The Supernova that Was Jazz-Rock Fusion

In the Spring of 1968 Miles Davis met and began dating fashion model and aspiring R&B singer-songwriter Betty Mabry . They marry in September. (That's her on the cover of Miles' February 5, 1969 release, Filles de Kilamanjaro --which was recorded with his "Second Great Quintet" [the last album attributed to them] in two sessions in 1968: June 19-21 and September 24--when both "Mademoiselle Mabry" and "Frelon brun (Brown Hornet)" were recorded.)      Betty was a very outgoing socialite, going to parties and clubs almost every night, initially hanging out at a multi-racial club in Greenwich Village (The Cellar--where she made contacts with key people in both the music industry and the fashion world). Though she was initially drawn to New York's folk music scene, she also found a love for the R&B explosion happening in pop music. music that she was quick to force upon her new partner--both in album and radio form but also in concert form....

 Lonnie Liston Smith is only a very recent discovery of mine. I think that my brain had always confused Ramsey Lewis with Lonnie Liston Smith. I had purchased a Ramsey Lewis album (1978's Legacy ) back in college totally based on wanting to hear more from the composer of the wonderful song, "Sun Goddess" covered by Earth, Wind & Fire for their Gratitude album, but Ramsey's music just wasn't what I needed to hear at that time. For some reason "Lonnie Liston Smith" always registered as "Ramsey Lewis" in my diminutive brain. Thus, until a couple of months ago (maybe two) I had never, ever heard the wonderful music of Lonnie Liston Smith. This upsets me to no end because Lonnie's music is exactly  the kind of music that I would have loved and fed off of during my entry into the world of the metaphysical and occult in the early 1980s. I now know, own, and have reviewed five of  The Richmond (VA)-born keyboard player got his start in the rich...

Soon after 1969, a year in which experimentation with the use of electrified instruments in jazz music multiplied drastically, in which modern advances in recording, editing, and sound processing techniques affected the way recorded sound could be manipulated and published, and in which the dominance of rock 'n' roll as a popular and creative art form came to the fore, many open-minded, curious, and/or forward-thinking jazz musicians began to jump on the bandwagon of what would eventually become known as Jazz-Rock Fusion. Herbie Hancock was one such figure. Over the course of the entire decade of the 1960s, Herbie had established himself as a conduit for the expression of new ideas--which was, no doubt, one of the reasons he had been asked by Miles Davis to join his second "great quintet"--which culminated in the recording sessions that created the music for Miles' revolutionary "electric big band" albums,  In a Silent Way  and Bitches Brew . Despite man...