But I think it's that wide-ranging freedom of being able to use different elements from all kinds of different walks of the musical universe that make "fusion" "fusion". That's why it's such an appropriate yet meaningless word. It's right up there with "eclectic", you know. And that's my zone, in the cracks. 

Coming from West Los Angeles, just kind of a middle-class neighborhood. My parents were both schoolteachers in the Los Angeles City School System. And I'm listening to white people play the blues, and then listening to, maybe, rhythm and blues, and then listening to psychedelia, and listening to prog rock, or whatever. 

I don't think I had any idea what direction to turn as any kind of tradition. There was no guidance by a tradition or the idea of lineage. In fact, it was kind of a challenging idea if I thought about it too much. It was a little troubling. So I think that until I heard so-called progressive rock and jazz, specifically hearing "Africa" by John Coltrane, but also hearing Bitches Brew, early Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, music like that, Tony Williams Lifetime. 

That was when I started to, maybe, formulate an aesthetic that became kind of the aesthetic that I still manifest. Which is to say that "jazz rock", so-called, or maybe chamber music, the music of Ralph Towner or some of the ECM artists, whether American or European, began to assist in helping me coalesce musical ideas that I thought had validity, rather than just playing cover songs or maybe glomming onto a tradition like bebop or the blues or Bluegrass or something like that where you'd basically have kind of a rule book. And you have some very set challenges as an instrumentalist to tackle in order to even begin to use that vernacular with any kind of lucidity.

So this new form of jazz rock, fusion, prog rock, et cetera, which is in a way kind of a grab bag, but also has improvisation involved, and also compositionally is very wide-ranging, and sometimes very impressionistic or coloristic. That, I think, is what I still do. 

And I don't know if that's part of a lineage, but I guess the fact that I'm still alive doing it, and now have met with and even played with a lot of the people that I was listening to when I was a teenager, means I'm part of some kind of lineage. And I think it's in spite of all my work with rock in rock and roll. After the 80s I got back into playing rock and roll. I played with Mike Watt and the Geraldine Fibbers and now, of course, 14 years with Wilco. I still think basically I'm a jazz fusion guy.