As mentioned in earlier posts, I primarily care about music over lyrics. Even subpar writing can become magical lyrics when embedded in incredible music. I won’t deny that really bad lyrics sometimes stand out and initially detract from a song, such as Greg Lake’s “day a little sadder, a little madder, someone get me a ladder” on ELP’s “Still… You Turn Me On,” but such lyrics are soon consigned to the background like undecipherable (pick a foreign language of your choice) text in an opera, as the music is the main feature.
Of course, I admire great lyric writing as we see with Peter Hammill at his best, or lyrics that are just plain bold and powerful, as with Pete Sinfield’s best lyrics. But for me it’s almost always the music I pay attention to.
This Joni Mitchell album, released on November 21, 1976, is one of those rare albums with lyrics at the level of high-caliber poetry and music that is equally interesting and engaging.
Hejira is a concept album. Not a rock opera or a single narrative, but more of a twentieth-century folk-jazz song cycle thematically related to the album’s title, which is based on the Arabic word “hijra,” which refers to Mohammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, and is used more generically to mean any flight or escape from danger or a difficult situation.
Mitchell wrote these songs while touring, and only afterwards assembled them into a whole; however, musically and emotionally, there is a seamless continuity as Joni explores this theme of running away with honor. Compared to the denser textures of her previous album, Summer Lawns, this is a sparser, more intimate sound, with a strong jazz foundation provided by fretless bassist Jaco Pastorius and other musicians like Larry Carlton on guitar and John Guerin on percussion. Listen to this with the lyrics, but engage with the music and the overall fine production values — the stereo mix, though far from mirroring a live environment, is handled tastefully and respectfully. This is not an album to put on as background music; it is high art requiring undivided attention, and with that full, complete attention, one gets the full intended experience.
Jean-Luc Ponty: Imaginary Voyage
Old Age! I no longer remember if I bought Jean-Luc Ponty’s Imaginary Voyage album (released in early November 1976) after or before I purchased tickets to his concert at Arlington Theater on December 1, 1976. I do remember my good friend, known to most of you readers as Leo the Deacon, in his puke yellow (his words, not mine) Ford mini-pickup, taking us to the concert, paying for part of the gas, and then going to what I think was a Sambo’s restaurant (though it could have been a Denny’s, which is a much more appropriate name than Sambo’s, but I cannot change the past — I can only muddle up my memories of it), with Jean-Luc Ponty coming in with what I believe to be a couple of bandmates — maybe guitarist Daryl Stuermer and keyboardist Allan Zavod, maybe electric bassist Tom Fowler, and drummer Steve Smith, maybe more than two bandmates, maybe other people, unfortunately, though a fan of Daryl Stuermer, also, I only would have recognized Ponty — at any rate, Tom Waits had been the opening act, and Ponty the main bill, and I am pretty sure we got to Sambo’s (or wherever) before Ponty. (Don’t you hate hearing old people ramble about the past?)
When we finished our food and were leaving, I stopped by Ponty’s table, and fawningly said, “You are the best violinist of all those in rock.” He replied, with a tone of modesty and not one of combativeness or defensiveness, “Who are the others?” and though I knew a few, like David Cross from King Crimson, I was so surprised by his rejoinder that none came to mind at that moment, and I left his table speechless, with a slightly reddened face.
The concert performance was great, though, and he opened up with the first track from Imaginary Voyage, the accessible, upbeat “New Country,” and, as far as I remember, played the next track from the album, “The Gardens of Babylon,” which uses some of the same melodic and harmonic material of “New Country.” He also played material from the second side of the album, the suite “Imaginary Voyage,” though I don’t remember if it was played in its entirety. This suite is the best part of the album, mostly jazz-progressive-rock fusion, and though I am fine with side one, it’s side two that elevates this album into a keeper and one that was a true treat to listen to once again after about forty-eight years of neglect.
There are so very few jazz greats that I have seen in person. Not quite sure why. As a teenager, I was a big fan of Duke Ellington, becoming acquainted with him by checking out LPs from the city library on the other side of town. I loved his recordings from the 1940s, from his commercial hits like “A Slip of the Lip” to his more elaborate pieces like the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite. I also purchased a budget 3 LP Stan Kenton set, which was in my listening rotation along with classical and rock LPs. However, I had no idea what bebop, hard bop, or much about any style of jazz beyond the forties. That changed with college, and I began to go to a few jazz concerts, but considering the wealth of talent that came into the Los Angeles and Orange County area, as well as regulars I didn’t see, like Bobby Hutcherson, I saw only a fraction of the artists I could have seen. Thanks to a close friend, I did get to see Sonny Stitt and a number of local jazz artists like the jazz trio, Illiad.
At some point, I even saw Milt Jackson. It seems to me that I might have seen him at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach around 1976 — but I cannot verify it. He also played at other venues during this time. And maybe the memory is fabricated. This is the issue with old age.
But as old as I am, I can enjoy Milt Jackson on LP, CD and streaming services! Here’s a look at recordings from 1956 where he was the vibraphonist for the Modern Jazz Quartet, or that the MJQ pianist John Lewis recorded.
The Modern Jazz Quartet: Fontessa
The blend between classical and jazz elements goes back to several decades earlier than 1956, with classical composers incorporating jazz elements (Darius Milhaud in 1919, Gershwin/Grofe with Rhapsody in Blue in 1925) and jazz composers like Duke Ellington writing works like “Creole Rhapsody” in 1931 and Symphony in Black in 1935. Stan Kenton championed the incorporation of classical music elements: his chief arranger in the 1940s, Pete Rugolo, wrote works like “Artistry in Rhythm” and “Artistry in Bolero” for the Stan Kenton band, which continued to mix modern classical and modern jazz elements with works like Bob Graettinger’s “City of Glass.” And then there was Dave Brubeck and his octet, which released several notable works during 1946-1950, including “Fugue on Bop Themes.”
John Lewis had an extensive classical music background, studying classical piano starting at age seven and earning both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in music, focusing on both piano performance and musical composition. He brings both his advanced piano technique and compositional skills to his Modern Jazz Quartet recordings, as well as his solo recordings.
Recorded in January 1956, Fontessa was the first Modern Jazz Quartet album released in 1956, and their first on the Atlantic label, which issued the LP in both mono and stereo versions. Unfortunately, the stereo version, despite its impressive soundstage, has some audible engineering defects. The mono version sounds great, and I suppose it is quite possible with today’s AI-driven technology to create a stereo version of the mono, based not on the audio content of the stereo, but just based on data about the stereo image itself. Hopefully that happens. AI needs to do a few decent things to partly balance out all the danger it poses.
AI’s currently unfulfilled potential aside, I am delighted with my mono version, starting with, yes, a jazz fugue, “Versailles”, with Percy Heath on bass working his butt off to keep up with the contrapuntal interaction between John Lewis on piano and Milt Jackson on vibraphone, with Connie Kay providing unobtrusive support on drums. This is followed by one of my favorite ballads, “Angel Eyes,” with Milt Jackson adjusting the motor of his vibraharp to the minimum revolutions per second to provide a shimmering, haunting effect. It’s worth noting that, though “vibraphone” is the term we use for these types of instruments today, in the early days of the instrument, the manufacturers had specific names. The Leedy Manufacturing Company created the first of these instruments, with a prototype in 1921 and a commercial version in 1924 under the proprietary name of “Vibraphone.” In 1927, the J.C. Deagan company released a technically superior product that they named the “Vibraharp,” with the bars made of an aluminum alloy for a warmer tone, a tone-sustaining pedal, and a layout matching the keyboard of the piano. The Deagan product set the tone (sorry, dear reader…) for the instrument, with other manufacturers producing similar products (for example, the Vibra-Celeste). Milt Jackson played the Deagan Vibraharp, and today we call such instruments just vibraphones or even “vibes” with “vibes” commonly used instead of “vibraphone.”
Another standout track on the album is “Fontessa,” an eleven-minute suite showcasing the musical subtleties of the quartet. Ending the album with more of a bebop flair is the well-known Dizzy Gillespie tune, “Woody’n You.” Overall, this is an excellent album showing the range of the quartet.
The Modern Jazz Quartet: At Music Inn
Although it was recorded on August 28, 1956, and released later that year, this is not truly a live concert album but rather a closed recording session, and it is unclear whether there were multiple takes. This is not to be confused with their 1959 “At Music Inn,” which is a true live album and includes Sonny Rollins on a couple of tracks. For this album, we have Jimmy Giuffre playing clarinet on three tracks. The group continues to develop their highly refined MJQ sound starting with a rendition of Gershwin’s “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess,” followed by a new jazz fugue by John Lewis, “A Fugue for Music Inn,” where Giuffre takes the first voice, followed by Milt Jackson, then John Lewis. Though not quite as amazing as the previous album, there is a lot to love here all the way to the last track, a variation on “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” which opens with some intricate contrapuntal passages and Percy Heath providing some bowed bass lines.
John Lewis: The Modern Jazz Society Presents a Concert of Contemporary Music
Recorded on March 14, 1955 (before I was born) and released in 1956 (after I was born), this is one of the most important and musically enriching lesser-known jazz albums of the 1950s. When I say lesser-known, I need to qualify that, as the Penguin Jazz Guide awards it four stars and its select “crown,” which transcends that maximum four-star rating to indicate the album’s essential or profound historical status.
You can be the judge if this is an essential album (I strongly feel it is not just an essential jazz album, but an essential album for any music lover), but there is no debate on its historical importance: this is the very first Third Stream album — recorded and released, as one would expect, before the term Third Stream was invented. It is always the case that the music comes first and that the label comes later. In this case, the label came pretty quickly, coined in 1957 by one of the participants and arrangers of this album, Gunther Schuller.
What is Third Stream? Basically, it is a blend of classical music and jazz — in Schuller’s words, “the result of two tributaries,” with Third Stream being between these two — getting contributions from both. Schuller’s definition implies that works like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue are Third Stream. Some would assert that Third Stream is more of a synthesis where both classical and jazz are combined seamlessly, and that is clearly an attribute of this album. Whether there were other Third Stream works before this album or not, this LP album is the first that I know of that is a collection of individual works written specifically for a given album. All that said, labels are often more a matter of convenience than accuracy, and the same holds true with “Third Stream.”
