Blood, Sweat and Tears

It's great when a band has a vision from the very beginning, and Blood, Sweat And Tears set out a stall for themselves right from the start and became fusion legends as a result. The band was formed in 1967 by organist and singer Al Kooper, who was inspired by bands like The Buckinghams and The Maynard Ferguson Orchestra to create music that combined the instrumental chops of jazz with the soul and hooks of modern day pop music. Taking the name of a 1963 Johnny Cash album, Kooper formed the band out of several respected session musicians along with members of Buffalo Springfield and Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention, and signed to Columbia Records a few months later. However, just as the album started steadily selling, internal tensions saw Kooper forced out of the group only a year after it was formed after other members of the band were critical of his singing skills.

Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby, two members of the original line-up, took over as band leaders and started searching for a new lead vocalist. After passing up Steven Stills, Alex Chilton and Laura Nyro, they found a Canadian folk-singer named David Clayton-Thomas, who joined the band just in time to hit the big time after their second, self-titled studio album was released in late 1968. The record was a smash hit, with the album itself getting certified four times Platinum, its singles colonising the top of the charts for weeks, and finally beating out The Beatles' “Abbey Road” for the Grammy Award for Album Of The Year. The album's two follow up records also sold strongly as well, both getting certified Gold on their releases in 1970 and 1971. However, the tensions that threatened to torpedo the band a couple of years earlier reared up again, and this time, they kneecapped the bands career.

The band had split into two factions, one wanting play jazz-fusion, while the other wanted to play straighter, rock influenced music, and by 1972, the band were almost completely changed over, fronted by Jerry Fisher, their third singer in five years. While the band never replicated the commercial success they had in the late 60's, they've remained cult heroes to jazz fans all over the globe all the same. They were even the first band to take on a talented young bass player by the name of Jaco Pastorius in 1975, before he became the standard bearer of electric bass in jazz music as a member of Weather Report. To this day, they remain an astonishing live act, with a revolving door policy on the greatest jazz players of today coming in and out to play shows with them nearly half a century after the band first came together.