Jazz Blues Fusion by John Mayall (Vinyl record album review)

Record basics

• Album name: Jazz Blues Fusion (Performed and Recorded Live in Boston and New York)
• Artist name: John Mayall
• Year: 1972
• Number of discs: one
• Label: Polydor
• Collection: Essex
• Distinguishing characteristics: price label on the back ($7.99)
• Buy it on Amazon: $319.00

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but John Mayall has come up a few times:

• An Anthology of British Blues (1968): 5/5
• An Anthology of British Blues, Volume 2 (1968): 5/5
• The Turning Point (1969): 5/5
• The Last Time (1989): 4/5

What I expected

I like the blues, and I like some forms of jazz, but I don’t generally have a positive view of jazz fusion.

What it was actually like

This was actually great, and I don’t think I would have considered it “jazz fusion” at all. Maybe it could be “blues fusion,” if that were a thing.

Country Road was a slow and very traditional sounding blues song, so traditional that it was hard to believe Mayall wrote it, with solid harmonica, but also a prominent electric guitar counter-melody that I loved, and I also loved that the audience was delighted by it.

Mess Around was another blues song that was also electric and with harmonica but was more upbeat, and I thought the inclusion of jazzy horns did add to it.

Good Time Boogie was much faster – like a boogie – and was actually pretty cool, with a blues style electric guitar and then also a jazz style bass guitar. I liked listening to it for a while, but it went on way too long and I didn’t care much for the saxophone solo.

Change Your Ways was much more of a jazz song, with elements that would clearly be identified as funk several years later, and even had a series of solos – first saxophone and then electric guitar, both outstanding.

Dry Throat took a different approach, going back to a slower blues song like at the beginning of the record, and then continuing with some excessively jazzy saxophone that I didn’t enjoy much.

Exercise in C Major for Harmonica had an extended bass guitar solo that wasn’t really interesting to me, and then turned into more of a jazz song like Good Time Boogie.

Got to Be This Way wasn’t dramatically different from all the other songs, but I thought it was the best because it brought together everything from the others, and with a lot of blues elements as well as a lot of jazz elements, it really sounded like a new and different style that I couldn’t quite place.

Besides that, the record’s production made a pretty hard split between front right and front left, so the stereo sounded unusually on my speakers.

Grade

5/5: love it