Three musicians who passed through Miles Davis‘s band in the late 1960s spent the following decade pulling jazz keyboard playing in a direction it had never gone before.
Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock had all sat behind a Fender Rhodes on Davis’s electric records, and once they left to lead their own groups, they took the instrument with them, adding ARP and Moog synthesizers, clavinets and Mellotrons as the decade went on.
Not everyone followed: Keith Jarrett and McCoy Tyner spent the same years building some of the most acclaimed acoustic piano records of the era, arguing by example that the instrument didn’t need to plug in to stay vital.
Around and after that first generation came players who grew up with electric keyboards as a given rather than a novelty, fusing jazz technique with funk, soul and the studio sound of the period.
These ten musicians, presented roughly in the order their defining work of the decade appeared, cover both camps.
1. Joe Zawinul
Zawinul co-founded Weather Report with Wayne Shorter in 1970, and spent the decade turning the ARP 2600 into as recognizable a voice in the band as any horn.
That reached its fullest expression on 1977’s Heavy Weather, recorded with Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Alex Acuña and Manolo Badrena, where Zawinul played ARP 2600 on nearly every track alongside Rhodes, Oberheim synthesizer and melodica.
His composition “Birdland,” under six minutes long, became an unlikely hit for an all-instrumental jazz-fusion band and a standard covered for decades afterward.
Heavy Weather reached number one on Billboard’s jazz chart, went platinum and won DownBeat’s readers’ poll for Album of the Year, and it remains the clearest evidence of how far Zawinul had pushed synthesizer playing from novelty effect to compositional core.
2. Chick Corea
Corea spent the first half of the decade building Return to Forever from a Brazilian-tinged acoustic group into an electric powerhouse, playing Fender Rhodes throughout 1973’s Light as a Feather, recorded in London the previous October with Stanley Clarke, Flora Purim and Airto Moreira and built around “Spain,” a melody drawn from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez that became one of the most covered jazz compositions of the era.
By 1976’s Romantic Warrior, with Al Di Meola and Lenny White rounding out the band, Corea had assembled a small orchestra of keyboards for a single record: acoustic piano, Rhodes, clavinet, organ and no fewer than four different synthesizers.
The album went gold, and AllMusic later called it Return to Forever’s most popular release, a fair summary of how commercially successful Corea’s electric period had become.
3. Herbie Hancock
Hancock’s Mwandishi band spent the early 1970s making dense, exploratory records like 1972’s Sextant, where he played piano, Rhodes, clavinet, Mellotron and both ARP and Moog synthesizers behind Bennie Maupin, Eddie Henderson and Julian Priester; it sold poorly but is now regarded as one of the period’s most uncompromising fusion statements.
Hancock then deliberately simplified, telling interviewers he wanted to play something lighter, and the result, 1973’s Head Hunters with Paul Jackson, Harvey Mason and Bill Summers, became the best-selling jazz album of its era until George Benson’s Breezin’ overtook it three years later.
Built on Hancock’s clavinet and Rhodes vamps rather than Mwandishi’s harmonic density, it reached number thirteen on the Billboard 200 and was later added to the National Recording Registry.
4. Keith Jarrett
Jarrett had played electric piano and organ in Miles Davis’s band from 1968 to 1971, and came out of that experience determined never to plug in again, writing that he was carrying on “an anti-electric-music crusade” in the liner notes to one of his own live albums.
His 1972 solo-piano album Facing You earned a perfect five-star review from DownBeat, but it was 1975’s The Köln Concert, an entirely improvised solo performance recorded on a small, out-of-tune rehearsal piano after the venue failed to provide the Bösendorfer he’d requested, that made him a genuine commercial phenomenon: it has sold roughly four million copies, making it the best-selling solo jazz album ever released.
Jarrett split the rest of the decade between that solo work and two parallel working quartets, one American, one European, never touching a synthesizer in either.
5. McCoy Tyner
Tyner left John Coltrane’s group in 1965 still associated primarily as a sideman, and it took most of the following decade for his own records to catch up to that reputation.
Sahara, recorded for Milestone in 1972 with Sonny Fortune, Calvin Hill and Alphonse Mouzon, became his commercial breakthrough, selling more than 100,000 copies and earning two Grammy nominations; Tyner played not just his trademark hard-driving acoustic piano but koto, flute and percussion across the record.
