Fusion Best 100: Full Moon & Tony Williams
A genuine "big in Japan" record and a Miles Davis acolyte going solo.
My kid has a fever, and the only prescription is… more jazz fusion! Actually, it’s plenty of hydration and lots of naps, but I’ll be listening to Chick Corea in between bottles and lullabies.
Welcome back to Attenuator, which looks a bit different due to my 2025 mission to listen to and write about every single record on the Fusion Best 100 list — a ranking of the 100 best Western jazz fusion albums released between 1969 and 1989, as chosen by the writers of Japanese magazine Record Collector. Last week’s issue contains a more detailed overview of this year-long project that I won’t bother rehashing here.
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Bob’s Big Boy aficionado and noted quinoa cooker David Lynch — I have no idea whether or not he enjoyed jazz fusion, but the Thought Gang album he recorded with frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti was kind of jazzy. Plus, his oft-repeated weather report refrain of “golden sunshine and blue skies all the way” kind of sounds like the title of a fusion track. Rest easy, Mr. Lynch, here's hoping that there's plenty of coffee and chocolate milkshakes at the cafeteria in the great beyond.
98. Full Moon - Full Moon (1972)
Back when you didn’t have to worry about “search engine optimization,” you could basically name your band on a whim (so long as a group with some level of notoriety hadn’t already claimed the name). That laissez-faire attitude toward monikers is part of what makes it so difficult to look up the debut, self-titled record from the first band formed by future yacht rockers Buzz Feiten and Neil Larsen — it’s listed on Discogs, but you’ll have to sift through the other ~26 acts who arrived at their handle via lunar inspiration (it doesn’t help that Full Moon’s second album released a decade later was also a self-titled affair).
Before Full Moon, Larsen served in Vietnam (working as a band director) before ending up in New York writing TV jingles, while Feiten was a music school dropout who landed a gig as a guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, performing at Woodstock with the group. At some point, the pair crossed paths and formed Full Moon, roping in some former Paul Butterfield sidemen (Phillip Wilson on drums, Gene Dinwiddie on sax, Freddie Beckmeier on bass) to fill out the band.
The sizable Butterfield contingent explains why Full Moon is more R&B than fusion — Feiten’s contributions to the record (nearly all of which feature vocals from Wilson) are nicely arranged, pretty straight-ahead R&B ballads that feel informed by his previous gig. The two tracks credited to Larsen (“Malibu” and “Midnight Pass”) are where the record earns its fusion stripes, each packed with lots of great keyboard parts — a taste of things to come on his later solo albums.
Full Moon has never been reissued in the US since its original LP pressing, but it’s been re-released in Japan several times over on both CD and LP — most recently a vinyl repress issued by Tower Records’ in-house label. I’m not exactly sure why this record has such a vaunted status in Japan, but my best guess is that Larsen’s regular tours through the country (in support of his own releases, as well as with acts like Al Jarreau and Joe Sample) throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s somehow gave his earliest music a foothold there. Larsen and Feiten seem to have had a falling out at some point in the early aughts, but their final recorded work together was exclusively released in Japan in the early ‘90s: a series of seven CDs featuring instrumental covers of songs by acts like the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Whitney Houston, issued under the name “Jazz Express.”
97. The New Tony Williams Lifetime - Believe It (1975)
A rhythmic prodigy, Tony Williams was just 13 years old when he began playing drums professionally. By 17, he’d fallen in with Miles Davis (a name that looms large in the Fusion Best 100 list), becoming a part of the trumpeter’s “Second Great Quintet" alongside Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Ron Carter. Between 1964 and 1969, Williams witnessed Davis’ gradual embrace of jazz fusion firsthand, performing on seven of his studio albums, culminating with Davis’ head-first dive into electrified, quasi-ambient fusion, In A Silent Way. A few months later, Williams departed Davis’ ensemble to form his own trio (dubbed The Tony Williams Lifetime) and cut the raw, jazz-meets-psych rock LP, Emergency!
After being dropped by his record label in 1974, Williams recruited some new players, renamed his quartet New Main Street Singers-style, and embraced the funkier, more frenetic, prog-rock adjacent sound of mid-’70s jazz fusion. Motown session bassist Tony Newton and keyboardist Alan Pasqua hold their own in this iteration of Lifetime, but British guitarist Allan Holdsworth is the breakout star of Believe It, putting his whammy bar to use on pitch-bending leads (“Fred”) and channeling saxophone intonation with guitar strings (“Wildlife”). Holdsworth’s dense solos mesh nicely with Williams’ complex, precise rhythms — listen closely to a track like “Proto-Cosmos,” and it becomes clear that Williams isn’t just keeping time; his rolls and fills are in constant conversation with Holdsworth’s twisting licks.
Williams is one of the jazz drummers, but I initially thought the presence of Believe It on the Fusion Best 100 list was due to his association with Miles Davis (a guy with enough cultural cachet to star in a Japanese liquor ad in the ‘80s). A little digging revealed that Williams’ connection to Japan runs deep — he played on records by Japanese fusion greats Sadao Watanabe and Terumasa Hino and toured Japan annually with his quintet during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, cutting a live album in Tokyo. A decade after Williams’ untimely death from a heart attack in 1997, drummer Cindy Blackman assembled a Lifetime Tribute Band that toured Japan and broadcasted a show from the Blue Note in Tokyo. Considering this level of reverence, I’m a little surprised that Believe It didn’t earn a higher spot on the list, though this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Lifetime (or Williams, for that matter).
That’s enough jazz for one newsletter — please share if you know of anyone in short supply. Next week, I’m tackling Chick Corea’s first synth-fueled record and a late-’70s fusion LP that veers sharply into smooth jazz territory.