The Best Jazz Albums of the '70s

Teo Macero built the double LP at the splice block, looping and stitching three days of August 1969 sessions cut just after Woodstock closed. Miles Runs the Voodoo Down crawls on two basses and Bennie Maupin's bass clarinet while the trumpet jabs over the top. The rock crowd bought it and Columbia had a gold jazz record. Spotify's plain edition appends the outtake Feio after the six album sides.

Birdland put a fusion band on AM radio: Zawinul's melody named for the 52nd Street club, with Jaco Pastorius playing the opening line in false harmonics on fretless bass. Zawinul produced, Jaco took a co-producer credit, and the record became Weather Report's best seller. Maynard Ferguson and the Manhattan Transfer both covered the tune within two years — jazz musicians writing standards again.

The follow-up problem after Head Hunters — which sits on the Funk '70s list, that's the border — got solved by swapping one drummer: Mike Clark in for Harvey Mason, the rest of the Headhunters band intact on Columbia. Actual Proof is the drummer's audition tape forever after, snare figures splintering across the bar while Paul Jackson's bass refuses to land where funk says it should.

Five players, no vocals, and a Columbia debut that made virtuosity the point: John McLaughlin, Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman and Rick Laird, most of them strangers weeks before recording. Meeting of the Spirits opens the record on an arpeggiated riff at hymn tempo that keeps threatening to bolt. Spotify credits the album 'with John McLaughlin' and appends a live take of The Noonward Race.

Cecil McBee's bass figure holds the title track Journey In Satchidananda in place for six minutes while Alice Coltrane's harp spills over it and Pharoah Sanders keeps his soprano just this side of the boil. An Impulse! record named for her guru, Swami Satchidananda. The closer, Isis And Osiris, was cut live at the Village Gate — the one non-studio track on the original LP.

Panned flat in 1972 — the jazz press called it a sellout, the sleeve was a Corky McCoy cartoon, and Columbia printed no personnel — and now half of electronic music claims it as an ancestor. Black Satin buries sleigh bells and handclaps inside a one-chord groove that Teo Macero looped like a beat producer twenty years early. Spotify's official copy tags the closing Helen Butte medley an Unedited Master.

Recorded in two February 1972 days for Manfred Eicher's ECM, with Flora Purim's voice, Airto Moreira's percussion, Joe Farrell's flute and soprano, and Stanley Clarke's bass around Corea's Fender Rhodes. Crystal Silence stretches nine minutes of soprano saxophone over slow-moving Rhodes chords, the gentlest thing any fusion founder put to tape. This is the Brazilian-tinged band, two albums before the electric-guitar era.

Creed Taylor's CTI operation gave Freddie Hubbard the varnished sound and the band — Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Lenny White — at Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio in January 1970. Red Clay's theme rides a Rhodes vamp halfway between hard bop and boogaloo, the exact sound of jazz easing into the new decade. The streaming edition adds Cold Turkey and an alternate take of the title track.

Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears heard a Florida bar-band bassist and signed on to produce his 1976 Epic debut. Portrait of Tracy is two and a half minutes of solo fretless bass in chiming false harmonics that players are still transcribing, and Come On, Come Over drags Sam & Dave back to the mic. Spotify's copy is the 2000 press with two bonus takes appended.

Jarrett's European quartet — Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson, Jon Christensen — cut this for ECM in Oslo in April 1974, and The Windup skips out on a hopscotch theme happier than anything in his American band's book. Steely Dan later conceded a co-writing credit on Gaucho for shadowing 'Long As You Know You're Living Yours. The studio-only scope keeps The Köln Concert off this list; this is the Jarrett record that belongs on it.

By 1976 Return To Forever meant Corea, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and a very young Al Di Meola, and this Columbia debut became the band's best seller, certified gold. Medieval Overture opens on synth fanfares and unison runs at a tempo that dares the rhythm section to blink. Spotify tags every track Instrumental, an odd rendering on an album that never had a voice on it.

Ken Scott engineered the Mahavishnu drummer's Atlantic solo debut at Electric Lady in May 1973, pairing Jan Hammer's Moog with Tommy Bolin's guitar — a rock player, hired on purpose. Stratus runs nine minutes on a drum-and-bass groove so durable Massive Attack built Safe From Harm on it eighteen years later. Of all the fusion records here, this is the one funk DJs actually spin.

Milton Nascimento wrote five of the nine tracks and sings most of them in that keening falsetto, with Herbie Hancock at the piano and Shorter answering on soprano. Ponta de Areia opens the record wordless, floating over Rhodes chords — a Minas Gerais melody meeting Columbia-budget fusion. Border case, flagged: as much Brazilian MPB as jazz, and better for the mix.

Lonnie Liston Smith found a Fender Rhodes standing in the studio, improvised the shimmer that opens Astral Traveling, and walked out with the sound that made his own career — his first time on the instrument, by his telling. Cecil McBee gets an unaccompanied bass feature, Love, mid-album on this Impulse! date. Karma (1969) sits on the '60s list by the release-year cut; Thembi trades sermons for songs.

Chanted like a broadcast from somewhere better, the 21-minute title track Space Is The Place stacks June Tyson and the Arkestra's voices over squalling organ until the slogan turns hypnotic. Cut in Chicago in 1972 and released on Blue Thumb in 1973 — not the same-named film soundtrack, which is a different record. Spotify's copy is the Impulse!-catalogue reissue and its page is dated 1998.

The Mizell brothers wrote, arranged and produced this Blue Note set through their Sky High shop, and Wind Parade is their thesis: strings, stacked falsetto harmonies and a trumpet gliding over a disco-adjacent groove that crate-diggers have mined ever since. Border case, stated plainly — this is where the fusion list shakes hands with funk and the dance floor, one step past even Thrust.