At least at one point in time, a lot of people knew the role of Black Sabbath in music. They basically had the first major commercial release of a style of music that is, today, the root of all heavier rock music and even heavy metal from their famous albums from the late 60s and early 70’s.

I’m not one for most metal (except I like some artists, and dug “grunge” in the early 90’s) but I definitely 100% respect Black Sabbath and like quite a few songs off their 1970 quadruple-platinum album Paranoid. I also figure a lot of 20 year olds probably have no idea who “Ozzie” is other than that MTV show when they were 14 called The Osborns with some crazy dude who can’t talk. Ozzie was the lead singer of Black Sabbath before he got sacked from the band for heavy drug use, which is why he’s so physically messed up today.

In funky jazz music there were plenty of early pioneers just as there probably are with metal. But if there were one band I’d say is the “Black Sabbath” of jazz music, I’d say it’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Click play to start listening:


The first two are my favorites off Inner Mounting Flame.

The rest of the songs are the actual Black Sabbath songs of Paranoid, you might as well listen to them too as they rock also… This is the complete album, in order…

Mahavishnu was the first major group out of the “Miles Davis alumni” who went on to become the jazz & funk pioneers that are so heavily covered on this blog. The 1971 Inner Mounting Flame (the songs you’re listening to) was one of the first jazz funk albums that became “popular” without Miles’ name on it, and was more “listenable” than the avante-garde (downfall of) bebop & jazz music of the late 60’s, including Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the first major jazz-funk album.

I forget when or where it was, but at some point I heard a recording of Herbie Hancock saying ‘there is something about Mahavishnu” that led to his involvement that is the source of the existence of this blog, for example, and how a guy like me who wasn’t even born until 1978 is still fascinated with this stuff that happened 35 years ago…

Mahavishu was a little a-traditional in their lineup as well. They had an electric violin player of all instruments, a French guy named Jean-Luc Ponty, as a leader in their small group. Some people like this, some don’t. To some the violin is a smooth, romantic song, and to some it’s piecing. Mahavishnu also extensively used the Fender Rhodes as well.

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So I thought I’d give some ode to the “Black Sabbath” of Jazz-funk, and a little Black Sabbath too while we’re at it… Enjoy the tunes…

Good reads/relevant:
http://www.liraproductions.com/jazzrock/htdocs/histhome.htm
And all the wikipedia links in this post…