The door Miles opened
It started, as most things in jazz start, with Miles Davis. By the late 1960s he was listening to Sly Stone and James Brown with the same intensity younger musicians had once listened to him. The result was a series of records that didn't sound like anything that had come before — and that divided the jazz world into two camps that have never fully reconciled.
01
In a Silent Way — Miles Davis (1969)
The first step
The quieter of the two Miles electric masterpieces. No drums on the opening section, electric keyboards floating under a melody that appears and disappears. It sounds like ambient music made before ambient music existed. A lot of people who couldn't handle Bitches Brew found their way in here first.
02
Bitches Brew — Miles Davis (1970)
The big bang
Two discs, eight musicians playing simultaneously, no clear pulse you can lock onto, and a studio producer cutting and splicing the results into something that had never existed before. Jazz critics were appalled. Rock audiences were fascinated. It sold more than any Miles Davis record since Kind of Blue — which is exactly the kind of statistic that tells you something true about what was happening to music in 1970.
03
On the Corner — Miles Davis (1972)
As far as he went
Miles went further still. On the Corner is closer to James Brown than to bebop — layered percussion, repetitive groove, almost no melody. He wanted the Black teenage audience that wasn't listening to jazz. They didn't come; the jazz audience left. It remains his most divisive record and, to a certain ear, his most interesting one.
The musicians who followed
The musicians on those Miles sessions — Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul — went off and made their own electric records. They took different things from the experience.
04
The Inner Mounting Flame — Mahavishnu Orchestra (1971)
The rock direction
John McLaughlin had played on Bitches Brew. What he took from it was the volume and the intensity, not the funk. The Mahavishnu Orchestra played jazz harmony at rock speeds with electric guitar at the centre. Loud, precise, almost overwhelming — a completely different answer to the same question Miles was asking.
05
Sweetnighter — Weather Report (1973)
The groove direction
Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul had both been in the Miles band. Weather Report started abstract and electric; Sweetnighter was where they found the groove. Heavy bass, repetitive vamps, Shorter's saxophone floating over the top. They kept the jazz complexity but made it move differently. Heavy Weather (1977) brought them a mass audience, but Sweetnighter is where the shift happened.
06
Head Hunters — Herbie Hancock (1973)
The commercial breakthrough
Hancock had been playing electric keyboards with Miles. Then he made this — and everything changed. Chameleon opens with a bass groove that runs for sixteen minutes and never loses you. It became the best-selling jazz album of its time. The jazz establishment was suspicious; the funk audience was delighted. Hancock didn't care about the distinction. That indifference was the point.
07
Thrust — Herbie Hancock (1974)
The follow-up that went darker
The Head Hunters band, one year later, with the brightness dialled down. The grooves are heavier, the keyboard textures stranger, the overall mood more unsettled. Less immediately pleasurable than Head Hunters and probably more interesting for it. If the first album was Hancock finding his audience, Thrust was him testing how far he could push them.
The wider movement
08
Black Byrd — Donald Byrd (1973)
Jazz meets soul
CTI Records had its own formula for electric jazz — polished, string-laden, accessible. Donald Byrd's Black Byrd was the best-selling Blue Note album ever when it came out, which delighted the label and horrified the critics. It's smoother than Head Hunters and less ambitious, but it understood something important: that jazz could be popular without being dishonest.
09
Heavy Weather — Weather Report (1977)
When the mainstream arrived
Birdland became a radio hit. Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass was suddenly everywhere. Weather Report had been making adventurous electric jazz for years; Heavy Weather was the record that brought a million new listeners to the door. It's the most accessible thing they made — and an argument that accessibility and quality don't have to be opposites.
10
Everybody Loves the Sunshine — Roy Ayers (1976)
The warmest version
Ayers took the electric instruments and the funk rhythms and made something warmer and more song-based than most of what was happening around him. The title track has been sampled hundreds of times — which is its own form of critical recognition. If Head Hunters is the record that changed jazz, Everybody Loves the Sunshine is the one that made it feel like a summer afternoon.