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You know that Biblical tale of Abraham and the city of Sodom? God says, I've had it with Sodom. All that sin and corruption and stuff. (I might be paraphrasing a bit here.) Abraham says, well wait a minute, are you going to destroy the good with the bad? What if there are 50 good men in Sodom? God, who had apparently never considered this, grudgingly allows as how he'd spare the city for 50 good men, even though he was just dying to use his brand new red Missile Launch button. Abraham eventually gets God to spare the city for having even a single good man.

I feel that way about jazz-rock fusion. Part of me wants to ask, do we have to relive every single thing that's ever happened? Can't we all just agree that we did the jazz-rock fusion thing in the 70s and will never, ever speak of it again? But then, I remember that for all its many and truly wretched excesses, jazz-rock did occasionally produce a small gem. It almost had to - I mean, look at the enormous talents involved: keyboard giants like Return to Forever's Chick Corea and the late Joe Zawinul of Weather Report, virtuoso guitarists like John McLaughlin and Al DiMeola, and some guy named Miles Davis.

These guys (wait.... hmmm.... yup. All guys.) could play. Problem was, they wanted everyone to know it. So jazz-rock fusion, which began as a well-intentioned and perfectly reasonable attempt at mixing two styles that were beginning to affect each other anyway, quickly became saddled with a very troublesome image. Critics saw it as a bloated let's-see-how-fast-we-can-play-in-unison wankfest. It seemed more important that you be able to play in a 15/16 time signature - even if it sounded like you were counting furiously in your head - than to play something genuinely musical in good old 4/4 time.

Even if this argument was true for much of the movement, I would argue that there is no type of music, no style or movement, that hasn't produced at least something worthy of note, and worthy of revisiting years later. "Fusion" has its share, though how large a share depends on how generous you are with your definition of fusion. If you claim Miles Davis's "In A Silent Way" is a fusion album - well then I'm willing to call that a fusion classic. "Bitches Brew," undeniably a fusion album, had a big impact on a whole generation of younger musicians, and deserves some credit for that alone. McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra would surround its big, extended suites with smaller, largely acoustic works that still bear hearing today; McLaughlin's own solo record, "My Goals Beyond," is also largely acoustic, and is brilliant. There are others too. Really. Just not enough to get me to go to a Return to Forever concert.

Tell us: What's your reaction to the return of Return To Forever and other fusion groups?
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