Description

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The role of blended musical genres and styles across jazz, rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, techno, and grime.

Defined as the coming together of two or more distinct entities, fusion is essential to the vitality of modern and contemporary music. From music writer Alex Coles, Fusion! From Miles to Moor Mother examines the origins and legacy of fusion in popular music, and the role of jazz in particular as a catalyst for fusion across rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, techno, and grime.

All music may be a fusion of one sort or another, but for Coles, jazz has the unique ability to act like a translator, enabling the passage of one genre of music into another. Like translation, fusion is a process rather than a style or genre.

When musicians are driven to adopt fusion, blending musical genres can fluidly open out into the fusion of cultures. This is the premise of Coles’s examination of the influence of fusion on artists, including Miles Davis, Kimiko Kasai and Herbie Hancock, A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick Lamar, and Moor Mother. Through chapters that each focus on a single track, Coles sketches the backdrop to the dialogues, collaborations, and communities underpinning these unique moments in music history.

About the Author

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Alex Coles is a critic. He is author of Crooner (2023), Tainted Love: From Nina Simone to Kendrick Lamar (Sternberg Press, 2023) and DesignArt (2005).