And as we use “Classical” as part of the definition of “Third Stream,” I have to acknowledge that coming up with an airtight definition of “Classical Music” is even more problematic. There is non-notated classical music we have lost forever (Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, or Messiaen for audiences of varying sizes); there is classical music that requires sections of improvisation by ensemble members; there is classical music written for a single performance, sometimes with the music saved, sometimes discarded, and so on. In general, the most useful way to label music is in terms of quality, perhaps providing stars (****) like various journals do. That is, of course, a subjective evaluation, and even by scanning through the album ratings summaries on Wikipedia entries, one finds quite a variance in ratings, this album being one example with AllMusic.com giving one of the finest works of the 20th Century three out of five stars compared to the highest rating that we mentioned earlier from the Penguin Guide to Jazz.
For some reason, I feel more inclined to label a piece third stream if I hear a flute, bassoon, clarinet, or French horn. All four are present on this album, along with Getz and Lucky Thompson alternating on tenor sax, and J.J. Johnson on trombone (perfect choice), Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on percussion. John Lewis has composed all the pieces, with arrangement duties shared between him and Gunther Schuller. The five pieces on the album all immerse and saturate the listener in well-deployed tonal colors, a tribute to the composer, arrangers, and performers. The music includes solos, and one of the compositions is an infectious, over five-minute jazz fugue. The 1999 Verve\/Polygram CD release of this album includes three bonus rehearsal tracks, including a rehearsal of J.J. Johnson’s “Turnpike.”
John Lewis: Grand Encounter (2° East / 3° West)
Recorded on Feb 10, 1956, and released in November of 1956, this album is quite a contrast to The Modern Jazz Society Present album, composed of five standards and just one John Lewis original, and featuring an ensemble of just five musicians: John Lewis and Percy Heath, bandmates of the Modern Jazz Quartet representing the East, and Chico Hamilton, Jim Hall (then a member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet), and Bill Perkins (with Stan Kenton at the time) representing the West.
The album is one of John Lewis’s best. I find it a thorny proposition to identify any musician as underrated, but in terms of general public awareness, John Lewis has to be one of the most underrated pianists of all time. He is economical and supportive as appropriate, providing minimal but substantial support for soloists. On this album, Bill Perkins shines, with nothing in the way of his restrained yet beautifully resonant tone. He pairs perfectly with Jim Hall, both on Hall’s solos and in their melodic interactions. Lewis’s solos are generally restrained, clear, and elegant, with the melodic lines immaculately emphasized by singing tone for both legato and portato passages. His inventiveness serves to contribute to an overall effect and avoid disruptive displays of virtuosity — something I enjoy in its proper place, but way too often done at the expense of continuity and coherence.
The one John Lewis composition fits in perfectly with the five standards and is a quintessential example of cool and elegant jazz. If we label The Modern Jazz Society Presents album as Third Stream, I think we can accurately label this album as cool jazz. It seamlessly blends both East Coast and West Coast jazz elements. It is ideal for dedicated listening or for relaxing on a Sunday afternoon, whether giving it full attention or dividing attention between the music and a novel — with minimal attention on the novel.
On July 7, 1956, the Duke Ellington Orchestra played the third annual Newport Jazz Festival, taking the stage as the first act of the third night of the festival — well, almost: several of his band members were running late, so Duke and the musicians that were there played a version of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and a truncated set of two numbers: “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Tea for Two.” Duke and his band then stepped aside as several “cooler” and “more hip” acts took the stage: Teddy Wilson’s Trio, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, the musically progressive Chico Hamilton Quintet (with Fred Katz on cello and piano and legendary guitarist Jim Hall), and dynamic “modernist” vocalist Anita O’Day, a flagship artist of the recently-formed Verve label, at the peak of her career following an April 1956 5-star review of her third studio album, eponymously titled Anita, released several months before Elvis Presley’s Elvis album. Elvis, I mean, Anita, was then possibly followed by the Bud Shank Quartet, but I am not sure of the order of the acts.
It is stated that the Duke fidgeted with anxiety backstage watching the more modernist acts, which made his own orchestra seem dated. However, when the time came for his orchestra to take the stage again, they were fired up to continue. Their set included the premier performance of a newly composed Ellington suite, which the band had not sufficiently rehearsed, and the defining moment of the concert: Paul Gonsalves’ 27-chorus solo between the two sections of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which, according to reports, incited near-pandemonium amongst the attendees and, as a result, generated a resurgence of public interest, single-handedly reviving the band’s relevance for a new generation of jazz fans.
However, when the time came to release the concert as an LP, Columbia Records had several challenges. The new suite clearly sounded under-rehearsed; saxophonist Johnny Hodges felt his playing was subpar in spots; Ellington was concerned about releasing a flawed representation of his orchestra; and Gonsalves, purportedly drunk during the concert, had misidentified which microphone to play next to, playing into the mic that the Voice of America had set up, making his crowd-stirring solo on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” sound distant.
So with all those considerations, the band recorded new versions of those numbers that had been selected for the planned “live” album, and producer George Avakian and engineer George Knuerr added the fake crowd noise. The two spent two days in the studio combining live tapes and studio retakes, electronically boosted the live audio as needed, spliced in additional, more noticeable applause, and heavily layered the tracks with reverberation, negatively impacting the general sound quality — all for the purpose of creating a finished product that appeared to be a genuine live festival performance.
The album was released in November of 1956, becoming the best-selling album of Duke’s entire career. It was a true commercial juggernaut, one of the first jazz albums to sell over a million copies, with continuing robust sales worldwide for years after its release. It even reached the number 14 spot on the Billboard Pop Albums chart, sadly not coming close to contending with that aforementioned Elvis album, but doing extraordinarily well for a live big band concert album during those early days of rock n roll. The album created increased demand for the Ellington Orchestra and their recording opportunities, and Ellington famously quipped, “I was born at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956.”
In terms of critical acclaim, reviews of the album were filled with praise. Jazz critics, who had previously dismissed Ellington’s mid-1950s output as archaic and tired, completely reversed their stance. Reviewers in publications like DownBeat heralded it as a miraculous, irrefutable comeback.
And it’s important to note that the concert itself, even before the album was released, was a significant driving force of the band’s resurgence and no doubt helped drive the popularity of the album — the concert’s resulting press attention led Time magazine to put Duke Ellington on the cover of their August 20, 1956 issue, something never achieved by Elvis either in 1956 or in Elvis’s entire lifetime.
Now, although I purchased a copy of the Ellington at Newport album in CD format as well as a vinyl copy, something occurred that made me glad to set aside those versions, forever.
In 1999, two or three years after the discovery of tapes of the concert made by Voice of America, a 2-CD set was released which, through the aid of digital technology, merged together the original Columbia concert recordings and the VOA recordings to create a unified, amazingly crisp and detailed, stereo representation of the Ellington Orchestra performance.
And wow! Is it something. One can hear the rough spots, that’s true. For example, the first time I heard the beginning of Johnny Hodge’s solo on “I Got it Bad,” I physically cringed, involuntarily scrunching up my shoulders. I played the alto sax for a short time, and know that even though its pitch is controlled with fingered keys, one can make some uncomfortably embarrassing sounds — I never considered that one of the most disciplined alto saxophonists of all time, would ever inadvertently play such an off-pitch sound as was recorded for posterity that evening. And yet, the performance is still amazing. This is the case with that entire concert, making the true live version of the imperfectly three-part suite preferable to the cloudy-sounding 1956-released version. And for completists, the original material recorded in the studio for the doctored 1956 LP is included on the second CD, including a retake of “I Got it Bad,” played flawlessly by Hodges — and without any added crowd noise or reverb.
So yes, that original 1956 Ellington in Newport is one of the most historically significant albums in jazz, but the 2-CD 1999 version is one of the most musically enjoyable releases in big band jazz.
Jimmy Smith: Jimmy Smith At The Organ – A New Sound-A New Star Volume One, Jimmy Smith At The Organ – A New Sound-A New Star Volume Two, Jimmy Smith At The Organ Volume 3
Jimmy Smith recorded three studio albums in the first six months of 1956. The first, titled Jimmy Smith At The Organ – A New Sound-A New Star Volume One, has a strong rhythm and blues vibe, with a selection of standards, a very bluesy and soulful rendition of Horace Silver’s “The Preacher,” and Smith’s interpretation of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” recorded on February 18, 1956, and released in 1956.
The second album, Jimmy Smith At The Organ – A New Sound-A New Star VolumeTwo, was recorded the next month on March 27, 1956, and released in 1956, and is closer to standard mid-1950s hard bop than the first. It starts with a rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “The Champ” that rivals any 1970s heavy metal rock track for sheer electrical power-driven invention and expression.
The third album, with a reassuringly shorter title, Jimmy Smith At The Organ Volume 3, recorded over two sessions, June 17 and June 18 1956, is similar to the second album, and contains only part of the tracks from those two sessions.
In 1997, a 2-CD set of a remastered version of these four sessions was released: A New Sound… A New Star… Jimmy Smith At The Organ Vol. 1-3, and unless you are committed to vinyl, this is the set to have. Jimmy Smith had an organ style like no other recording musician of 1956. His background was in Rhythm and Blues bands before transitioning to jazz. His approach is to lean into the melodic capabilities of the Hammond B-3 organ, emphasizing its electric-produced timbral options, and playing R&B-type chord textures when accompanying and when soloing, usually either playing primarily melodic passages with some interspersed chordal support or playing melodies over a walking bass. Though there is a general absence of any counter-melody or hints of polyphony, he is appropriately paired with electric guitarist Thornel Schwartz Jr., who continued to record with other notable Hammond B-3 organists, including the incomporable Larry Young. Schwartz provides the necessary polyphony and counter-melody phrases on Jimmy Smith’s solos, sometimes even providing the bass foundation underneath those solos. The interplay between these two is riveting, with Donald Bailey providing a crisp backbeat, a skip-style hi-hat, and propulsive snare accents that kept the high-energy bop driving forward. On slow passages, Smith and Schwartz showed how expressive their electric instruments could be, and Bailey provided a soulful R&B-style support. The 2-CD set puts the bonus tracks before the third album, and this works musically well, providing over a couple of hours of electric-driven soulful hard bop that influenced later jazz, R&B, and 1970s pop music — with influences well into the 1980s, with Quincy Jones requesting Jimmy Smith to play a Hammond B-3 MIDI organ solo on Michael Jackson’s Bad.
