The history of this multiplex musical category tracks an advent in American music, as well as the entanglements of a global mass media with local musics. Fusion as an experiment in musical aesthetics and as a marketable category of music begins as an era in the history of jazz. In the late 1960s, jazz musicians, pioneered by Miles Davis (for example his recording “Bitches Brew,” 1970), combined “traditional” jazz musical forms with those from rock music to form jazz fusion. Rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and the R&B funk-rock of Sly and the Family Stone had particular influence on jazz music.

Throughout the 1970s, many jazz musicians continued to experiment with combinations of acoustic and electric instrumentations, or left behind the acoustic sound altogether for an amplified, electronic one. Rock rhythms and percussion styles replaced the bebop, swing styles common to jazz music and were used more frequently as compositional features. Rock musicians as well embraced fusion as a small number of rock bands featured jazz ensemble arrangements with solo improvisation.

Fusion of the 1960s and 1970s heralded not only a blurring of the boundaries between rock and jazz music, but also the emergence of a global sound. Jazz music had a history of incorporating other musical styles, mostly from Africa and from Latin American countries, and jazz fusion continued with this inclusive worldview. Fusion in the 1980s and 1990s, however, represented the blending together of sounds, instruments, rhythms and composition styles into a “polyphonic” genre of music referred to as world music, world beat, global fusion, world fusion, or just fusion music that loosely encompasses recordings of local musics from around the world to create the polyphonic forms produced for consumption on a world market. The “fusion” of local traditional musics with “Western” music is said to celebrate the recognition of other musical forms and instrumentations, while at the same time symbolizing musical expression in a global world. Paul Simon’s Grammy-winning “Graceland” (1986) recording, a blend of American pop music with the music of black South African musicians, is held up as an exemplar of contemporary fusion (although not without controversy). In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century fusion represents what sometimes appears to be a hodgepodge of musical productions that can include the coming together of so-called “traditional” musics from Africa, Asia, South America, and so forth with what has been referred to as a “universal pop aesthetic,” that is “Western” (Taylor, 1997). Fusion can also include “new and old world music,” “ancient future world fusion” and “folk fusion music” that can bring together the music of the Andes with Appalachian music, for example.

While fusion grew from experimentation in musical aesthetics, it also was the product of changing musical tastes and a record business increasingly oriented towards a world market. Fusion’s “hybridity” marks a fluidity of economic and aesthetic relationships between the music traditions of local worlds and the modern, often Western, tastes of a global culture. Although some would argue that hybridity has always been a feature of music and fusion should only be applied to the American jazz and rock fusion music.