Fusion produced more significant guitarists in about fifteen years than any other movement in jazz has managed before or since.
Some of that was equipment. By 1970 amplification and effects had reached the point where an electric guitar could hold its own against a Fender Rhodes, a synthesiser and a drummer playing at rock volume. Some of it was money: guitar was the instrument rock audiences already knew, and a band with a guitarist out front could fill halls that a piano trio couldn’t. And some of it was simply that nobody had done it yet, so there was a lot of ground to take.
The players below are grouped by generation rather than ranked, and the list leans towards the 1970s, which is when most of the fusion ‘vocabulary’ was written. Feel free to let us know in the comments section what you would have done differently!
The originators
John McLaughlin
The central figure, and the one everyone else had to respond to.
By the time he formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971, McLaughlin had already played on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, been part of the first Tony Williams Lifetime alongside organist Larry Young, and made Extrapolation in London. Mahavishnu is what he’s remembered for: unison lines at implausible tempos, odd meters treated as ordinary, and a level of amplification rarely heard in jazz before.
His range gets overlooked. He went on to spend years playing acoustic guitar with Shakti, working with Indian classical musicians on their terms rather than borrowing an exotic surface. Between the electric and acoustic sides of his work he covers more ground than any other guitarist in this style, and he was still touring and recording into his eighties.
Larry Coryell
Often called the godfather of fusion, and the claim holds up better than most nicknames.
Coryell was playing electric guitar with rock feel inside a jazz context before there was a market for it: first with the Free Spirits in 1966, then in Gary Burton’s quartet, then leading The Eleventh House, which came together around 1973 and released its first album the following year. He had grown up on blues and rock in Washington State before arriving in New York, and he refused the choice everyone kept asking him to make.
His catalogue is uneven, which may explain why his reputation sits below his influence. The players who came after him knew exactly what he’d done. He died in February 2017.
Bill Connors
The guitarist on Return to Forever’s Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy in 1973, and a genuinely important link between McLaughlin’s generation and the virtuosos who followed.
Connors played with a fierce, distorted, blues-rooted attack that gave that album much of its force, and then left the band after a single record. What he did next is the interesting part. He signed to ECM and made a series of quiet acoustic albums, beginning with Theme to the Guardian in 1975, before returning to electric playing in the 1980s.
That refusal to consolidate is probably why he’s discussed less than the guitarists on either side of him. The playing on Hymn stands up against anything from that year.
Sonny Sharrock
Sharrock sits at the edge of what most people mean by fusion, and belongs here anyway.
He was making extremely abrasive electric guitar music in the late 1960s, working with Pharoah Sanders and spending several years in Herbie Mann’s band, where his playing must have startled a fair number of ticket holders. His approach came from free jazz rather than rock: slide, feedback, sheets of noise, almost no interest in conventional lines.
He was rediscovered in the 1980s through Last Exit, the group with Peter Brötzmann and Bill Laswell, and made Ask the Ages in 1991 with Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones. He died in 1994. Almost every guitarist working at the noisier end of improvised music since owes him something.
Pete Cosey
The least famous name here and one of the most radical.
Cosey was a Chicago session guitarist who worked with everyone from Muddy Waters to Miles Davis, and he played in Davis’ band from 1973 until Davis stopped touring in 1975. He is the dominant voice on Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus, playing seated, surrounded by effects, generating textures with no real precedent in jazz guitar.
He made almost no records under his own name, which is the main reason he’s a footnote in most histories. Listen to twenty minutes of Agharta and its kinship with Sharrock and the more abrasive end of modern improvised guitar becomes obvious.
The virtuoso era
Allan Holdsworth
The player other guitarists talk about with something close to bewilderment.
Holdsworth wanted to play saxophone and couldn’t afford one, so he set about making the guitar behave like a horn. That produced his legato technique, in which notes run together with no audible attack, and a harmonic vocabulary built from unorthodox chord shapes he arrived at by ignoring standard guitar chords entirely. He told an interviewer in 1987 that he found the basic major seventh chord offensive.
He worked with Soft Machine, the New Tony Williams Lifetime, Jean-Luc Ponty, Bill Bruford and UK before going out on his own with I.O.U. in 1982. Eddie Van Halen then brought him to the attention of Warner Bros., which produced Road Games and a relationship with the label Holdsworth found intolerable. From Atavachron in 1986 he became the most visible user of the SynthAxe, a guitar-shaped MIDI controller almost nobody else took seriously.
His influence runs through rock and metal as much as jazz — Van Halen, Alex Lifeson and Joe Satriani among many others have cited him. He died in April 2017, two months after Coryell, at 70.
