Mouzon Virtue

Megadrummer and percussionist Alphonse Mouzon recorded Virtue, his lone date for Germany's MPS, in 1976, and the label issued it in 1977. As far as fusion records go, these were not particularly good years, but Virtue is an example of the very best of what electric jazz had to offer at the time. Mouzon was half of a pair of drummers who defined the fusion era – the other was Billy Cobham.

Megadrummer and percussionist Alphonse Mouzon recorded Virtue, his lone date for Germany's MPS, in 1976, and the label issued it in 1977. As far as fusion records go, these were not particularly good years, but Virtue is an example of the very best of what electric jazz had to offer at the time. Mouzon was half of a pair of drummers who defined the fusion era the other was Billy Cobham. Beginning with his tenure in the Eleventh House with guitarist Larry Coryell, and carrying it over into his work with Weather Report and McCoy Tyner, Jaco Pastorius, and Albert Mangelsdorff, to name a few, Mouzon is, in his way, one of those defining drummers; a musician who carried his own musical vision into both electric and acoustic jazz and was too mercurial to be pinned down by either, though he is perhaps too often panned in by critics as strictly a fusion drummer.