students (usually past 25/30K students), normally had a good variety of the music ... not the same as the large city, but close. But, by the time you drove 3.5 hours to SLO from LA, you wouldn't hear a single jazz thing on the dial much.