front cover of Birds of Fire
Birds of Fire
Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion
Kevin Fellezs
Duke University Press, 2011
Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, a musical idiom that emerged as young musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the time, fusion was disparaged by jazz writers and ignored by rock critics. In the years since, it has come to be seen as a commercially driven jazz substyle. Fusion never did coalesce into a genre. In Birds of Fire, Kevin Fellezs contends that hybridity was its reason for being. By mixing different musical and cultural traditions, fusion artists sought to disrupt generic boundaries, cultural hierarchies, and critical assumptions. Interpreting the work of four distinctive fusion artists—Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Herbie Hancock—Fellezs highlights the ways that they challenged convention in the 1960s and 1970s. He also considers the extent to which a musician can be taken seriously as an artist across divergent musical traditions. Birds of Fire concludes with a look at the current activities of McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock; Williams’s final recordings; and the legacy of the fusion music made by these four pioneering artists.
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front cover of Head Hunters
Head Hunters
The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album
Steven F. Pond
University of Michigan Press, 2010
". . . [a] very readable dissection of all the different ways in which Herbie Hancock's 1973 album Head Hunters broke the mould. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking read."
---Jazzwise Magazine
 
"An important and timely book. Pond's work reflects the insight an informed researcher and skilled performer can bring to the study of music."
---Travis Jackson, Associate Professor of American Music, University of Chicago
 
Winner of the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Award for most distinguished work on popular music.
 
Steven Pond's Head Hunters captures a transitional moment in modern music history, a time when jazz and rock intermingled to create a new, often controversial, genre. At the forefront of that style was Head Hunters, Herbie Hancock's foray into the fusion jazz market.
 
The album became a turning point for a radical shift in both the production and reception of jazz. It was the best-selling jazz record of all time to that point, and the music industry quickly responded to the expanded market, with production and promotion budgets rising tenfold. Such a shift helped musicians pry open the control-booth door, permanently enlarging their role in production. But critics, believing that rock and funk might be appropriating jazz to new musical ends---or more ominously, for commercial reasons---grew increasingly alarmed at what they saw as the beginning of the end of jazz.
 
Steven F. Pond is Associate Professor of music at Cornell University. He will become Editor-in-Chief for the journal Jazz Perspectives in 2011.
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Pat Metheny
Stories beyond Words
Bob Gluck
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An in-depth exploration of the style and influence of Pat Metheny, a truly distinctive musical voice of our time.

Guitarist and composer Pat Metheny, among the most acclaimed, visionary musicians of our time, has for five decades toured with his many creative musical projects, most prominently the Pat Metheny Group, while collaborating with celebrated artists, including Charlie Haden, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, and Steve Reich.

Bob Gluck, whose perspective as pianist, composer, and educator has illuminated the music of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis in his two previous books, now focuses his lens on the music of Metheny. Neither a biography nor chronological record of Metheny’s musical output, Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words instead captures Metheny’s self-conception as a musician and the threads that unite and distinguish his creative process. Drawing upon a wealth of new interviews and close readings of musical examples, Gluck offers a bird’s-eye view of Metheny’s musical ideas. Among these are the metaphor of storytelling, the complementarity of simplicity and complexity, and the integrated roles of composer, performer, and band leader. Much like Metheny’s signature style, this book is accessible to a wide range of readers, presenting new clarity, musical insight, and historical perspective about the legacy of Metheny’s groundbreaking music. 

 
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