Matt Kassel: World Music Response

After I saw Bela Fleck with Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer a few weeks ago at the Keswick Theatre, the word fusion popped into my head a lot while thinking about the performance. And in class, as Lewis wrapped up our world music session by playing us samples of modern world music records, the word fusion also popped into my head.

I don’t mean to compare what seemed like a sub-par Gaelic-rock band to an all-star trio, but most world music collaborations, to me, have similar natures. The Fleck-Hussain-Meyer collaboration represented a confluence of disparate musical backgrounds—bluegrass (Fleck), classical (Meyer), and Indian classical (Hussain)—that somehow managed to avoid sounding completely like any one of those distinct backgrounds.

As I understand it, fusion was a marketing word, as is world music (not the way the ethnomusicologists use it), and new age. It has its purposes, but it’s ambiguous. It doesn’t say much. All music is a fusion of something. All music has its ties to influences from around the world. Classifications reduce.

If you were going to describe the Fleck music I saw, you’d need a lot of adjectives, so it seems useful to add the word fusion in there somewhere. But to me, it’s a red herring: it directs attention away from the bare bones of a type of music. (I think Herbie Hancock’s album Rockit was intended as a pop album, but it got labeled as jazz-fusion.)

We come across these problems of fusion in jazz a lot. Musicians are often drawing on musical resources from around the world—Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and so on. Usually the word jazz supersedes the relevant influence in the music, or it becomes a combination word—like Latin jazz.

For example, I saw Miguel Zenon perform the other night with a group of Puerto Rican pandero players—he was drawing on the folkloric music of his native Puerto Rico: plena. But I wouldn’t call it plena, what he played. I’d call the music jazz with hints of plena in it—albeit big hints. And the reason for that, most likely, is because of the huge ethic of improvisation in jazz, that, as we saw, is present in other musical idioms, but which is so essential to jazz’s lifeblood.

I don’t think there’s any way of getting around using the word fusion sometimes. I guess no word, or set of words, really does complete justice to a musical form. But there are lazy words out there, and I think fusion is one of them.