Jeff Beck
Beck came from British blues-rock rather than from jazz, which is precisely why he matters here. Blow by Blow in 1975 and Wired in 1976 brought a large rock audience to instrumental fusion, and neither record has an academic bone in it.
His playing on those albums is technically startling but always physical, and his tone — increasingly built around fingers, volume knob and vibrato arm rather than a pick — is one of the most recognisable sounds in electric guitar. He carried on absorbing new ideas until his death in 2023. Fusion players tend to name him for the phrasing rather than the speed.
Al Di Meola
Di Meola left Berklee at 19 to replace Bill Connors in Return to Forever in 1974, and the classic quartet with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White is what made his name. Speed was the headline: precise, alternate-picked lines executed at a rate that became a benchmark for a generation. Earl Klugh also briefly toured with the band during this transitional period.
What came after complicates the caricature. His work with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin on acoustic guitar, and his long engagement with Latin and Mediterranean music, revealed a rhythmic sophistication the early reputation had obscured.
Pat Metheny
One of the most commercially successful jazz guitarists of the modern era, and a stranger musician than that suggests.
Metheny’s group music — the warm tone, the layered keyboards, the wide-open melodic writing — became so widely imitated that it’s easy to forget how unusual it sounded in 1976. The catalogue also contains Song X with Ornette Coleman, Zero Tolerance for Silence, and a decades-long body of trio playing that is straight-ahead by any measure.
If you want the argument for fusion as something other than technical display, he’s it.
The Miles alumni
John Scofield
Scofield joined Miles Davis‘ band in 1982 and stayed until 1985, and the playing on those records is where a lot of guitarists first heard what he does with harmony.
His sound is instantly identifiable: slightly overdriven, rhythmically slippery, full of notes that shouldn’t work and do. He is a blues player and a bebop player at once, and unlike most on this list he has moved between fusion, organ trios, country-inflected projects and straight jazz without any of it seeming like a detour.
Mike Stern
Stern was the first guitarist Miles hired after returning to music in 1980, appearing on The Man with the Horn and touring in the early 1980s. His playing sits at the point where bebop lines meet rock distortion.
He is, more than almost anyone here, a linear player — long, singing melodic lines rather than chordal texture — and his phrasing owes as much to saxophonists as to guitarists. He has also been a fixture of the New York club scene for decades, so several generations of players have learned by standing three feet from him.
The technicians
Frank Gambale
Gambale became the full-time guitarist in Chick Corea’s Elektric Band from Light Years in 1987, and the most prominent exponent of sweep picking as a jazz technique rather than a metal one.
The technique gets discussed far more than the music it produced. What made him valuable to Corea was the ability to execute arpeggio-based lines across dense harmonic terrain without the phrasing collapsing into an exercise.
Scott Henderson
Henderson was one of two guitarists, alongside Carlos Rios, on the Elektric Band’s 1986 debut album, and by his own account lasted only a few months in the group before Gambale took over. His real body of work is Tribal Tech, the band he led for two decades.
He is the clearest example of a fusion player whose foundation is genuinely the blues. His records divide people — the technique is enormous — but what holds them together is a bending, vocal quality that stops the harmony becoming abstract. Guitarists who find most fusion sterile often make an exception for him.
Wayne Krantz
Krantz is the outlier, and for a certain kind of listener the most interesting player here.
He built a body of work around a long-running New York trio and an improvisational approach that treats the guitar rhythmically rather than melodically, often working from very small amounts of material. His influence on younger players is out of all proportion to his profile, precisely because he doesn’t sound like anyone else in the tradition.
Carrying it forward
Fusion guitar didn’t stop in 1985, though the coverage largely did.
Guthrie Govan bridges the technical rock and jazz worlds more completely than anyone since Holdsworth. Mark Lettieri’s work with Snarky Puppy has introduced fusion guitar to an audience that mostly arrived through YouTube. Charlie Hunter built an entire approach around playing bass and guitar parts simultaneously on a custom instrument. Nir Felder, Adam Rogers and Matteo Mancuso all suggest the vocabulary is still being extended rather than curated.
Whether any of them ends up in the company above is a question for a version of this article written in twenty years.
The one thing they share
For all the differences in tone, technique and temperament, there’s a common thread.
Every player here arrived at their sound by trying to make the guitar do something it wasn’t built for. McLaughlin wanted the density of a horn section. Holdsworth wanted a saxophone. Cosey and Sharrock wanted something closer to electronics and pure noise than to strings. Hunter wanted two instruments at once.
That’s what separates fusion guitar from virtuosity for its own sake, and it’s why the best of these records still sound like arguments rather than demonstrations.
More on the players and albums that shaped the music in the Jazzfuel archive — or sign up for the Weekend Edition newsletter for a jazz reading list every Saturday.
