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Fusion!: From Alice Coltrane to Moor Mother
128 pages, Paperback
Published March 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 11, 2024
Probably the best music writing I’ve read this year.
May 21, 2025
okay! finally finished this baddie.
so: first, the good! this is an excellent project as far as its historiography is concerned. plenty of links between relevant musical figures, as well as an in-depth, cross-referenced citation list involving biographies, interviews, lectures, and academic sources. this makes for an excellent envoy into a very broad understanding of the history of "jazz fusion" (loosely, because Coles troubles this term, rightly so). i also enjoyed seeing a combination of familiar artists and new ones (the playlist for this book is phenomenal, and on its own makes it worth the purchase), and placing them in relation to one another and to their own practice through the lens of collaboration, cooperation, compromise, and heritage. altogether, a lot to offer.
that being said: the bad... or meh. Coles doesnt seem to really know, at the root of it all, what constitutes "fusion", and because of this a number of contradictions emerge from his writing. fusion is a practice rather than an aesthetic category? cool, i am partial to that theory. but then to speak of it as the enmeshment of two or more other genres is to presuppose a certain aesthetic emerging at the grain of two other contoured aesthetics; which is to say, to call it a practice means you have to talk about how the artists practice their art, rather than discuss the sound "in itself" as exemplary of this relations (because then youre pulling it back towards an aesthetic understanding rather than a procedural one). and even if this is the case, there's no reason for fusion music to be the only case where this understanding of "genre" as practice occurs (this line of thought goes at least as far back as half a century ago...). i think its particularly bizzare to make these claims when dealing with the intersection of genres that are themselves already so malleable and fluid - jazz, hip-hop, electronic (dance music), etc - and practice-oriented (rather than aesthetic). not to mention that underlying this all are certain aesthetic presuppositions about what is necessary to underpin "fusion" (in broad and paraphrased strokes, Coles relies heavily on the presence of a somehow recogniseable "jazz" which is augmented or supplementary to another genre/practice). there seems to be an unspoken (and i'd argue, entirely arbitrary) aesthetic reason we don't see any discussion of supergroups in rock/RnB/metal/etc, and the type of "fusion" that emerges from those interactions (for instance, thinking through groups like The Sound of Animals Fighting, Isles and Glaciers, or Sufferer).
but, to mediate my own criticism, i may have walked into this read expecting something different. i wanted an academic/theoretical text, and i ought to have expected music criticism (most of these short, and to their credit digestible, essays come from other, more journalistic sources). nonetheless, the writing has consistent grammatical issues (predominantly with regards to maintaining tense within sentences), and could have done with more thorough editing.
so: first, the good! this is an excellent project as far as its historiography is concerned. plenty of links between relevant musical figures, as well as an in-depth, cross-referenced citation list involving biographies, interviews, lectures, and academic sources. this makes for an excellent envoy into a very broad understanding of the history of "jazz fusion" (loosely, because Coles troubles this term, rightly so). i also enjoyed seeing a combination of familiar artists and new ones (the playlist for this book is phenomenal, and on its own makes it worth the purchase), and placing them in relation to one another and to their own practice through the lens of collaboration, cooperation, compromise, and heritage. altogether, a lot to offer.
that being said: the bad... or meh. Coles doesnt seem to really know, at the root of it all, what constitutes "fusion", and because of this a number of contradictions emerge from his writing. fusion is a practice rather than an aesthetic category? cool, i am partial to that theory. but then to speak of it as the enmeshment of two or more other genres is to presuppose a certain aesthetic emerging at the grain of two other contoured aesthetics; which is to say, to call it a practice means you have to talk about how the artists practice their art, rather than discuss the sound "in itself" as exemplary of this relations (because then youre pulling it back towards an aesthetic understanding rather than a procedural one). and even if this is the case, there's no reason for fusion music to be the only case where this understanding of "genre" as practice occurs (this line of thought goes at least as far back as half a century ago...). i think its particularly bizzare to make these claims when dealing with the intersection of genres that are themselves already so malleable and fluid - jazz, hip-hop, electronic (dance music), etc - and practice-oriented (rather than aesthetic). not to mention that underlying this all are certain aesthetic presuppositions about what is necessary to underpin "fusion" (in broad and paraphrased strokes, Coles relies heavily on the presence of a somehow recogniseable "jazz" which is augmented or supplementary to another genre/practice). there seems to be an unspoken (and i'd argue, entirely arbitrary) aesthetic reason we don't see any discussion of supergroups in rock/RnB/metal/etc, and the type of "fusion" that emerges from those interactions (for instance, thinking through groups like The Sound of Animals Fighting, Isles and Glaciers, or Sufferer).
but, to mediate my own criticism, i may have walked into this read expecting something different. i wanted an academic/theoretical text, and i ought to have expected music criticism (most of these short, and to their credit digestible, essays come from other, more journalistic sources). nonetheless, the writing has consistent grammatical issues (predominantly with regards to maintaining tense within sentences), and could have done with more thorough editing.
August 10, 2025
Wow.com the way he interweaves beautiful analysis of sound, eg about the use of space in miles’ music particularly, with contextual background of the fusion processes was so intricate and gorgeous
September 8, 2025
Nice non fiction read! Lot of songs/knowledge i did not know prior to this read. Lots of fun listening to the songs while reading :)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews