Ok, well you asked for it. :lol:
I mostly stick with '70s fusion, though there is a lot of good recent stuff that I could talk about, too.
Classic fusion covers a lot of ground, so I'll probably divide things into the different phases that American fusion went through in the '70s:
--Avant-garde/cross-over
--Jazz-rock
--Jazz-funk
--Soul jazz
--Pop jazz
First off is the avant-garde phase that started with Miles Davis's
In A Silent Way in 1969 and lasted through about 1972-73. Basically, fusion started because around 1967-68 Miles Davis started hanging around with modernist orchestral guys and married a young woman named Betty Mabry, who was a real 'scene maker' in NYC and turned Miles onto Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The result was two ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL albums:
In A Silent Way and
Bitches Brew. Almost all of the people who led the great fusion bands of the '70s played on one or both of these albums.
Silent Way is very eerie and sparse, showing a lot of modernist tendencies. It still features the core of the great acoustic Miles Davis Quintet from the '60s, but expanded with two or three electric pianists going simultaneously, and John McLaughlin in his first major recording--made on literally his first day in New York after arriving from England. I love this album, but it might be tough sledding for folks looking for crazy shredding etc.
I've been listening to
Bitches Brew for 20 years now, and I still hear new stuff in its weird sonic stew. It's a much denser, layered affair than
Silent Way, with a cast of thousands all seemingly playing at the same time. Some of it is probably a bit dated now, but it's one of the most important albums in jazz history. Again, it has a very modernist, avant-garde orientation, with very few 'out front' solos, and a loose organization. You can still hear some ties to jazz as it had been, compared to where Miles would go in the '70s.
Miles went off in different directions with his electric music after these two albums, but several alumni of these sessions carried on the same basic style--especially the three keyboardists.
--Chick Corea started Return to Forever, which was a lighter, cooler, shimmering thing in its first incarnation with Stanley Clarke on acoustic bass, Joe Farrell on sax, and Flora Purim and Airto Moreira providing a Brazilian sound on percussion, drums and vocals. While it was more accessible than what Miles was doing, RTF Mk. I still had that eerie coolness to it. The two albums
Return to Forever and
Light As A Feather are favorites of mine, but they are probably not the best place to start into fusion, since they are heavily indebted to Brazilian music and don't really "rock."
--Herbie Hancock did a trio of albums with his Mwandishi band from 1971-73 that have more of a tribal groove than
Bitches Brew, but work the same general abstract territory. I love all three albums and highly recommend them all if you have an open mind:
Mwandishi,
Crossings, and
Sextant.
--Joe Zawinul started Weather Report with Wayne Shorter after they both left Miles's band, and the first two albums,
Weather Report and
I Sing The Body Electric, are total mind-fucks. Part of the latter album was drawn from live recordings used on the Japanese-only release
Live in Tokyo, which is my favorite album by this version, but also a bit hard to find. Also, Joe Zawinul's album
Zawinul was recorded just before he started Weather Report and is a great album in the same general style.
I'm way into this style of jazz at the moment, and it's quite addictive if you can wrap your mind around it. It's all about textures and space.