When Miles Davis went electric, he didn’t just change the sound of jazz. He created a new job for the saxophone.
Wayne Shorter had spent the 1960s playing alongside Miles in one of the most celebrated acoustic groups ever assembled. By the beginning of the next decade he was helping to build Weather Report, while a succession of younger saxophonists — Steve Grossman, Dave Liebman and Sonny Fortune among them — passed through Miles’s increasingly electric bands.
Elsewhere the instrument was being pushed in completely different directions. Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet became part of the strange, dark sound of Bitches Brew and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band.
Joe Farrell moved between tenor, soprano and flute with Return to Forever. David Sanborn and Grover Washington Jr. pulled jazz towards funk and R&B. And Michael Brecker developed a tenor sound so complete that a generation of saxophonists spent the following decades trying to absorb it.
Fusion presented saxophonists with a problem guitarists and keyboard players didn’t have: how do you make an acoustic horn work in music built around amplification, synthesisers and electric guitars?
The best players didn’t simply play louder. They changed their tone, their phrasing, their repertoire, and sometimes the instrument itself. Dave Liebman had his horns drilled for microphone pickups on the day of his first gig with Miles. Brecker eventually turned the electronic EWI into a serious improvising instrument.
Here are ten saxophonists who defined the fusion era, in no particular order.
Wayne Shorter
The one who arrived already established. Shorter had come up through Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’s second great quintet, and by the time fusion existed he had written a substantial part of the modern repertoire. He played on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, left Davis in 1970, and formed Weather Report with Joe Zawinul at the turn of the decade.
What changed was the instrument in his hands. The soprano became increasingly central to his sound, a lighter and more piercing voice that could cut through electric keyboards without fighting them. Weather Report ran until 1986.
Zawinul gradually became the band’s primary composer and creative director, which is the standard criticism of Shorter’s role there — and also the reason the group worked, since Shorter was content to be a colour inside someone else’s design.
The fusion success brought pop work: Joni Mitchell from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter onwards, the solo on the title track of Steely Dan’s Aja, Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”. He died in March 2023, aged 89.
Bennie Maupin
Maupin is on the list for texture, and specifically for what he did with an instrument nobody expected to hear in this music. His bass clarinet is one of the defining sounds of Bitches Brew, and he stayed with Davis through A Tribute to Jack Johnson, On the Corner and Big Fun.
Then he joined Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet in 1971, playing only bass clarinet and flute on the first album and adding soprano by Crossings. When Hancock dissolved the band and built the Headhunters, Maupin was the only member he kept.
On Head Hunters his credits run to tenor, soprano, saxello, bass clarinet and alto flute, and he is a co-composer of “Chameleon” — a fact that tends to get lost behind the synthesiser bassline. The closing “Vein Melter” is essentially him and Hancock’s Rhodes.
He is 85 and still performing and teaching, with a run of leader albums going back to The Jewel in the Lotus on ECM in 1974.
Joe Farrell
The multi-instrumentalist, and probably the player on this list most likely to be unfamiliar. Farrell majored in flute at the University of Illinois, came up through Maynard Ferguson, Charles Mingus and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, and joined Elvin Jones’s band in 1968 — for a period in a three-horn front line alongside Dave Liebman.
He was a charter member of the first incarnation of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, playing on both Return to Forever and Light as a Feather, and the way he moves between tenor, soprano and flute is a large part of why those records sound the way they do. Where a fusion band might have reached for a synthesiser to change colour, Corea had a player who could simply pick up a different horn.
His own CTI albums started with Joe Farrell Quartet in 1970. He won DownBeat’s Most Promising New Star in 1968 and again in 1969, and died in California in 1986, aged 48.
Steve Grossman
Miles hired him to replace Wayne Shorter. He was still a teenager.
Grossman had begun on alto as a child and moved to tenor at around 17 under Coltrane’s influence, and in 1970 he found himself in the loudest and most confrontational band in jazz, playing soprano into a wall of amplification.
He is on Miles Davis at Fillmore, A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Live-Evil, all from that year. NPR’s obituary pointed to his soprano improvisation on “It’s About That Time” from the second night at the Fillmore East as the evidence.
He went to Elvin Jones’s band afterwards, which is where he made his name on tenor, notably on the 1973 Live at the Lighthouse with Liebman alongside him and only Jones and Gene Perla behind.
Later came Stone Alliance with Perla and Don Alias, more than two dozen albums as a leader, and a move back towards acoustic hard bop in the 1980s. Liebman’s verdict, quoted in that obituary: he was the best of all of us.
Dave Liebman
The detail that explains this whole article belongs to Liebman. On the day of his first gig with Miles — 12 January 1973, at the former Fillmore East in New York — his tenor, soprano and flute were all drilled to take microphone pickups so they could be amplified.
He walked onto the bandstand not knowing most of the band, and has said the energy, volume and density were overwhelming, and that saying he had no idea what he played that night would be an understatement.