There’s often a bittersweet undercurrent that is present when listening to great music composed or performed by an artist who died before reaching their forties. Every time I listen to a Jimi Hendrix recording, my enjoyment is always accompanied by the thought of what a tragedy it is that he didn’t live longer.
Most Americans seem aware that Mozart died at a young age: 35. Yes, part of this is due to the popularity of the movie Amadeus. Europeans are generally more aware of 18th and 19th century composers than Americans, but even if Amadeus had never been released, most Americans would know the names of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.
A smaller percentage of Americans know who Franz Schubert is, and some who are familiar with his name know it from his “Ave Maria,” which gets played quite a bit during the Christmas season, even today. There are not so many who have heard a full Schubert symphony or can tell you that he composed hundreds of songs, seven completed symphonies, three unfinished symphonies, some amazing string quartets, and a stunningly stylistically diverse range of piano music and piano sonatas before dying at the age of 31. It’s nearly impossible for me to listen to his music without reflecting (perhaps when cueing it up or immediately after its completion) on how tragic his early death was, or wondering what masterpieces would have been available for us if he had lived another thirty or forty years — or even another four years — living at least as long as Mozart. And then sometimes I consider how badly decimated the output of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or even Mozart would have been if they had not made it to their 32nd birthday. We would still have all but two of Mozart’s 41 or so symphonies, but we would not have his last three, including the great Jupiter symphony, his Requiem, several of his best piano concertos and string quartets, or his four most important and beloved operas. Sadly, if all composers had died at the age of 31, Schubert would be considered the greatest of them all. Fortunately, the great majority lived past 31. That may explain why most Americans have such little knowledge of Schubert — but I suspect it’s just more accurate to assert that most Americans have little knowledge of music prior to the era of the Beatles.
If you approach the average person and ask what they think of the jazz trumpeter Booker Little’s career, and how it might have been different if he had lived a few decades longer, you will just get a blank stare. And even if Booker Little had continued making jazz music until his eighties, most Americans would not recognize his name simply because there is a general ignorance of America’s greatest musical legacy, the canon of recorded jazz music.
So I have to keep that in mind when I consider the magnitude of the loss to music of Clifford Brown at the age of 25, and to a lesser extent, Bud Powell’s younger brother, Richie, a talented pianist, composer and arranger, at the age of 24, both killed as passengers in a car accident when Richie’s 19 year old wife lost control of Clifford Brown’s car late at night on a badly rain-slicked Pennsylvania Turnpike during heavy rain and limited visibility. Neither alcohol nor drug usage was involved; Brown was one of the most notable drug-free players of the 1950s.
The accident occurred during the earliest hours of June 26, 1956. Clifford Brown recorded on two studio albums in 1956, each released in 1956.
Clifford Brown and Max Roach: Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street
The first album I will cover, Clifford Brown’s last album as a leader, was recorded in January and February of 1956, and it is one of the finest hard bop albums of all time: Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street. Please note that although the title may imply a live recording, this is a studio album recorded in New York City at Capitol Studios.
The album opens with a four-bar Max Roach solo on drums as part of Richie Powell’s 64-bar introductory arrangement for Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?“, followed by an incredibly intense solo by Clifford Brown, followed by a similarly focused solo by Rollins. Now, in some of the recordings I have, Sonny Rollins comes off as remarkably relaxed and melodic, but here we have a very riveting hard-bop statement. This is followed by Powell’s piano solo, more introspective initially, but developing to fit the mood. George Morrow then has his solo, followed by an arranged ensemble section and a Max Roach solo. It’s important to mention how Max Roach stood out from most of his contemporary drummers, first in the forties, and as he developed in the 1950s. He didn’t just support the ensemble and soloists or keep the beat; he intertwined with the ensemble and soloists, often altering the micro-elements of the beat while not disrupting the rhythmic flow. His solos were more than a technical display but a musical narrative, interesting not as just perfunctory or an obligatory contrast with the melody-instrument soloists but as equal engagement with the overall musical effect. The solo here doesn’t break the flow but is both musically intriguing and nicely sets up the alternating exchanges between Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins that lead into the outro or arranged finish, which mimics the introduction, including the brief Max Roach solo. The engineer fades the track out, which a purist may find objectionable, but which works quite effectively.
Now, both the CD reissue of this and the Complete 11 CD Clifford Brown EmArcy box set provide some alternate takes for this album, with the 11 CD set providing a full alternate take that is even better than the take used for the original album. One can hear some notable differences, including the opening intro where George Morrow plays the last two odd beats of Roach’s solo. Seems to me the Brown solo is more unrestrained and expressive, and the Rollins solo more exploratory and relaxed, with the main benefit being we have two different versions, both exceptional.
The EmArcy box set also gives us two remarkable versions of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “I’ll Remember April.” Once again, the arranged sections are sharp and effective, with the soloing focused and urgent on “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” The album contains three compositions by pianist Richie Powell, with “Powell’s Prances” being an exhilarating hard bop number proving an effective fast-paced vehicle for both Brown and Rollins, with a strong solo by Powell and Max Roach providing energetic support and a propulsive thirty-five-second solo. The album includes an additional piece by Tadd Dameron, and the EmArcy box set includes two additional tracks from the January/Februrary sessions.
Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins Plus Four
Rollins, a part of the Clifford Brown, Max Roach Quintet since November 1955, joining shortly after his break from jazz due to a period of drug rehab, such as it was in late 1954 and 1955, recorded for Prestige as a leader starting in 1951 through November 1956. In exchange for Rollins playing with Clifford Brown and Max Roach for the EmArcy label, EmArcy agreed to allow Brown, Roach, Powell, and Morrow to join Rollins for this Prestige recording, Sonny Rollins Plus Four, recorded in March 1956, and released in August 1956, a couple of months after the fatal Brown/Powell crash.
The album starts with a Rollins composition, a 3/4 jazz tune appropriately named “Valse Hot. Rollins has the first solo, relaxed and melodic. Brown’s solo is effortlessly engaging and lyrical. Powell and Roach both make fine contributions. The session seems more ad hoc, and I suspect the arrangements were a product of the rehearsal process rather than being formally written out by Powell.
Of the remaining numbers, each contains strong solo work and is a treat to listen to. “Count Your Blessings” is a beautiful ballad, showcasing Rollins’ lush, rounded, romantic tone with Brown sitting out. The album ends with the lively Rollins tune “Pent-Up House” with Clifford Brown taking the initial solo, wowing us as always with his ability to craft a composition in mid-flight, starting with stark, economical phrases, and then developing the material as if retelling a condensed plot of a short story. Rollins seems sensitive to the mood and provides a similarly narrative solo. Again, Powell provides a solid piano solo, and Max Roach’s solo provides an effective transition to the recapitulation of the theme.
Sonny Rollins: Work Time
Prestige released two other Sonny Rollins albums in 1956. The first was Work Time, recorded in December 1955, and released sometime in 1956. I love this album! Rollins’ “Paradox,” the second track, is one of those memorable hard-bop originals — not derived from some previous classic, but fresh and clever, including its Latin rhythmic sensibility, disrupted, or rather infused, with Rollins’ sparkling use of accents and the tense, shifting quality of its melodic material. I am a big fan of Billy Strayhorn’s “Raincheck,” so it’s a real treat to get this driving hard-bop rendition of it, which includes a relentlessly swinging Rollins solo and an invigorating Max Roach solo.
Recorded in May 1956 and released in October 1956, I own one of those audiophile repressings of this, and it’s really tempting to get it out to just listen to the first track, the only recording of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane playing together; however, the rest of the album is pretty strong.
There’s been a lot written about this first track, so I’ll try to be brief. It’s unusual to have two soloists of the same instrument recording together in a quintet, and it was happenstance that we have this. Coltrane was on the Prestige label, playing with Miles Davis and the exact same rhythm section Rollins was using for his session, and for some reason was in the studio with his tenor saxophone. Rollins, a close friend of Coltrane, didn’t hesitate to encourage him to sit in. Of course, whatever tune they picked to record would have to be a piece Coltrane knew the changes to, and for optimal improvisational ease, it made sense for it to be a blues-based tune. Not sure how they arrived at the selection, but they chose Kenny Clarke’s and Fats Navarro’s 12-bar blues “Royal Roost,” renaming it, appropriately for the session, “Tenor Madness.” Well, the recording was a critical success, with Coltrane and Rollins having both the advantage of long, extended solos in the first few minutes, and then, after a piano solo from Red Garland and a bass solo from Paul Chambers over a minute of exciting four-bar interchanges, followed by some more soloing and then a dozen more choruses of alternating exchanges.
This makes the rest of the album seem a bit anticlimatic, but as mentioned, it’s worth continuing on with, even if one chooses to take a break, sample some more Coltrane, or play Tenor Madness a second time before continuing on. Particularly notable is the contemplative rendition of “When Your Lover Has Gone” and Larry Clinton’s reworking of Debussy’s “My Reverie,” one of those pieces that goes perfectly with a crackling fire in the fireplace, if you happen to have a house that actually has a fireplace.
Track listing All tracks by Sonny Rollins except where noted.[7]
Recorded in September 1956 and released the next month, this is an energetic, exciting album, filled with choice tunes and wonderful improvisation. We hear a lively Sonny Rollins on the first track, George Russell’s Ezz-Thetic, making the most of the opportunity, reminding me of the free-wheeling John Coltrane at times as he effortlessly slides through sequences of notes. His solo is followed by a breathy but equally breathless Kenny Dorham solo. Ray Bryant provides top-notch piano throughout the album, and his solo here navigates the tricky chord changes of Ezz-Thetic (based on “Love for Sale”) effortlessly. There are some trading fours (Rollins, Dorham, and Roach alternating four-bar solos) and then Roach and the duo of Rollins and Dorham alternating, this giving way to a tension-driven Roach drum solo, one of the many highlights of the album.
