I don’t have too much to say about the genre of new Jazz fusion other than to point out certain tracks by Jean-Luc Ponty that absolutely stand out. Check out if you can, “No More Doubts” from his otherwise unremarkable 1987 album The Gift of Time. Jean-Luc Ponty helped to popularize the electric violin playing with frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But it is his experiments with the synclavier that you can hear some true brilliance shining beyond his potent violin capabilities. Long I searched for another track by him sounding anything close to this with dismay… it was even my impetus for beginning to collect vinyl in college (a cheap way of sampling music on a budget before file sharing on the Internets); Ponty records usually went for 99 cents in the throwaway bins. I even emailed Ponty to ask him for help. (He suggested my buying his latest album). If only he had suggested a few tracks from his early works.These are haunting abstract tunes that pierce something deeper. If you appreciate “No More Doubts” let me recommend “Elephants in Love” on his 1985 album Fables. (The rest of the album aint too shabby, neither.) Then, if you’re still hungry for frenetic electro-jazz try “Cosmic Messenger,” “Don’t Let the World Pass You By” and “Egocentric Molecules” from the album Cosmic Messenger (1978). Audio cocaine, I tells ya. Go listen!

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Jean-Luc Ponty” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.