That is the job fusion invented: not louder playing, but a physically modified instrument and a new relationship with the sound system. He stayed until 1974 and appears on On the Corner, Dark Magus and Get Up with It.
Afterwards he went his own way — Lookout Farm with Richie Beirach, a quintet with John Scofield, then Quest from 1981 — mostly on soprano, and mostly in territory closer to post-bop and free playing than to fusion. He is 79, an NEA Jazz Master, and has appeared on more than 500 records.
Sonny Fortune
Fortune turned Miles down once, preferring to stay with McCoy Tyner, which tells you something about how the electric bands were regarded by players who had options. He was with Tyner from 1971 to 1973 and is on Sahara, Song for My Lady and Song of the New World.
He accepted in September 1974, replacing Liebman, and stayed until the following spring. That short tenure produced the two extraordinary Osaka live albums, Agharta and Pangaea, where he is credited on soprano, alto and flute, and he also appears on Get Up with It.
Fortune joined Davis’s touring band in September 1974, replacing Liebman, and stayed until the following spring. Playing alto against Pete Cosey’s guitar is about as severe a test of the acoustic-horn-in-an-electric-band problem as the decade produced..
He is the alto voice here rather than another tenor, and he led his own records from 1974 — Long Before Our Mothers Cried on Strata-East, then Awakening and Waves of Dreams. He died in 2018, aged 79.
Michael Brecker
Brecker’s career traces the whole arc of the music. He moved to New York in 1969, aged 20, and joined the jazz-rock band Dreams; then the Brecker Brothers with his brother Randy through the 1970s; then Steps Ahead in the 1980s; then a major acoustic career under his own name. He appeared on more than 900 albums and won fifteen Grammys.
The tone is the thing — brighter and more penetrating than the average tenor player’s, built to sit on top of an electric band rather than inside an acoustic one, and technically complete in a way that produced imitators for thirty years. He was also, unusually, prepared to abandon the saxophone altogether: he took up the EWI during his Steps Ahead years, demonstrated it with the band in Tokyo in 1986 using looping and harmonisation to build ensemble textures out of one line, and paired it with an Oberheim Xpander on his 1987 solo debut.
He waited until that debut to record as a leader at all. He died in January 2007, aged 57.
David Sanborn
Sanborn described what he was doing on David Bowie’s Young Americans better than any critic has: there was no lead guitar, so he played the role of lead guitar, and he was all over that record.
That is the amplified alto voice in a sentence. He had polio at three, spent a year in an iron lung and took up the saxophone at eleven on a doctor’s advice to build his lungs back. By his teens he was playing with Albert King and Little Milton; he studied with J.R. Monterose at the University of Iowa, joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1967 and played Woodstock with them.
Then came the sessions — Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Springsteen, Steely Dan — and the Brecker Brothers, where he played alongside Michael’s tenor and Randy’s trumpet. Randy initially objected to the band being named after the two of them, on the grounds that Sanborn was too much of the sound to be left out of the title. His own Taking Off followed in 1975. He rejected the smooth jazz label throughout, and died in May 2024, aged 78.
Tom Scott
Scott is here to stop the article becoming a list of Miles alumni and New York players. He formed the L.A. Express in 1973 with Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, Max Bennett and John Guerin — a band of first-call session musicians playing fusion on their own terms.
What happened next is the West Coast story in miniature. Joni Mitchell hired them for Court and Spark, then took them on the road for her first tour with a band, documented on Miles of Aisles.
Scott arranged and played on both. Around the same period he was working with George Harrison on Dark Horse and Extra Texture, playing the “Jazzman” solo on Carole King’s 1974 hit, and appearing on McCartney’s “Listen to What the Man Said”.
The band made Tom Cat in 1975 and Scott left soon after. He also wrote the theme to Starsky & Hutch. It is a less romantic version of the fusion career than Liebman’s, and a more accurate picture of how most saxophonists actually made a living in the 1970s. He is 78.
Grover Washington Jr.
Washington got his break because somebody else didn’t turn up. In 1971 Hank Crawford missed a session for Creed Taylor’s Kudu label and Washington was called in to replace him. The result, Inner City Blues, sold; Taylor signed him as a leader; and Washington, by his own account, was still working at a Philadelphia record wholesaler at the time, unloading boxes of records with his own name on them.
He belongs on this list because he represents the branch of fusion that ran towards soul and R&B rather than towards virtuosity — Mister Magic and Feels So Good in 1975, then Winelight in 1980, which carried “Just the Two of Us” with Bill Withers singing. That single reached number two on the Hot 100 and won its writers a Grammy.
He played soprano, tenor and alto with a distinct voice on each, and stretched considerably further live than the records suggest. He died in December 1999, five days after his 56th birthday, after collapsing at CBS Studios having taped four songs for a morning television show.
Who else?
The four who came closest: Bob Berg, Gary Bartz, Ernie Watts and John Klemmer. Kenny Garrett is arguable, though he belongs more naturally to the generation after classic fusion.
Which of those would you swap in — and who have we missed entirely? The comments are open.
