100 Greatest Fusion Albums according to DigitalDreamDoor.com

Like all published lists, I think it's lame. And like all published lists, it's too 'classics' based. Whenever a site/magazine puts a list out, they're afraid to not include the staple albums of that genre, so as not to appear clueless. So about a quarter to a half of them are rote. There's a lot of albums that aren't fusion too, of course. I could quibble with the order of certain things too, as could we all, but that's to be expected.

There are enough deep cut type releases that you can tell the list wasn't put together by know nothings, so that's good at least.

My list would have those Holdsworth albums in reverse order.

8. Atavachron (1986)
26. Sand (1987)
75. Secrets (1989)
97. Wardenclyffe Tower (1992)

I like that the list spans into more recent times. I question the Sting, Steely Dan & Chicago in honorable mention. And the biggest elephant in the room for me is that aside from a few early English ones, they're virtually all US recordings. I realize that the world revolves around us, but my biggest recent epiphany has been the richness that non-US fusion brings to the genre. If they held true to their criteria "These Fusion Albums were chosen to showcase the artists musical vision through their originality, influence, instrumental quality and creative inspiration." then there is no reason for excluding non-US fusion other than ethnocentrism or ignorance, or at least not digging deeper than what is obvious. But I'm not surprised by this.

I have around 33 of them in some form. I used to have most of the Zappa, MO, WR & RTF on vinyl or cassette, so probably 20 or so I no longer have, but can easily stream if the urge strikes (which it usually doesn't). We had a long thread about whether Zappa was fusion on the FB group, and I plan to re-visit some of these recordings I used to listen to in the '80s.

'Silent Way' is famous for Miles' advice to John Mcloughlin. ... "Play it like you don't know how to play the guitar"



"There I was in the studio, and there was a tune called "In A Silent Way," which is a Joe Zawinul tune. And Joe, he didn't know there was a guitar player coming, so the only thing he could do was photocopy his piano part and give it to me. So I had a piano part in the studio.

So we ran it down, Miles didn't like it. We ran it down another time, he didn't like it. This is when he stopped, and he looked at me, he said, "I want to hear it on the guitar". I said, "you want these piano chords in the melody?" "Yes." So I said, "that's going to take me a minute just to put it together because it's not a guitar part." And he said, "Is that a fact?" So already, you know, sweat was running down my back. I'm thinking, what am I going to do here? I've got this piano part, and he wants me to do the whole thing.

So after about ten seconds, he looked at me and he said that famous quote, "play it like you don't know how to play the guitar". Play it like you don't know how to play the guitar. So I threw out the chords, I threw out the rhythm. I threw it all out, and I just played the melody, and I just played it real simple. And I was just astonished because he had been able to pull out of me something that I didn't know I could do."


www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=132487200