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. Wrong!