Section

When the singer/songwriter movement of the early 1970s fully blossomed with the likes of Carole King, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Jackson Browne and friends, four studio musicians became intrinsically involved with all of them: Danny Kortchmar, Craig Doerge, Leland Sklar, and Russ Kunkel. These seasoned studio musicians played a major role in defining the sound of all of these songwriters.

Often referred to as the mellow mafia in their home base of Los Angeles, their ubiquity on the records of artists signed to Asylum Records alone had them appearing on hundreds, if not thousands of recordings. While all this mellow music activity was occurring and achieving monumental commercial success and popularity, an altogether different and far more musically challenging project developed between the four sidemen, and that was the Section.

As the Section, they developed their own brand of fusion, mixing all their collective talent into a highly adventurous brew. These musicians were capable of mind-blowing virtuosity, but far more importantly, they had a passionate intensity when playing together that made the music far more compelling than most jazz-rock fusion bands or progressive rock contemporaries. Technically brilliant, but with a sense of humor to balance things better than most, they released three albums of instrumental studio recordings, all of them highly intriguing, but few reaching record buyers.

Thus the band remained an insider secret that few ever had the opportunity to hear. Arguably the most cohesive and consistently compelling recordings they ever created as the Section were for their second album, Forward Motion, released in 1973. Here was an album that compared favorably to the best fusion music of the time, from Mahavishnu Orchestra to Duane Allman-era Allman Brothers to King Crimson. Fans of those groups would have found much to enjoy on that album, from the unusual and complex time signatures to the blazing guitar and wildly adventurous keyboard and synthesizer work.