When jazz went electric at the end of the 1960s, the drummer’s job changed almost overnight.
Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Return to Forever were playing louder, faster and increasingly complicated music. The drummers had to compete with amplified guitars and keyboards, hold down grooves borrowed from rock and funk, and still improvise with the freedom of jazz.
It produced an extraordinary generation of players. Tony Williams was still a teenager when he joined Miles Davis. Billy Cobham brought a huge new sound to Mahavishnu Orchestra. Lenny White played on Bitches Brew at 19. And the musicians who followed them would end up on some of the biggest jazz, rock and pop records of the next three decades.
Here are the drummers who changed what the instrument could do.
The First Wave
Tony Williams
Williams joined Miles Davis’ quintet in 1963, at 17, and spent five years rewriting what a jazz drummer was allowed to do with the pulse. After leaving Miles in 1969 he formed Lifetime with John McLaughlin on guitar and Larry Young on organ, and made Emergency!, one of the first records that can properly be called fusion.
Emergency! is loud, badly recorded and hard to love on first contact. It is also the point at which a jazz drummer stopped adapting to rock volume and started demanding it. Almost everyone on this list is working in territory Williams opened. He died in 1997.
Jack DeJohnette
DeJohnette played on Bitches Brew and then took the drum chair in Miles Davis’s touring band during the early electric period, appearing on Miles Davis at Fillmore, Black Beauty and material later used on Live-Evil.
What separates him from most fusion drummers is that he never sounds like he is holding a groove down. His playing has a floating quality even at high volume, and he moves between free playing, funk and straight time without any visible seam. He has also had one of the longest second acts in jazz, spending decades in Keith Jarrett’s standards trio alongside Gary Peacock.
Billy Cobham
Cobham was born in Panama, raised in New York, and became the drummer in the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971. His playing on The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire is the reference point for fusion drumming: enormous kit, ambidextrous, capable of negotiating odd meters at speed without the pulse becoming an academic exercise.
His 1973 solo album Spectrum went further into rock, and it became a favourite of drummers and, later, of hip-hop producers. He was still touring regularly into his eighties.
Lenny White
White played on Bitches Brew at 19, then joined Return to Forever in 1973 for Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy and stayed through Romantic Warrior.
His strength is a rock drummer’s weight combined with jazz phrasing, which is exactly what Chick Corea’s writing needed. Where Cobham overwhelmed a band, White organised one. He returned to Return to Forever for the 2008 reunion tour and has kept working in both jazz and funk contexts since.
Alphonse Mouzon
Mouzon was Weather Report’s first drummer, playing on the self-titled 1971 debut, and he arrived there by an unusual route. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1948, he moved to New York to study drama and medicine, took lessons from Bobby Thomas, and played in the pit band of the Broadway musical Promises, Promises before the medical career was abandoned.
After Weather Report he recorded McCoy Tyner’s Sahara, joined Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House and made a series of funk-rock albums under his own name. He played harder and busier than most of Weather Report’s later drummers, which is a large part of why the first album sounds so different from the rest of the catalogue. He died on Christmas Day 2016, aged 68.
Harvey Mason
Mason played on Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters in 1973, which means the groove on “Chameleon” is his. It is a masterclass in economy: almost nothing extraneous, every note placed where it does the most work, and a feel that carried a jazz album into the pop charts.
He then declined to tour with the band, because he was earning well as a session player in Los Angeles, and went on to one of the longest session careers in American music. That decision opened the door for a very different drummer.
Mike Clark
Clark came out of the Oakland club scene and took over the drum chair in Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters in 1974, playing on Thrust.
Where Harvey Mason’s playing on Head Hunters is precise and economical, Clark works with displacement and internal complexity, pulling the groove around the beat without ever losing it. His performance on “Actual Proof” became a reference point for generations of funk and fusion drummers, and remains one of the clearest examples of what made the Headhunters rhythm section so distinctive.
Narada Michael Walden
McLaughlin recruited Walden in 1974 to replace Cobham in the second Mahavishnu Orchestra. He played on Apocalypse, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and produced by George Martin, then on Visions of the Emerald Beyond and Inner Worlds.
Following Cobham in that band was an unenviable job and Walden did it by playing with more funk and less thunder. He went on to a second career as one of the most successful pop producers of the 1980s, which has slightly obscured how good the Mahavishnu recordings are.
The Session Generation
Steve Gadd
Gadd has one of the most extensive session careers of any drummer here.
