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The avant-garde (or “free jazz”) musicians who came to the forefront of jazz during the late 1950s and early 1960s mounted a revolutionary movement that challenged all the conventions of the idiom, aligning their innovations with the progressive social and political changes of the era. This chapter looks at the leading exponents of the music, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. But just when jazz seemed ready to sever completely its relationship with a mainstream audience, a new movement known as fusion (or jazz-rock fusion) attempted to broaden the music’s appeal by drawing on the new sounds of electrified commercial styles. Miles Davis, previously seen as an advocate of bebop, cool jazz, and other jazz movements, emerged as the leader of this new approach, signaled by the release of his hit album Bitches Brew. In the 1970s, a different kind of fusion style emerged, associated with the ECM record label in Germany, which combined jazz with ingredients drawn from classical music, world music, and other sources. This chapter traces the history of these contrasting styles and their major exponents, including Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and the band Weather Report

Guitar synthesizers gained prevalence in the 1980s thanks to the work of guitarists such as Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, and Allan Holdsworth. This chapter explores how the guitar synthesizer challenged prevailing ideologies of technology, technique, and tone in the guitar community and was ultimately a commercial failure. It traces a brief history of the electric guitar and the synthesizer and their subsequent conjoining. The chapter discusses three cases in detail: Metheny’s use of the Roland GR-300, McLaughlin’s use of the Synclavier II, and Holdsworth’s use of the SynthAxe. The chapter concludes with an examination of the critical reception of the guitar synthesizer and speculates about the future of technological synthesis across the analog/digital divide.

This chapter evaluates the final two albums of the Miles Davis Quintet, namely, Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro. It examines the group's attempt to mix jazz with rock elements on the albums through the use of electric piano and electric bass, single extended tonal centers for improvisation, and importation of rock based straight-eighth rhythms. Both compositions were significant predecessors for Davis's fusion work later in his career, with the use of rock rhythms, pedal point improvisation, and harmonic language somewhat sparer than earlier recordings. The chapter also analyzes the singles “Country Son”, “Paraphernalia”, “Black Comedy”, and “Stuff” from Miles in the Sky, and “Petit Machins”, “Tout de suite”, and “Filles de Kilimanjaro” from Filles de Kilimanjaro.

Chapter 4 then examines how they sounded and why this is important. The creation of distinctly Melanesian cultural expressions was an important thread in the thinking of Narokobi, Tjibaou, and Hau’ofa, and concerns about imitating dominant Western forms and threats of cultural grey-out were prominent. The chapter delves into Sanguma’s early musical processes towards melding older with modern, that would define an approach that continues to be developed amongst other groups, in Melanesia and Australia, today.