The much briefer “Dr. Free-Zee” showcases Max Roach’s versatility and creativity by overdubbing his timpani lines over the initial recording of the ensemble where Roach is on his standard drum kit. Side One concludes with Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” I love how Max Roach is featured in the short intro before the exposition of the melody. Rollins is off to the races, again eliding notes and creating drama through his extraordinary control of note placement and emphasis. Dorham’s solo is breathy, agile, and lightning fast. Again, Bryant holds his own, and Max Roach provides an amazing drum solo.
Side Two opens with Roach’s “Mr. X. which includes a strong solo by Rollins, Dorham and Bryant maintaining the energy and mood, some exciting trading fours and a great drum solo by Roach over Bryant’s piano accompaniment. This is followed by “Body and Soul” — I am incapable of hearing any instrumental version of “Body and Soul” without instinctively reflecting on Coleman Hawkins’ historic 1939 recording. Rollins plays beautifully here with some gorgeous low-register legato, and Bryant and Morrow support Dorham’s reflective solo perfectly. There is no drum solo, an appropriate decision.
The album concludes with Dizzy Gillespie’s early bebop tune “Woody ‘n You”, written in 1942, and originally written for Woody Herman and his Orchestra, but first recorded by Coleman Hawkins with Gillespie, Roach and Oscar Pettiford. Dorham provides a particularly inspiring solo here, and there is some incandescent interplay between Rollins and Dorham after a second solo by Rollins. Bryant solos before an apparent recap, which unexpectedly gives way to an engaging Max Roach percussion solo with the theme resolutely returning, followed by brief Rollins and Dorham exchanges concluding one of Max Roach’s finest albums.
Track Listing All compositions by Max Roach except as indicated
100 years ago this month here are some notable musical events!
First Electrical Recording of Beethoven’s 9th: On March 16–17, 1926, conductor Felix Weingartner recorded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 “Choral” at Columbia Studios in London. This was a massive technical and historical milestone, functioning as the first complete electrical recording of the Ninth Symphony.
Electrical Recordings continue to take the world by storm including Argentina: On March 1, 1926, the Victor company cut its first electrical recording master in Buenos Aires. Tango singer Rosita Quiroga recorded “La musa mistonga.” Interestingly, Victor kept the new technological capability quiet at first to continue selling their acoustic back catalog.
If you are resident of the United States, there is a good chance a recording of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” was owned by one of your ancestors in the 1920s. Here is the first recording made of it:
Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians recorded Parlor Social Stomp here:
And across the pond, England was spinning their own sides of American Jazz:
King Oliver and his Dixie Syncopaters recorded “Snag It” on March 11, 1926.
By the start of 1976 the commercial demand for progressive rock was still at its peak, but many of the established English bands were creatively past their peak. In Italy, even before 1976, the top progressive rock band, PFM, started modifying their sound to increase their appeal to English-speaking audiences, releasing albums with English lyrics, a decided artistic and musical misstep, and arguably a commercial mistake as well, as the move did not result in greater American sales and negatively impacted both sales and their image within Italy.
January 1976 was the release month of Picchio dal Pozzo’s first album. Their lyrics, though limited, were exclusively in Italian, and their style didn’t resemble or remind one of Yes, Genesis or ELP. There are certainly traces of the techniques and chamber music approach of the English Canterbury scene, but the album has a solidly Italian and Continental identity with the musical playfulness more in line with the earlier sounds of PFM, RDM and Banco than the bloat and pomposity of some of the late 1970s symphonic rock movement — I won’t mention names, including some of the American groups that were guilty of this.
This Picchio dal Pozzo album starts off with a minimalist, repetitive opening, crescendoing with added Italian vocals. The second track, “Cocomelastico,” is heavily Zappa influenced, with the lightness and musical seriousness of tracks like Hot Rats‘ “Peaches en Regalia,” as well as recalling instrumental passages from Caravan and other Canterbury groups.
The music gets wilder with the longest track of the album, “Seppia,” getting into territory closer to the music of Robert Wyatt, Gong and Soft Machine with even hints of Area in the middle and ending with a softer Caravan-like sound.
The first side ends with the brief instrumental “Bofonchia” (Italian for “grumble”) and side two starts with the adventurous “Napier” (perhaps after the Scottish mathematician who invented logarithms). The track is the longest of the second side, and includes some magical vocals and a range of moods and instrumentation.
The second side continues, adventurous and musically eclectic, with “La Floricoltura Di Tschincinnata,” meditatively with “La Bolla” and its shimmering, post-impressionistic flute and piano, and the final track, “Off,” continuing that mood, more consistently with flute and piano joined with some ethereal vocal work — effectively wrapping up an adventurous, musically compelling album with a beautifully melodic, introspective ending.
Eberhard Weber: Yellow Fields
Released in early 1976, Yellow Fields is led by German bassist and composer, Eberhard Weber, who delivers one of the finest and most distinctive jazz albums of the year, avoiding any hints of the more commercial and more prevalent fusion jazz of that year, yet still delivering an album that was equally contemporary and accessible.
Like Charles Mingus before him, Weber was classically trained on cello, switched to bass, and integrated his use of the bass to further his musical vision, often using the bass in a more melodic role, utilizing the upper register to create a singing quality, weaving musical tapestries that are foundational to the music.
Now here is the real treat for me: We have Charlie Mariano being an indispensable part of this album’s appeal. I am a big fan of the nagaswaram, sometimes immersing myself in old recordings (from the 78 era) of Indian Classical Music to soak in its magical sounds. The nagaswaram is similar to the more commonly heard shehnai, which Mariano also features on this album, except it is significantly larger, longer, lower in pitch range, and louder. It requires athlete-level lung power and a musical sensitivity to its capabilities to bend pitch and hit the notes between the notes — play those non-Western tones, those micropitches, opening up the full range of musical vocabulary just as the shehnai does. Mariano further extends his timbral and range options on this album with the soprano sax.
Adding to the wide range of colors on this album is classically-trained German jazz pianist, Rainer Brüninghaus, who adds depth to the album but never subverts its mood or flow, playing both acoustic piano and synthesizer.
If you wish to check out an excellent example of 1970s jazz, here is an intense, cohesive, and immersive album that avoids the more prevalent fusion and free-jazz styles of that era and provides a wealth of musical color. Please give it a listen if you haven’t and let me know your thoughts: how would you place it in the diverse range of jazz albums of the 1970s?
Druid: Fluid Druid
There were several albums I considered including in this month’s Fifty Year Friday, albums that I have enjoyed listening to, and one of particular musical significance, but ultimately, I thought best to let other fans of such albums write their own reflections, thoughts or retrospective reviews on those albums. In the case of Druid’s Fluid Druid, released sometime in the first half of 1976, this is an album that was pretty much under the radar in 1976 and pretty much unknown today. (Note: after further research it appears the album was released on April 30th, 1976, but let’s keep this entry here for now, with plans to move it to April if I am still writing these retrospectives at that point.)
This is an English band, consisting of four musicians: the keyboard player and principal composer, Andrew McCrorie-Shand, the bass guitarist, Neil Brewer, the drummer, Cedric Sharpley, and the guitarist, Dane Stevens, who provides the vocals. Now sometimes his vocals, which can be overly affected, annoy me a bit, and sometimes they are quite good. The instrumental passages are quite enjoyable, and overall the music sounds heavily influenced by Yes and, to a lesser degree, Genesis. What matters, though, aren’t the influences, as apparent as they are, but the overall quality. Though this varies a bit, overall this is a strong album. Check out the instrumental track “FM 145,” a bit reminiscent of Greenslade, or “Nothing but Morning,” which sounds like part Yes and part Queen, and where Dane, credited on this album with just his first name, even sounds a bit like Freddie Mercury. If you are a fan of that portion of the Yes catalog and/or the Genesis catalog from the early and mid 1970s, there should be enough attractive material here, as well as in their first album, to make it worth your while to stream or purchase.
In 1925, recording technology continued to improve with jazz bands across the USA making their first recordings, even if it was only one double-sided 78 record.
1925 was the year Armstrong transitioned from being the greatest 1920s jazz sideman to a leader of his own group. He began the year in New York with Fletcher Henderson and ended it in Chicago recording the first “Hot Five” tracks starting in November — some of my favorite jazz recordings of all time, and generally recognized as highly treasured musical landmarks.
Other notable names made recordings this year: the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington with his group The Washingtonians, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. The sides they recorded are still musical gems a hundred years later.
Lesser names recorded, of course. Some had big hits, including Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra’s original hit recording of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and Paul Whiteman’s symphonic jazz version of James P. Johnson’s “Charleston,” which became a popular representation of the vitality and character of the “Roaring Twenties.”
There were many lesser names with less known recordings that are worth checking out including the Original Crescent City Jazzers recording “Christine” and The Halfway House Orchestra’s “Pussy Cat Rag.” Yes, we still had rags being featured in both jazz and in written concert hall music, but ragtime was now a historical style, and most pieces titled rags in 1925 were jazz and not ragtime.
Even rock fans will find 1925 abundant with gems that they would likely appreciate: “Cow Cow Blues” by Dora Carr and Cow Cow Davenport which is a blues recording enlivened with early elements of boogie woogie as well as Blind Lemon Jeffersons first recordings including “Black Horse Blues.” At the same time, many recordings of “pre-bluegrass” and “pre-country” music were recorded including Charlie Poole’s unrelenting, banjo-driven “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues” with traditional fiddle and rhythmic acoustic guitar.
All in all, 1925 had a wealth of music that any music lover can spend a few weeks, if not a full year, exploring.
Released in November of 1975, Night at the Opera starts with the excitement of an ocean voyage — we hear arpeggiated waves from the piano, whale rumblings from the bass, bird cries and seagull squawks from multitracked guitar breaking into soft strains of a tango quickly turning into heavy metal. This is Freddie Mercury the composer at the height of his craft.
After having purchased three Queen albums already, the first thing I did when I brought this album home in December of 1975 was note which tracks were attributed to Mercury — this served as indicators to what tracks would impress me the most. That turned out to be an effective predictor, but, importantly, the rest of the band’s contributions were some of their very best songs, making this album packed with classic material from start to the pinnacle of the album, the penultimate track, “Bohemian Rhapsody” — one of those rare instances in rock since the Beatles had disbanded where a truly great work of music made its way from legendary status with serious listeners, musicians, and dedicated fans to legendary status with the general public, even though, perhaps as expected, it took some time to do so.
