Jon Irabagon

The Pitts Minnemann Project is an instrumental progressive-rock/jazz-fusion collaboration between keyboardist Jimmy Pitts (Scholomance) and drummer Marco Minnemann, joined by rotating guest virtuosi on guitar, bass, saxophone, and violin. They released two albums, '2 L 8 2 B Normal' (2014) and 'The Psychic Planetarium' (2016), both blending heavy fusion with progressive-metal complexity.

Volto! is an American jazz-fusion jam band based in Los Angeles, best known as the side project of Tool drummer Danny Carey. Formed in the early 2000s from improvised sessions with guitarist John Ziegler and bassist Lance Morrison at a San Fernando Valley jazz club, the group spent nearly a decade as a live-only act before releasing its debut album Incitare (2013) on Fantasy Records. Their heady, genre-spinning instrumental sound bridges King Crimson, Liquid Tension Experiment, and 1970s fusion, foregrounding the improvisation that Carey has cited as his main motivation for the project.

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Cartel Carnage is a French quintet of jazz-scene musicians (guitar, bass, trumpet, tenor sax, drums) fusing free jazz, heavy metal, pop and progressive rock into what reviewers called a 'musical UFO.' Their sound and stated influences — Naked City, Fantomas, Mr. Bungle, Zorn, Ornette Coleman, alongside Meshuggah and Slayer — place them squarely in genre-collision RIO/avant-prog territory, though no sourced personnel or label ties connect them to the existing atlas. Their sole full-length, Incorporated, was released in 2012 on Great Winds/Musea Records.

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Los Angeles metal-jazz quartet fronted by trumpeter Dan Rosenboom and guitarist Jake Vossler, pairing lyrical, Miles-Davis-lineage trumpet against Vossler's distorted, noise-inflected guitar over double bass and drums. Their 2017 debut Reclamation (Tzadik) was tracked in 72 hours as a politically charged 'jazz protest record,' moving between free improvisation, heavy thrash riffing, and balladic passages.

Valtozash is a fifteen-to-seventeen-piece 'jazz-thrash-metal' big band out of Brisbane, Australia, led by composer and electric vibraphonist Andre Bonetti. A full horn section collides free-jazz harmony and improvisation with thrash-metal aggression, drawing press comparisons to a conducted orchestra 'brutally assaulting' jazz standards. Albums like Wizard-Bird (2017) and Boiling Solitude (2021) showcase the ensemble's scale, arranging dense big-band charts against metal riffing.

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Coinmonster is a Pennsylvania/Ohio-border progressive-metal outfit (New Castle, PA, formed 1990) built around guitarist-vocalist Jon Reider's fusion chops — self-described 'avant-garde jazzcore' that threads Holdsworth/Herring-style jazz-rock guitar through off-kilter time signatures, with detours into banjo-and-brushes Americana on tracks like 'Wake Up Tilton.' Largely a private-press/regional act (The Schematic, 2000; Tilton Johnson, 2002) rather than a scene band, it's an outlier RYM-tagged avant-garde-metal entry with no documented ties to the wider atlas.

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Tear Light From Matter is a Massachusetts-based instrumental act pairing saxophone with a standard metal rhythm section, self-tagged on Bandcamp as experimental/jazz metal/fusion/prog metal. Their debut, "In Statu Nascendi" (released 25 January 2019, recorded and mixed by Jerry MacDonald at Odd Fellows Recording), sits alongside a further release, "Fœtal Præyers", in a small but pointed discography. The saxophone-led interplay places them in the lineage of jazz-inflected heavy bands rather than straightforward metal songwriting.

Red Side Visible is a Cleveland/Akron, Ohio project built around multi-instrumentalist Tim Mirth, fusing odd-metered metal riffing with genuine free-jazz improvisation and alto saxophone. Press copy invokes Meshuggah, Mr. Bungle and Zappa as touchstones; the 2021 album 'A Break from Normality' collects material written and re-recorded across a decade since the project's 2010 debut 'Enter Entropy'.

Brooklyn/NYC instrumental trio blending prog, jazz, and metal into knotty, polymetric compositions; began as an acoustic jazz unit before electrifying into an aggressive math-rock/tech-metal power trio. Drummer Jeff Eber doubles in Dysrhythmia, and the band's Cuneiform-era records were engineered by Dysrhythmia's Colin Marston, tying them into the Brooklyn tech-metal underground.

Panzerballett is a Munich jazz-metal quintet founded in 2004 and led by guitarist-composer Jan Zehrfeld, fusing delicate interlocking funk grooves with brutally hard, polyrhythmic Meshuggah-informed riffs and genuine jazz improvisation. Alongside Zehrfeld's originals they stage virtuosic reinterpretations spanning Deep Purple, Meshuggah and Weather Report, and are known for comedic, theatrical live shows. Signed to ACT Records, their guest-heavy albums (e.g. Planet Z, Übercode Œuvre) recruit elite fusion drummers.