He worked extensively with Chick Corea in the mid-1970s, and his playing on Steely Dan’s “Aja” and Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” is studied by drummers who have no interest in jazz at all.
His contribution is a particular kind of authority. Gadd makes complicated ideas sound like the obvious thing to have played, which is harder than it sounds and much rarer than it should be.
Peter Erskine
Erskine came out of the Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson big bands and joined Weather Report in 1978, staying until the early 1980s. He is on Mr. Gone, 8:30 and Night Passage.
Playing alongside Jaco Pastorius meant working with a bassist who behaved like a lead instrument, and Erskine’s solution was to leave more space rather than compete. He has since worked across straight-ahead jazz, ECM projects and film sessions, and his writing on drumming is as clear as anyone’s.
Omar Hakim
Hakim replaced Erskine in Weather Report and played on the band’s later records. He then became one of the most in-demand drummers of the 1980s, appearing on albums by Sting, Dire Straits and David Bowie.
He is a good example of a fusion-trained player whose real influence came through pop. The precision and the light touch on a hi-hat that made him useful to Zawinul are exactly what made him useful to everyone else.
Simon Phillips
Phillips was working professionally in London as a teenager and by 1980 was playing on Jeff Beck’s There and Back, still one of the most quoted fusion drum performances on record. His CV runs in every direction at once: Gil Evans, Stanley Clarke, Pete Townshend, Frank Zappa, The Who, and twenty-two years as Toto’s drummer from 1992.
The fusion work is where he sounds most like himself. He has led the Protocol project since the late 1980s, initially playing every instrument on the record himself, and he spent years in Hiromi’s Trio Project alongside bassist Anthony Jackson. He plays an enormous kit with real control, and produces and engineers most of his own records.
The 1980s technicians
Dave Weckl
Weckl was the drummer in Chick Corea’s Elektric Band from its 1986 debut, and for a generation of players he defined what a modern fusion kit was supposed to sound like: tightly tuned, heavily gated, every stroke audible.
That sound has dated in places, but the playing underneath it has not. Weckl’s independence and his control at fast tempos remain a benchmark, and his instructional videos taught more drummers than most conservatoires.
Vinnie Colaiuta
Colaiuta joined Frank Zappa’s band at 22 and spent two years playing some of the most rhythmically difficult written music anyone has asked a drummer to read. He then moved into session work in Los Angeles and became the first call for a very long list of artists.
Drummers tend to talk about him differently from everyone else on this list. The technique is extraordinary, but what gets discussed is his time feel, which stays elastic even inside extraordinarily precise written music.
Dennis Chambers
Chambers came up through Parliament-Funkadelic before moving into jazz, and that order matters. He plays fusion from the funk side rather than the jazz side, with a snare attack you can identify in two bars.
He has worked with John Scofield, Mike Stern, John McLaughlin and Santana, among many others, and he is one of the few drummers who can play at that level of density without the groove ever loosening.
Bill Bruford
Bruford arrived from progressive rock, having played with Yes and King Crimson, and moved steadily towards jazz across his career. His band Bruford, with Allan Holdsworth on guitar, sits squarely in fusion, and Earthworks, which he formed in 1986, took him further into jazz proper.
His playing is unmistakable and slightly awkward in a way he clearly intended. He avoided the obvious backbeat wherever possible, and preferred timbre and pitch to power. He announced his retirement from performing in 2009, then reversed it: in 2023, Bruford returned to public performance with the UK-based Pete Roth Trio after more than a decade away from the drum kit.
Fusion Drummers: Still Going Strong!
Fusion drumming did not stop when the coverage slowed down.
Mark Guiliana has built an approach that draws as much from electronic music as from jazz. Chris Dave reshaped the feel of a whole generation of players through his work with Robert Glasper and others. Nate Smith brought a compositional sense to the drum chair. Larnell Lewis, whose work with Snarky Puppy has reached an enormous audience through video, is among the most visible fusion drummers working today.
Terri Lyne Carrington, who has worked with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter among many others, and Cindy Blackman Santana, whose playing comes directly out of Tony Williams and who spent years with Lenny Kravitz, both belong in any serious version of this conversation and are usually left out of it.
Where to start listening
Take four records in order and the development is obvious.
Emergency! from 1969 for Tony Williams, then Birds of Fire from 1973 for Cobham, then Thrust from 1974 for Mike Clark, then 8:30 from 1979 for Erskine. Ten years, four completely different answers to the same problem of what a drummer is supposed to do in an electric band.