And just as the Beatles elevated their work with multi-track musical enhancements, so too did Queen elevate Night at the Opera to a precisely rendered set of cohesive numbers that deservedly live up to the album’s title. Now, don’t get me wrong — we have an amazing musical diversity on this album — with such diversity in just Mercury’s compositions — but we add to that “I’m in Love with My Car”, “You’re My Best Friend,” the vaudevillian “Good Company” with ukulele and outstanding guitar accompaniment, and “The Prophet’s Song” with its brilliant use of deceptively simple imitative counterpoint, and it’s pretty easy to understand how Night at the Opera more than holds its own today as a timeless classic.
Keith Jarrett : The Köln Concert
One of my favorite possessions was the triple LP Keith Jarrett Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne which I had purchased with Christmas money in 1973. It was just incredible to have a three LP set of piano improvisation of such high quality. Given that, I am puzzled why I never bought The Köln Concert until the complete version made its way on to CD around 1984.
Recorded live in January of 1975, The Köln Concert was released in late November of 1975, the album starts off plaintively in the style of the quiet Americana reflectiveness so well done by classical composers like Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. For the first improvisation, Jarrett leans heavily on repetitive phrases and ostinato-like patterns to continue to move the music forward, flowing as if driven by stream of consciousness, yet always compelling and logical, deftly avoiding lingering too long in any single style, texture, or mode of emotional expression as the music logically unfolds.
The second piece, broken up onto three sides of the double LP album, is dramatically different in tone and character. Like the first improvisation, it evades any simple stylistic labels sometimes flirting into rock piano improvisation. Where the first improvisation was reflective, the second is inexhaustibly joyous and intensely rhythmically as Jarrett turns the piano into a percussive engine, hammering out a powerful, trance-like groove with his left hand that is pure, ecstatic energy. This propulsive marathon of invention continues through Part IIb, before finally dissolving and making way for the famous encore, “Part IIc.” After all the complex fireworks, this final piece is a moment of breathtaking, lyrical grace — a simple, hymn-like melody that releases all the tension and remains one of the most beautiful themes Jarrett ever played.
The music makes this performance legendary, but like the most interesting legends, it has an almost mythical backstory. Jarrett had specifically requested a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand. Unfortunately, what was made available on the stage was a baby grand rehearsal piano in such bad condition that Jarrett had initially refused to play on it. The requested piano was in storage and due to horrid weather was not able to safely replace the inferior piano. So Jarrett was forced to confront the rehearsal piano, an unsuitable, tinny, and out-of-tune practice piano he tested during the afternoon of the concert and was so dissatisfied with it he almost threw the towel in performing that evening. The promoter finally convinced him that he had a responsibility to play as best as he could for a sell-out crowd and somehow do his best to deal with the inadequacies of the inferior rehearsal piano. Jarrett went forward with the performance and it was this limitation, this ‘bad instrument,’ that forced Jarrett to navigate that evening’s improvisations into new territory, compelling him to avoid the shrill upper register notes and the weak lower bass notes, replacing the harmonic function of the latter with lower middle register accompaniment patterns and repetitive ostinatos — thus creating the distinctive style that unifies the music of this remarkable performance.
Joni Mitchell: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Released in November of 1975, The Hissing of Summer Lawns finds Joni Mitchell presiding over one of the most seamless marriages of lyrics and music of the 1970s. The poetry here is evocative and ironic, crafting memorable metaphors and unforgettable images. It’s often said that when constraints are placed on artists, they often produce their best work. For an artist who had previously written music around pre-existing lyrics to then make that shift over to the craft of fitting words into already composed music, one might expect a change in character — or at least in lyrical texture. Beginning around 1973 or 1974, Mitchell’s lyrics indeed became more fluid, impressionistic, and engaged, so that by the time of this album, she had achieved a near-perfect fusion of music and poetry, with the music among her finest creations.
And how does one classify the sound? One cannot. It draws on pop, rock, folk, and jazz, yet it belongs to none of them. The album charts its own course, allowing space for stellar contributors like Bud Shank and Joe Sample to leave their imprint without overshadowing Mitchell’s vision. The closing track, “Shadows and Light,” brings the album to a transcendent conclusion: a multi-tracked a cappella choir of Mitchell’s voice against a contrasting, processed drone from a Farfisa organ. The result is a kind of sonic cathedral, where light and sound filter through like stained glas — ever shifting, quietly monumental, and filled with a sense of cosmic design.
The entire album is a showcase of extracting equilibrium from motion. The music is built on a strong foundation yet exploratory and liberating. Here we have an artist of the highest level in full command of her gifts, unafraid to blur the lines between song and painting, intellect and intuition. The Hissing of Summer Lawns continues to be an album worth returning to: we achieve familiarity with repeated listenings but never is the magic lessened.
Chris Squire: Fish Out of Water
Another November 1975 release was Chris Squire’s highly accessible, melodic Fish Out of Water. For those like me who couldn’t get enough of the brilliance of Yes’s Fragile, this album was filled with the musical inventiveness and wonderful bass lines that dominated that Yes album. Musicians include Bill Bruford on drums and percussion, with saxophonist Mel Collins on two tracks and Patrick Moraz on bass synthesizer and organ on one track . Squire handles all the vocals, bass guitar, some acoustic twelve-string guitar and electric bass. Special compliments go Andrew Pryce Jackman who provides acoustic and electric piano keyboards and seamlessly integrated orchestration providing the album with additional depth and further contributing to its ebullient vitality. Fish Out of Water is a must-have album for all Yes fans surpassing most of their catalog released after 1975.
Crack the Sky: Crack the Sky
Crack the Sky’s debut was released in limited quantities in November 1975 by the independent label, Lifesong. Is this the biggest accomplishment by this label? Depends on your perspective — Lifesong posthumously re-released several greatest hits albums of Jim Croce material starting in 1976 as well as being responsible for “The Biggest Rock Event of the Decade” — that’s right — the rock opera Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero — an album of such popularity that I cannot find any entry for it on Wikipedia, though in fairness, the title was released again twenty-five years later on CD and is currently available on eBay for $49.
Putting Spider-Man historical considerations aside, the Crack in the Sky album, despite its limited distribution, eventually climbed up to spot 161 on the Billboard Charts in February 1976 aided by some airplay in the Baltimore area and more importantly being identified by the Rolling Stone magazine as the debut album of 1975.
Keyboard player and lead vocalist John Palumbo wrote all the music and lyrics showcasing an eclectic range of styles incorporating sixties pop elements and contemporary progressive rock elements. Both the music and lyrics are generally quirky, with a tongue-in-cheek, often ironic, humor deeply embedded in the lyrics and the music rich with accessible melody. There are musical moments that recall surf music, the Beatles, Procol Harum, early Genesis, and even Gentle Giant. It’s not a particularly well-produced album but it is a lot of fun, and an album that anyone who considers themselves well-versed in the history of rock music should have heard at least once.
Tangerine Dream: Ricochet
Recorded in late October and early November of 1975 in England, partly live at Fairfields Hall in Croydon and partly in the studio, Ricochet was released in December of 1975. It continues that rhythmically intense sequencer-driven signature sound from Rubycon, delivering it with sparkling clarity and focus. The music unfolds logically with a strong sense of overall meaning and purpose, effectively locking in one’s attention and never letting it go. Side One, “Ricochet, Part One” contains studio improvisations and recreations of live performances with side two, “Ricochet, Part Two” being predominantly live.
Vangelis: Heaven and Hell
Released in November of 1975, Heaven and Hell is a mixture of the cinematic, early and modern “classical” music, Greek folk and some elements of progressive rock. The album effectively combines Vangelis’s mastery of synthesizer with orchestra to create a richly themed concept album about the duality of human interaction with good and evil, the light and the darkness of existence. Side One, “Heaven and Hell, Part I”, opens furiously with synthesizer and chorus setting a strong symphonic tone and concludes with vocals by Jon Anderson of Yes segmented with a glorious orchestral and synthesizer interlude. Side Two, “Heaven and Hell, Part II” opens up, contrastingly, darkly and ominously, generally maintaining that mood with the notable interspersion of an exuberant, infectious Greek-influenced folk-dance-like section and its more reflective ending. The musical tone-painting is particularly impressive, effectively supporting side two’s darker thematic premise.
Mike Oldfield: Ommadawn
Released in November of 1975, Ommadawn is Mike Oldfield’s third major symphonic work, following the partly Exorcist-driven phenomenon of Tubular Bells and the expansive, pastoral landscapes of Hergest Ridge. Ommadawn mostly consists of one long work, the title track, divided between the two sides of the original LP with a short additional work at the end. It is this title track that is the gem and centerpiece of the album, excelling in compositional presentation and development of thematic material with the first theme deftly varied, followed by an abruptly effective intrusion of the second theme around the 4:15 mark, which is also skillfully varied. After this exposition of fundamental material, both themes are further developed and extended with a richness of instrumental variety and occasional vocals (using a cleverly altered Irish translation of some simple English words) invoking a tribal sense of community.
The second half of “Ommadawn” is more dramatic with greater musical weight and contrast, further exploring a wondrous world-fusion sound that would soon become a whole sub-genre of music. The highlights here include Paddy Moloney on the Irish equivalent of bagpipes, more properly known as Uilleann pipes, and an uplifting blend of vocals and glockenspiel followed by an Irish-like dance section that brings the work to a close.
For those looking to check this album out, avoid the original mix and go for the sonically spectacular 2010 remix which provides significant clarification and enhancement of individual instruments and provides rich, immersive stereo.
Magma: Live/Hhaï
Released in December of 1975, I bought this album in Germany in 1978, and I was not surprised in the least to find this live album of the French progressive rock group in Germany. Unlike Ange, which had a distinct French coloration to their albums, Magma had a Germanic sound and eschewed the French language to adapt a language more suitable to their music — not German, but — okay let’s break this down.
