One night in the fall of 1969, at a Manhattan club called Ungano’s, Herbie Hancock willingly put his hearing at risk. He was there to catch Lifetime, a new trio led by Tony Williams, his former bandmate in Miles Davis’ revolutionary 1960s quintet. He didn’t know what to call the music being played that night by Williams, organist Larry Young, and guitarist John McLaughlin. But he sensed that the experience was worth the aural toll.
“It was loud,” Hancock later recalled of the gig. “It was the loudest stuff I ever heard in my life. It was louder than rock’n’roll. I said to myself, ‘This is something new.’ … It was exciting and very arresting. It snatched you. It yanked you out of your seat. A lot of the people couldn’t take the volume. They got up and left. I also knew that if I stayed, I would pay the price in later years with my hearing. I consciously made the bad decision to listen anyway.”
When Miles heard the trio amped-up and jamming at a Harlem club, he promptly recruited McLaughlin for the session that would produce the 1969 ambient-jazz landmark In a Silent Way. That album and its 1970 follow-up, Bitches Brew, would come to be known as foundational texts of jazz-rock fusion. But as startling as those Miles dispatches were, and as entrancing as each remains more than a half-century on, neither fully harnessed the volume and volatility of contemporary rock. The true big bang of fusion arrived right on the heels of In a Silent Way, and well before Bitches Brew: Emergency!, the Tony Williams Lifetime’s aptly named 1969 debut.
Crank up the opening title track, jeopardizing your ears as Hancock did, and you’ll hear, within the first minute, jazz-rock’s fiery inception. Williams plays a taut snare-roll crescendo and the band enters with a blaring four-chord vamp, McLaughlin’s guitar bathed in fuzz and wah and Young’s Hammond B-3 framed by ominous distortion. Williams rampages through the riff—hammering the bass-drum pedal, syncopating furiously on the snare, rolling on the toms, exploding across the cymbals—while still conveying seismic waves of groove. The collective sound suggests Jimi Hendrix, Keith Emerson, and Clyde Stubblefield jamming on the rim of an active volcano. Just when it seems like Williams’ kit might splinter, the band downshifts gracefully into simmering swing, with the drummer playing springy jazz time on the ride, McLaughlin picking out nimble lines and Young adding chugging chords.
As with every transition in the piece, Williams’ otherworldly dynamic control makes this abrupt shift seem as though it’s cushioned by velvet. Later, the band builds to a thrash-funk theme reprise, driven by Young’s muscular bassline, during which you can hear one of the musicians (McLaughlin, perhaps?) whooping at the outrageousness of it all.