Enlightenment, recorded live at Montreux in 1973, drew similar acclaim, with DownBeat praising colors and intensities the reviewer called unprecedented in jazz. Tyner never adopted electric keyboards the way his Miles Davis-alumni contemporaries did, and his 1970s records stand as arguably the decade’s strongest case for post-Coltrane acoustic piano.
6. Jan Hammer
Hammer joined the original Mahavishnu Orchestra lineup in 1971, playing keyboards and organ alongside John McLaughlin, Jerry Goodman, Rick Laird and Billy Cobham on The Inner Mounting Flame, and by 1973’s Birds of Fire, his Moog synthesizer and Rhodes playing had become as central to the band’s sound as McLaughlin’s guitar; the album went gold and the band played over five hundred shows before disbanding at the end of that year.
Hammer then built a solo career from his own Red Gate Studio, releasing The First Seven Days in 1975 and forming the Jan Hammer Group the following year, while also guesting on Jeff Beck’s Wired and Al Di Meola’s Elegant Gypsy.
His aggressive, rock-inflected synthesizer style, developed inside Mahavishnu’s volume and speed, became a template other fusion keyboardists spent the rest of the decade responding to.
7. George Duke
Duke spent much of the early-to-mid 1970s dividing his time between Frank Zappa’s band and his own solo records for the German MPS label, a combination that shows in the funk-inflected fusion of 1974’s Feel, where Zappa appears on guitar under the pseudonym Obdewl’l X alongside bassist John Heard and drummer Leon “Ndugu” Chancler.
Duke’s other 1974 release, Faces in Reflection, reached number thirty-one on Billboard’s jazz albums chart, a genuine commercial result for an MPS record, and included a collaboration with Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento that pointed toward the more genre-blurring career Duke would build through the disco years that followed.
Across both records, his layered keyboard work, closer to soul and funk phrasing than to bebop, marked him as a distinct voice from the Miles Davis-descended fusion mainstream.
8. Lonnie Liston Smith
Smith built his Cosmic Echoes band around a spiritual, unhurried variant of jazz-funk that stood apart from the harder fusion of his contemporaries, and 1975’s Expansions, recorded for RCA’s Flying Dutchman imprint with Donald Smith, Cecil McBee and a small percussion section including Michael Carvin on clavinet, remains the clearest statement of that style; AllMusic later called it timeless soul-jazz with a traceable influence on smooth jazz and electronic music that followed.
Smith released a second album the same year, Visions of a New World, expanding the group with horns and guitar for what AllMusic described as an even smoother, more meditative groove.
His layered electric piano textures, built for atmosphere rather than harmonic complexity, gave 1970s jazz-funk one of its most recognizably laid-back voices.
9. Bob James
James arrived at Creed Taylor’s CTI Records as an arranger and conductor as much as a performer, and 1974’s One, recorded at Van Gelder’s studio with James handling keyboards, arrangements and conducting, reached number two on Billboard’s jazz albums chart on the strength of CTI’s polished, radio-friendly fusion sound.
The album’s instrumental track “Nautilus” went on to become one of the most sampled recordings in hip-hop history, turning up in tracks by Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest across the following decades, a second life that outstripped anything the record achieved on release.
James spent the rest of the 1970s working the same territory as both a solo artist and a key arranger for labelmates including Grover Washington Jr., helping define CTI’s smooth, string-and-electric-piano house style.
10. Patrice Rushen
Rushen was twenty years old when Prestige released Prelusion in 1974, playing acoustic and electric piano, ARP synthesizer and clavinet alongside Joe Henderson, Tony Dumas and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler; critic Leonard Feather called it a debut of exceptional promise, and it holds up as straight-ahead post-bop with fusion already creeping into the arrangements.
By 1977’s Shout It Out, her final Prestige record before moving to Elektra, the sound had shifted noticeably toward funk, with guitarist Al McKay among the musicians joining Rushen as she moved away from the harder jazz setting of her debut.
Taken together, her two Prestige albums track a young prodigy’s transition in real time, from acoustic jazz pianist to the funkier, more commercial keyboardist she would become through the R&B hits of the following decade.