Christian Vander, son of French jazz pianist Maurice Vander, was born in Paris in 1948. Exposed to both jazz and classical music, he grew up listening to Wagner, Bach and Stravinsky and met several great jazz artists including Chet Baker, who gifted Christian Vander his first drum kit and Elvin Jones who shared his musical expertise. Vander brought all these influences as well as his intense admiration for a number of jazz giants, most particularly John Coltrane, as well as drummers like Art Blakey, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke and Tony Williams. Vander brought all such influences with him, including Coltrane’s searching musical intensity, when he founded Magma in 1969 as Magma’s leader, primary composer, drummer and an important contributing vocalist.
With the formation of Magma, Vander begin the creation of the mythology of Magma concept albums and the appropriate language — Kobaïan, the language of the fictional world of Kobaïa — a distant planet colonized by a group of humans fleeing earth’s moral and ecological collapse. The language’s main function was to provide the appropriate musical sound for Magma’s music and to represent a sacred language of renewal. Its sonic characteristics are starkly different than French, coming closer to Slavic and Germanic patterns, but intrinsically supportive of Vander’s musical ideas, which slowly coalesced into a dark, more teutonic, primitively spiritual style, with texture and timbral/orchestral characteristics eventually significantly influenced by Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which Vander first heard in 1972.
This 1975 Live/Hhaï album includes material as early as 1973, all of which represents the mature, dramatic Magma sound prevalent from 1973 on. The original album was a two LP set that could still fit on a standard single CD, but is currently sold as a two CD set. It is available for streaming on the usual sources for anyone wanted to sample this unique music, a music that will retain its excitement, mystery and appeal for centuries to come.
Brian Eno: Another Green World and Discreet Music; Fripp & Eno: Evening Star
In November of 1975, Brian Eno released his third solo studio album, the remarkable Another Green World which, while not as ambient as his upcoming work, is certainly an unconventional pop album full of highly accessible music surrounded with imaginatively unusual context. Eno provides a mix of catchy songs with him on vocals, some amazing guitar work from Robert Fripp, but mostly a level of exotic, quirky arrangements that elevate each and every track. Highly recommend!
In December of 1975, Eno’s fourth studio album is released, Discreet Music, and it is a boldly innovative ambient album. The first side, the title track, is a work of beauty and can be listened to directly or used as effective background music for a range of activities including writing, reading and napping off. The second side is more challenging: three “elastic” arrangements of Pachelbel’s well-known canon where the parts move at different paces — not by chance or performer’s whim but intentionally arranged to distort the relationship of the individual parts and the overall musical experience. One can still hear traces of the original canon — yet each of the three very different arrangements alters the original musical architecture with time-based abstractions that are roughly parallel to distortion concepts in cubism, futurism and surrealism and also seem related to rules-driven processes that are found in works by artists like Paul Klee, Bridget Riley, Sol LeWitt and even those famous rectangle paintings of Piet Mondrian. One also has to give credit to John Cage’s influence which opened up this whole realm of unexpected alterations whether aleatoric or rules-driven.
The most challenging of these three albums, Fripp & Eno’s Evening Star, released also in December of 1975, is another tale of two sides. The first side of four tracks, each with new standard ambient titles, is by far the most accessible and functions very effectively as truly ambient music or even meditative, reflective music, particularly the first, third tracks and fourth tracks “Wind on Water,” “Evensong,” and “Wind on Wind.”
The second side is devoted to a single piece “An Index of Metals” divided up into six tracks. I doubt there are many people that can turn it on in the background and experience a calming or relaxing effect from it. It is filled with tension and not smooth or flowing. I suspect many will just find it plain irritating if using it to relax, read, or write by as it has a somewhat intrusive and ominous character. It is more listening music and needs the attention of an active listener to properly navigate the tension, suspense, and forward progress of the music. The last of the six tracks is the most gritty of all and it ends with the tension decaying as opposed to any resolution. This sets up a nice contrast to some more relaxing ambient music, which would become more and more common and commercially viable thanks to this early work by pioneers like Eno and Fripp.
Welcome back to Fifty Year Friday! It is my great pleasure to announce that our first entry is by an esteemed and respected writer who, for reasons we won’t question, has graciously agreed to provide material for us under the nom de guerre of Leo The Deacon. If you can navigate a substantial drop in quality, a few of my own Fifty Year Friday entries follow. Enjoy!
Tom Waits: Nighthawks at the Diner
If ever there was an artist and an album deserving of the rubric sui generis, it is Tom Waits and this, his third album Nighthawks at the Diner. At a time—October 1975—when progressive rock was on the cusp of going to seed, disco was poised to go mainstream, and Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea had set aside post-bop to explore jazz-rock fusion, Waits came out with a two-disc album in which he performs mostly original songs, backed up by a quartet of first-rate Los Angeles jazz sidemen, in front of a small live audience. As a bookish 20-year-old who never quite embraced rock music—despite the earnest and occasionally successful efforts of the curator of this blog to interest me in such groups as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant—I found Waits’ wry, atmospheric, jazz-inflected compositions a subversive challenge to the hegemony of rock and roll. Nighthawks appealed not just to the emotions, but to the head. It did not hurt that his profane, salacious, and very funny banter between songs was well calculated to engage the sensibilities of college guys whose weekends, more often than not, were spent in the company of other dateless young men.
So is Nighthawks a jazz production, or a singer/songwriter presentation? Yes. Here’s where it gets interesting, because throughout the performance Waits meanders about the intersection of several genres: jazz, singer/songwriter compositions, spoken word, a bit of stand-up comedy. Hell, in the cut “Big Joe and Phantom 309” Waits even covers a country-music song by Red Sovine about a ghostly trucker. The entire album is a musical Venn diagram of multiple converging circles. One can’t even call it a “live” album, exactly, because it was recorded in a studio, but in front of an audience hand-picked by the producer to convey the feel of a live performance. It’s not quite authentic but it works, especially as it allows the listener to experience the entire Waits shtick: the guttural banter, the jokes, the wordplay, and the music.
The mood is set from the get-go in the opening intro, with the quartet playing a bluesy vamp featuring Jim Hughart’s walking bass and short, honking arabesques by Pete Christlieb on the sax. The sound is that of a cool, if jaded, house band at a burlesque club and Waits reinforces the conceit by welcoming the audience to the fictitious “Rafael’s Silver Cloud Lounge,” and thanking the stripper who ostensibly warmed up the audience and put a charge into Waits’ libido. He continues with some introductory jokes about late nights and coming home after three months to find everything in his refrigerator has “turned into a science project.” As he talks, Waits elegantly elides into the first song, “Emotional Weather Report,” which is more rhythmic spoken word recitation than it is singing. He bemoans the “tornado watches…in the western region of my mental health” and declares that “It’s cold out there—colder than the ticket-taker’s smile at the Ivar Theater on a Saturday night.” Jilted by his lover, Waits’ forecast is for more precipitation.
The rest of the album more or less follows the same pattern, with Waits sustaining a twisted down-and-out persona as he leads into another song or spoken word performance, backed by the jazzmen and revolving around themes of loneliness, lost love, late nights, and life at the margins. For my money, the best cut on the album is the third, “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)” in which Waits precisely captures the milieu of an all-night coffee shop. In this song, (this time he is singing rather than reciting), Waits displays his artistry in clever turns of phrase and the ability to evoke the bittersweet mood of a lonely late night out after a break-up. Atmospherics and the skilled deployment of similes and metaphors are Waits’ stock in trade and he’s at his best in “Eggs and Sausage.”
Waits is often compared to the Beat poets, but that’s not quite right. His music at this stage of his career, and particularly on this album, is reminiscent of the Beats, with its jazz and spoken word poetry, and its exploration of loneliness and alienation. But unlike the Beats, Waits isn’t concerned with philosophy or spirituality, or even drug-induced altered states of consciousness. For the most part, alcohol is Waits’ drug of choice and that and his focus on the working class and marginalized perhaps slides him closer to the Beats-adjacent Charles Bukowski. Both Bukowski and the Beats expressed profound alienation, however, with the Beats setting themselves in opposition to the 1950s military-industrial complex and Bukowski challenging the smug conventionality and moral sensibilities of bourgeois America. Waits isn’t overtly political, like the Beats could be, and he certainly doesn’t indulge in the blunt rage and belligerence of Bukowski. Rather, despite the crusty delivery, he is sentimental. In the end, Nighthawks, as well as Waits’ other music of the mid-1970s, is not concerned so much with alienation as with hard luck, loneliness, and the struggle to carve a little dignity out of an uncaring universe. On Nighthawks, the world is what it is, and Waits knows it is a mug’s game to try to change it.
Tom Waits, at any point in his long musical career, is an acquired taste. Those fans, likely younger ones who are more familiar with the growling, iconoclastic, and experimental performer Waits morphed into starting with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, may find the younger Waits of Nighthawks in the Diner more conventional—dare we say “quaint”?—than the older artist they are familiar with. But in 1975, Waits’ retro-beatnik hipster persona, jazzy music, and well-crafted noirish lyrics was something different from the dominant electronic-heavy compositions of rock and fusion. From the perspective of fifty years, it holds up well, although younger listeners may find themselves bemused by Waits’ frequent references on this album to LA “landmarks” that have passed into history—The Copper Penny restaurants, the seedy Ivar Theater, the Ziedler & Ziedler clothing store on Sunset, and KABC weatherman Dr. George Fischbeck, to name a few.
If there is a flaw in Nighthawks, it is that the persona Waits adopts narrows the variety of the songs. To be sure, on a few tracks—“Warm Beer and Cold Women,” “Nobody,” and the country-ish “Putnam County”—Waits veers into his singer/songwriter roots, dials back the jazz, and sings accompanied by himself on piano. By and large, though, the album is a series of Waits’ compositions backed up by well-executed jazz incidental music. The jazz frames the mood, but the fun is in skillful lyrics, the repartee and wry observations, and the dark, at times cynical, yet not despairing atmosphere that Waits conjures up. It is an eccentric artifact of its time, but it still rewards the listener and reminds us that the 1970s weren’t all bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and leisure suits.
—Leo the Deacon
Van Der Graaf Generator: Godbluff
Released in October 1975 in the UK, this album was only available as an import. It wasn’t until I made a trip to Europe in 1978 that I purchased it in Amsterdam and had it and several other albums shipped from a post office near the record store back to the States. That particular parcel of LPs arrived home earlier than I, and so once I was home, I put it on my beloved turntable. Wow!
