A group of styles of jazz that merged post-bop music with soul, rock, and sometimes funk in an amplified form. First heard in the late 1960s in Miles Davis's In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew (when it was called "jazz-rock"), by the late 1970s jazz musicians such as Grover Washington and George Benson began to play a simpler, more direct music that was later more completely arranged and synthesizer-driven over a repeated bass line by groups such as the Yellowjackets and Spyro Gyra. Weather Report, a band formed by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, took fusion to a more exotic, atmospheric level, while maintaining ties to earlier forms of jazz through extended solos and group improvisation.
Miles Davis at Montreux (1973)