What's so funny 'bout peace, love and fusion jazz? The style grew to towering proportions under the tough- love horticulture of Miles Davis, flowered early into a generation of legendary bands, hit a tough winter in the mid- 1970s, and since then, the fruit has been dying on the tree, rotting like crab apples in the shadow of the boughs. I understand. Jazz purists never liked it, and by the time you might be able to convince a jazz purist to dig fusion, he'd already amassed enough evidence against it to put the shit away forever. How can you get someone to give Weather Report's mind- altering I Sing the Body Electric a fair shake when all he has to do is point to Spyro Gyra's catalog to shut you down. By the time you can respond you're waist- deep in the syrupy flow of '80s smooth jazz and you begin secretly to resent fusion for the predicament of contemporary jazz.

But never forget that fusion had a few stunning years. From 1969, the year of Bitches' Brew, to Miles' retirement to six ruinous years of self- abuse in 1976, fusion jazz trafficed in masterpieces. Sure nobody likes Return to Forever, but the first two Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, Miles' Live/Evil and Black Beauty: Live at the Fillmore East, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, and pretty much anything by Dave Holland all apologize for a century of Fattburger records.

While most of the serious Tonic scenesters have dedicated their careers to undoing the legacy of fusion in favor of the avant- garde ancien regime, there are a few groups out there who've learned to see with clear eyes backward to the precarious day of the gods. The Grassy Knoll must be praised above all for understanding fusion. Fusion jazz is not a sound but an ideology; in its day, it was a matter of opening jazz up to the innovations in music that were taking place in the late '60s, opening jazz up to rock and funk, to African and Eastern music, to New York minimalism and continental electronic composition, and certainly to the radical studio techniques pioneered by the Beatles and their followers.

The Grassy Knoll aren't playing what fusion jazz sounded like in the early '70s but what it should sound like now: bristling with broken hip-hop breaks, Money Mark- like Hammond B-3 fills, dark ambient, post-rock (particularly Cul du Sac), heavy noise, and lo-fi distortion crackles. It's all there, along with some singing trumpet lines, bass clarinet, sinister electric violin, sludgy deep basslines, and some jagged electric guitar.

"A Beaten Dog Beneath the Hail" opens with Bonzo big beats. Buzzing guitars snake about the regimented rhythm, and several Miles- ish trumpet lines skim the surfaces like a waterbug. Ellery Eskelin's admirable tenor sax work comes to the fore in "Down in the Happy Zone," set before an alternating fusillade of distorted noise, and surreally screaming strings (violin and cello). Think Wayne Shorter soloing over a Carbon record cut with shards of Henryk Gorecki. "Every Third Thought" stays with the strings and softens the blow of the album's first two tracks. "Blue Wires" has an asskicking blaxploitation sound: swinging muted trumpet over superfunky wah- wah guitar. And all this in the first sixteen minutes.

The album seems to paradoxically turn a new corner with every track, but somehow never loses its overall continuity. It's as if the melee of one track somehow unearths the seeds of the next and plants them in a different sound far away. The final track, "Thunder Ain't Rain," lays a squirmy repetitive crawl under the deepest bass this side of a Praxis record, and dices the whole affair up with acid- fried electric violin that makes Jean-Luc Ponty sound like the stuff of Bar Mitzvah bands.

This is fusion, children. Not the smooth supermarket sounds of delicate electric guitar and unobtrusive sax. This is the dangerous fusion, an exercise in the grotesque: sonic miscegenation and unchecked generation of forms. It's almost occult in execution. Ouroboros baby: the snake that devours its own tail forever.

-Brent S. Sirota