As a great admirer of their previous album, Pawn Hearts, which I had bought as a cut-out in the US for less than three dollars, I had high expectations for this. Fortunately, the quality of the lyrics and music did not disappoint.
After a four-year gap between Godbluff and Pawn Hearts, Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton, Guy Evans, and David Jackson roar back more powerfully than ever with less psychedelic and excursionary elements and an apparent singular focus on drama and controlled handling of musical tension and release. Hammill displays his range of skills on vocals, superior in dramatic and expressive impact to more famous contemporary singers/songwriters like David Bowie, and even contending with the otherworldly emotional delivery of Demetrio Stratos of Area and Francesco Di Giacomo of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso. Hugh Banton and Guy Evans are in great form on keyboards and percussion; and we have David Jackson on double saxophones, à la Rahsaan Roland Kirk, creating musical textures that elevate the music experience to breathtaking intensity.
Side One opens with “The Undercover Man”, which starts softly, creating musical and dramatic suspense. Once the tension is established, it methodically builds in intensity, layer by layer, gradually crescendoing, leading to some colorful organ, sax and the further unfolding of the brilliant expression and pacing of Hammill’s staggered and passionate vocals.
“Scorched Earth”, the second of two tracks on the first side, maintains intensity, opening up quietly and building in dynamics with repetitive motives weaving through Hugh Banton’s organ part and David Jackson’s deftly engineered sax parts supported by Guy Evans’s relentlessly polyrhythmic drum work. The forward momentum cools, with an initially echoey middle section, crafted out of preceding musical material that explodes into an unpredictable flurry of syncopated melodic material and violent skirmishes of accelerating ostinatos and motivic interchanges. Two dominant mixed meters alternate. Dynamic and rhythmic shifts continue to propel the music forward to an abrupt climax ending with a brief musical exhale.
Side two opens up reflectively with “Arrow”, with a meandering and introspective introduction ferociously interrupted with Hammill’s vocals which commence to entwine and shape the course of the music leading into an instrumental of repeated sax permutations on the primitive four-note saxophone motive heard earlier but not put through a series of repeated modifications. Hammill’s vocals return with full intensity and anguish:
How long the time seems How dark the shadow How straight the eagle flies How straight towards his arrow
How long the night is Why is this passage so narrow? How strange my body feels Impaled upon the arrow
This is followed by more sax-dominated instrumental and intensive, unrestrained percussion eventually trailing off into a sustained whimper.
The last track, “Sleepwalker”, described by Hammill as portraying “life in death, death in life” begins boldly with a brilliant 9/8-based mixed-meter motif, syncopated and off-kilter, creating a lurching, stumbling feel, realized flawlessly by sax, organ and percussion. Once the pattern is established for the listener, it moves into an accompaniment foundation for Hammill’s vocals:
At night, this mindless army, ranks unbroken by dissent Is moved into action and their pace does not relent In step, with great precision, these dancers of the night Advance against the darkness – how implacable their might!
The second section starts off as a tango with güiro, organ, clavinet and then sax on melody– but it is a 3/4 tango! It then contorts itself evolving into the opening motif for brief return of theme A, but these expectations are quickly tossed aside with an intro into a completely new section in a relentless, undeniable 4/4, the sax and rhythm hinting at a brief funky disco feel before the band shuts down that possibility completely with aggressive prog-rock percussion, sax and Hammill’s searing vocals.
A necessary aside on the artistic nature of David Jackson’s approach to the saxophone: dubbed “the Van Gogh of the saxophone” by a critic of the British New Musical Express, Jackson was described as a “renegade impressionist, dispensing distorted visions of the world outside from his private asylum window”. Following in the footsteps of jazz artists like John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Albert Ayler, Jackson focused on fully leveraging timbral and tonal qualities of his instrument to deliver a wider range of emotional experiences.
Two key elements defined his style. The first was his signature use of double horn — playing two saxophones (typically alto and tenor) simultaneously, creating dense harmonies and powerful, layered riffs. The second, and more crucial for “The Sleepwalkers,” was his pioneering use of electronics using customized pickups, octave dividers, wah-wah pedals, and powerful amplification, transforming the saxophone from a purely acoustic instrument into a versatile prog-rock sound source, capable of generating textures and timbres far beyond its natural range, allowing him to sonically manifest the fragmentation, distortion, and psychological turmoil central to VDGG’s music — and provide a fully-effective soundscape for Hammill’s autonomically engaging, intensely visceral vocal delivery.
The synthesis of those two saxophones, the bass pedals and organ work of Banton, Evans’s driving polyrhythmically-paced percussion, always at the service of the music and text propels us into the psychedelic-flavored coda which slowly evaporates into nothingness, leaving the lingering essence in the listener’s mind, eventually compelling a repeat playing of one of the finest albums
Steve Hackett: Voyage of the Acolyte
Released in October 1975, I never had enough money to buy this in my college days — such a shame, as this is a wonderful album and provides insight into how much Steve Hackett contributed compositionally to the many of the passages within Genesis’s Nursery Cryme and Supper’s Ready. Excellent, evocative and reflective music that sparkles as wondrously as ever.
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd released their ninth studio album in September of 1975. Fifty years later their The Dark Side of Moon boost has maintained their popularity enough so that there are multiple sets out this month celebrating the fiftieth anniversary. If you haven’t heard this album yet, you probably weren’t listening to music fifty years ago!
Can: Landed; Jethro Tull: Minstrel In the Gallery; Electric Light Orchestra: Face the Music
All released in September of 1975, all three of these albums have their strong moments and are worth checking out. Can’s Landed starts off with grungy rock badly recorded, but ends strongly with the musique concrète of “Unfinished” with much of interest in between.
Jethro Tull’s Minstrel In the Gallery is more reflective than his previous three albums and seemingly more personal. Thematically, the album lyrics cover the introspective and the cynical, with Ian Anderson’s lyrics exploring the isolation and pressures of being a public performer — Anderson being that Minstrel in the Gallery. Throughout a good deal of the album Martin Barre’s electric guitar is in the forefront and borders on a jazz-fusion ethos contrasted in other sections with delicate acoustic guitar. The album’s highlight is the musically and metrically complex, multi-part “Baker Street Muse” on side two, lasting over sixteen minutes with sharp contrasts and sharp lyrics.
ELO’s Face the Music opens up with an orchestral intro and explodes with their signature blend of strings, Jeff Lynne’s guitar, drums, and keyboards. The excellent opening instrumental, which highlights Mik Kaminski on violin, is followed by a classic-sounding ELO track, “Waterfall, reminiscent of Eldorado material. As mentioned earlier by Leo the Deacon, September 1975 ushers us into the mainstream days of disco fever and ELO made good money with an edited single version of the third track “Evil Woman.” I had stopped listening to AM radio long before 1975, but somehow I was still exposed to it enough in various public venues that I developed a rather strong aversion to its annoyingly commercially cloying sound. The remaining album has its ups and downs, and includes a number sounding much like the pre-disco Bee-Gees (“Strange Magic”) and Lynn’s excursion into country music, “Down Home Town.”
Besides these albums we have a wealth of other releases, not at the level of Godbluff by any means but much more commercially successful including albums by George Harrison, John Lennon, Elton John, Paul Simon, his former singing mate, Art Garfunkel, Rush, Herbie Mann, Linda Ronstadt, Roxy Music, Sparks, Steeleye Span, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Frank Zappa, Hall & Oates, Crosby and Nash without Stills, and though I haven’t a clue what it sounds like, and am totally fine with that, Kiss’s Live Album, which apparently is the first album released by any American hard rock band, for if memory serves me correctly Spinal Tap had not released any live albums by that date — or to be factually correct, now that I check Wikipedia, still has not.
The summer of 1975 marks the zenith of progressive rock: the moment when the genre reached its cultural and commercial apex. The journey had been remarkable. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw its birth and evolution, a period of explosive creativity as bands honed their technical abilities and expanded their conceptual ambitions. The artistic potential evident in foundational works like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Days of Future Passed was fully realized in a wave of masterpieces, each pushing the boundaries further: In the Court of the Crimson King, Fragile, Thick as a Brick, and Brain Salad Surgery.
By 1975, progressive rock was no longer an exceptional burst of creativity; it had become a normal, even dominant, mode of musical expression. The audience for long-form, complex compositions—accommodating multi-part suites, shifting time signatures, and grand conceptual themes—had been built. The music was not only artistically impressive but commercially triumphant, filling the largest concert halls, arenas, and stadiums across America and Europe.
Yet, this peak was also a turning point. Just as any artistic movement has its heyday followed by phases of sustainment, adaptation and imitation, whether finely-crafted Baroque, emotionally-evocative Impressionism, or intoxicating Swing, so too did progressive rock begin its next chapter. Having reached its summit, the genre moved out of the creative spotlight and began to solidify its place in history, setting the stage for new bands to adapt its sounds and for its original architects to navigate the changing tastes of a global audience.
Gentle Giant: Free Hand
Progressive Rock certainly had to be popular for one of the most underpromoted and generally ignored progressive rock groups to have an album climb as high as number 48 on the U.S. Billboard chart. One was still likely to get blank looks when recommending Gentle Giant to friends, but they had made such considerable progress in achieving recognition that they were now more often the main attraction rather than a predominantly supporting act, playing larger and larger venues, getting placed into multi-act festivals and headlining the 7,000-capacity Montreal Forum Concert Bowl and selling out the Centre Municipal des Congrès in Quebec City.
This well-deserved increase in success was crucial, as it helped buffer the band psychologically during a bitter two-year conflict with their UK label, WWA Records. The disputes were numerous and severe: WWA’s US counterpart, Columbia, had refused to release the brilliant but challenging In a Glass House; the band’s management was siphoning off an obscene amount of money; and the label was relentlessly pressuring them to become more commercial and produce a hit single.
After much legal maneuvering (and at what was apparently a significant financial cost), the band finally managed to extricate themselves from their contract. They promptly signed with the more prog-friendly Chrysalis, which had already expressed interest should they become available. This move was not just a business transaction; it was a liberation.
Now on their new label, Gentle Giant could create without constraints. The result was an immediate celebration of this freedom. The first side of their new album, Free Hand, serves as a defiant and musically intricate declaration of independence. Its overarching theme is interwoven with introspective lyrics on a fractured relationship, functioning both as a literal commentary on their breakup with WWA and as commentary on a romantic breakup.
The opening finger-snapping is overlaid with Kerry Minnear’s simple, syncopated piano line, which is quickly joined by Gary Green’s guitar—first with on-beat chords, then with off-beat stabs that accentuate the rhythm. Derek Shulman’s voice enters as another independent line, creating as exhilarating a syncopated opening as has ever been created in rock music.
During the verses, the rhythm section of Ray Shulman on bass and John Weathers on drums lays down a solid six-to-the bar beat. Superimposed over this foundation, the lead vocal and the primary melodic instruments (piano and guitar) operate in a conflicting meter of 7/4. This is not merely a display of technical prowess; it is the lyrical theme made manifest in rhythm. This irrationally persistent dual-meter creates a feeling of daredevil friction — a propulsive yet unsettling groove that is constantly pulling against itself. It musically represents the band’s position: they are intentionally “out of step” with the standard pulse of the industry but are perfectly in sync with their own complex internal logic. The two meters coexist, creating a challenging but ultimately coherent whole — a sonic metaphor for forging one’s own path.
The track ends with a coda carved from the intro, leading directly into the dramatic fugato opening of “On Reflection.” The texture builds with breathtaking complexity: first a single voice, then a second independent voice, then a third, and a fourth. After a short contrasting section, the four-part vocal polyphony is doubled by instruments. The track then shifts to a new, ballad-like theme, delicately supported by recorders, violin, and vibraphone, before the opening fugato returns on instruments alone, trailing off into silence.
The first side culminates with the title track, “Free Hand”, which serves as the narrative and thematic centerpiece. The swaggering, layered opening provides musical continuity, while the lyrics offer a triumphant and unambiguous celebration of autonomy. The aggressive first section is effectively contrasted by a reflective, free-flowing instrumental interlude. Derived from the opening theme, this section alternates between fluid passages and sharp, staccato outbursts. Exciting, climactic transitional material then builds tension before a final recapitulation of the primary theme. A short coda indulges in a few moments of development and ends with a notable cadential flourish — an in-your-face flip of the heels — a musical “so there!”
With “Killing the Time”, side two unexpectedly and amazingly opens up with the sound of Pong — the unassuming, but highly popular video game once found in pizza parlors, pubs, and hotel arcades throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan and much of Europe in 1974 and 1975. The brief sound of Pong is followed by musical tone painting at its finest — the music captures idleness effectively with its representation of the seeds of the rhythm searching for a groove and coalescing into what I call Gentle Giant’s stride style (see Fifty Year Friday: July 1971 with additional examples mentioned in Fifty Year Friday: September 1973, Fifty Year Friday: December 1972, Fifty Year Friday: April 1972, Fifty Year Friday: November 1970.)
Functionally, this track extends the album’s concept of new found freedom, portraying the band killing time between concerts. Though primarily minor and minor/modal with its distinctive off-kilter character, once past the opening section, the structural form relies on traditional verse and chorus relationships with a contrasting bridge after the third verse — but with the welcome addition of a sixteen-bar development section after the bridge with a standard repeat of chorus, verse, chorus and fade out. Though the harmony is generally straightforward, using a dominant key and the relative major as contrasting tonal areas, the deployment of chromatic passing chords and controlled dissonance adds to the overall musical interest.
“His Last Voyage” is the most lyrical work on the album, a soft and beautiful Kerry Minnear composition. The form is generally strophic, but constant variation and development provide a sense of passage through tumultuous seas, turning a tragic narrative into a powerful musical metaphor.
This is followed by the penultimate track, “Talybont,” a refreshing neo-Renaissance instrumental that lightens the mood with its cheerful Mixolydian mode and playful counterpoint. Originally composed for a never-released Robin Hood film, its inclusion here provides effective contrast while its melodic contour echoes the album’s opening track, adding to the record’s cohesive feel. It is in rondo form (A B A B A B A) with some musical variation to further increase interest. Interestingly, while the track provides necessary contrast, it also shares the melodic contour of the main theme from “Just the Same.” This subtle connection enhances the album’s sense of unity.
The album ends with “Mobile”, describing life on the road and returning to the album’s general conceptual theme.
“… Moving all around, going everywhere from town to town All looking the same, changing only in name Days turn into nights, time is nothing only if it’s right From where you came, don’t you think it’s a game? No, no, don’t ask why Do it as you’re told, you’re the packet, do it as you’re sold…”
The music rocks hard with a solid 4/4 time signature but is enriched with aggressive syncopation, rhythmic displacement, use of synthetic stretto (my term for removing notes in a repeated pattern) for creating momentum and tension, implied metrical shifts (while still in 4/4) and hints of polyrhythm. Add to this effective musical support of the lyrics, and ample musical development, and we have an exhilarating conclusion to one of Gentle Giant’s most unconstrained, most unified albums — an album celebrating, and ultimately documenting, their creative freedom.
Renaissance’s sixth studio album, Scheherazade and Other Stories, released in July 1975, captures the band operating at the peak of their artistry. Side one starts with John Tout’s piano solo, setting a dramatic tone for the album. Annie Haslam’s ethereal, wide-ranging, and always captivating vocals soar over the first track, “Trip to the Fair,” with its waltz-like foundation reminiscent of a merry-go-round. The 3/4 meter extends into the instrumental middle section, punctuated by snippets of 5/4 that nicely set up the return to the primary theme. This is followed by a short, upbeat, and energetic piece, “The Vultures Fly High,” with its effective modulation in the middle instrumental section. “Ocean Gypsy,” a reflective ballad with subtle musical twists and turns, closes side one.
The highlight of the album is the nearly 25-minute “Song of Scheherazade,” based on the multicultural classic collection of folktales, One Thousand and One Nights. The work is so effectively arranged to incorporate the London Symphony Orchestra that the orchestration seamlessly supports the musical and narrative effort. Annie Haslam is in top form, her voice navigating the epic’s dynamic shifts with grace and power, and John Tout contributes some truly memorable and impressionistic piano interludes that serve as narrative turning points.
Fifty years later, this is an exceptional album to revisit, beautifully showcasing Renaissance’s unique blend of progressive rock and classical influences. This truly effective, enduringly relevant, and genuinely engaging album is one of those artistic excursions that showcase how great music transcends stylistic boundaries to establish its own identity, one ultimately independent of time and genre.
Klaus Schulze: Timewind
Released in August of 1975, Timewind is a turning point for Klaus Schulze, a monolith of sequenced sound that answers the artistic challenge thrown down by Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra. Schulze’s response was to forge his own approach to the analog step sequencer, using its relentless, hypnotic ostinato patterns to create a new musical language that taps into the listener’s subconscious desire for rhythmic order. Time is no longer measured; it is created. This gives Klaus Schulze the freedom to forgo conventional melody, yet provide an accessible, orderly musical landscape: a slow tectonic drift of ambient continents stratified from electronic synthesis.
Even with this new technology, the album demands patience, which in turn allows the listener to fully enter and remain within the two slowly evolving universes that occupy each side of the original LP. This transformation of a mechanical pulse into the catalyst for a new realm of immersive experience now gives talented musicians like Klaus Schulze entirely new architectural tools to build previously undiscovered worlds. For the willing listener, the opportunity is that of complete immersion into the inner dimensions of pioneering soundscapes where time and space are collectively managed by the composer’s creative capabilities and the listener’s personal engagement.
Harmonia: Deluxe
Released in August of 1975, Deluxe, the second album from Harmonia — brimming with sonic colors, warmth and optimism — provides one of the best examples of listener-friendly German “Kosmische Music” (cosmic music). Where some of their contemporaries explored challenging dissonance or more Stockhausen-influenced content, this trio of Neu! guitarist Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius from Cluster, supplemented by drummer Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru, successfully crafted a sound that was both innovative and accessible, at least to those more adventurous listeners who explored the alternative avenues of music of the 1970s.
The album unfurls a vibrant, welcoming sonic world, seamlessly blending kaleidoscopic electronics with an insistent, forward-driving momentum that immediately engages the listener. The overall architecture relies on rhythms, ostinatos and the artful use of a drum sequencer. This is not consistently pulse-driven, rigid music, but music that appropriately flows, changes course, provides calm and turbulence, and ultimately invigorates with a sense of exploration, motion and scenic excursions.
The synthesizer work is particularly appealing, controlling the tint, brightness and saturation of the passing soundscape so colorfully it becomes visually evocative. The rich, shimmering textures seem to radiate a sonic equivalent of the visual spectrum allowing one to perceive the music in vibrant, shifting hues. With the addition of Rother’s contrasting guitar lines melodically interacting with the multitracked shimmering keyboards, the composite result creates the necessary wonder and interest to give Deluxe its overflowing positive and enduring energy.
Quick Reference & Semantic Summary (Fifty Year Friday Archive)
Primary Subject: Progressive Rock and Experimental Electronic Music in the Summer of 1975.
Key Albums & Artists Reviewed:
Free Hand by Gentle Giant (1975).
Scheherazade and Other Stories by Renaissance (1975).
Timewind by Klaus Schulze (1975).
Deluxe by Harmonia (1975).
Primary Musical Genres: Progressive Rock, Kosmische Musik (Krautrock), Berlin School Electronic, Symphonic Rock, and Avant-Garde.
Historical & Critical Context:
Explores the summer of 1975 as the commercial and cultural zenith of progressive rock before the genre’s transition.
Gentle Giant: Analyzes Free Hand as a literal and musical declaration of independence following their bitter split from WWA Records, highlighting their use of complex polyrhythms, syncopation, and fugato arrangements.
Renaissance: Highlights their seamless fusion of classical orchestration and rock, driven by Annie Haslam’s vocals and John Tout’s piano, particularly on the 25-minute epic “Song of Scheherazade”.
Klaus Schulze: Examines Timewind as a pioneering work of sequenced ambient electronic music, standing as a direct artistic response to Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra.
Harmonia: Reviews Deluxe as a masterclass in accessible, optimistic, and visually evocative German cosmic music, blending rhythmic momentum with colorful synthesizer textures.
Archival Context: Part of the Fifty Year Friday retrospective music review series.
