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Jul 24

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A place in my heart

Perhaps you, like me, found yourself beguiled by a TV ad for the new Range Rover last year — the one with the dog staring out of the window of a loft apartment and a female voice singing what sounded like the opening 30 seconds of best ’60s Southern Soul ballad that never made it out of the vaults. I wasn’t alone in trying to track it down, only to discover that there was no more to it than those few lines.

They turned out to have been written by Dom James (melody) and Tommy Antonio (words) and recorded in London with the singer Emma Smith, formerly of the Puppini Sisters. It was created to order by people who do that sort of thing for a living, and that’s all of it that there was. But James noticed the interest it created, and he promised to finish it. Now he has.

Here it is, lip-synched by Emma on YouTube and available via Bandcamp as a fine slice of balm for this bizarre summer. Apart from a couple of lines of the lyric that could have stood a bit more work, it lives up to the promise of the original snippet. I can hear Gladys Knight singing it now. But the original will do just fine.

* Here’s the Bandcamp link: http://www.emmasmithmusic.bandcamp.com/

Jul 19

11 Comments

Soft Machine today

Soft Machine Baked Potato 1

It’s many years since, to all intents and purposes, I lost interest in the Soft Machine. One by one, the early members  — Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper — dropped away, taking their various eccentricities and my enthusiasm with them. Left behind was a constantly shifting corpus of musicians who, for all their individual qualities, didn’t seem to amount to much more than just another jazz-rock band, taking advantage of the mileage left in the name.

And it’s the old conundrum, going back to Theseus’s ship or the woodsman’s axe. Or whichever football club you happen to support. If, over the years, all the components are replaced, is it the same ship, axe or football club?

So when the latest album by the group currently calling itself Soft Machine arrived in the post, I played it out of nothing more mild curiosity, prepared to hit the eject button as soon as the twiddling-and-noodling quotient was exceeded. To my surprise, I found myself listening all the way through with increasing interest and enjoyment. And then playing it again. For the past couple of weeks it’s been a fairly constant companion.

It’s a live set, recorded in February 2019 by the present line-up — John Marshall on drums, Roy Babbington on bass guitar, John Etheridge on guitar and Theo Travis on soprano and tenor saxophones, flute and Fender Rhodes piano — at a Los Angeles jazz club called the Baked Potato, located on Cahuenga Boulevard, just the other side of the Hollywood Freeway from Universal Studios, and owned by the pianist Don Randi, once of the Wrecking Crew. The Softs’ changes of personnel over the decades would challenge even Pete Frame, compiler of all those celebrated Rock Family Trees. For those who haven’t been keeping up, it’s enough to mention that Marshall joined in 1972, replacing Phil Howard, who had replaced Wyatt in 1970; Babbington arrived as Hopper’s replacement the following year; Etheridge joined in 2004 (see note **), and Travis two years later. In the past, I believe, there have been problems over the use of the name; until quite recently they were unappetisingly billed as Soft Machine Legacy.

The set list is a good mixture of ancient and modern, beginning with Ratledge’s “Out-Bloody-Rageous” (first heard on Third in 1970), given a keyboard intro by Travis which recalls the Softs’ early interest in Terry Riley’s keyboard improvisations. Ratledge’s more fusion-y “The Man Who Waved at Trains” is also present, as is Hopper’s moody “Kings and Queens”, a feature for Travis’s attractively Charles Lloyd-ish flute. The Karl Jenkins era is represented by “Hazard Profile Pt 1” and “The Tale of Taliesin”, both reminders of how effective a musical organiser the Welshman could be in this kind of context.

Marshall contributes “Sideburn”, a two-minute drum solo showing the fine touch he always possessed, and there are two pieces from Etheridge and three from Travis, mostly operating in stylistic terms within a triangle formed by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, mid-’70s King Crimson and the Pat Metheny Group. Which is where I would normally take my leave, except that here there’s no sense of the sort of self-indulgence to which so many excellent musicians — particularly guitarists — were prone during the bad old days of the jazz-rock fusion.

All the pieces here are concise and well formed, and all the solos have substance. Etheridge’s “Heart Off Guard” is another vignette: a gentle study for guitar and soprano that slides into his lovely “Broken Hill”. His solo on the circling and rising chord pattern of “Hazard Profile” is genuinely lyrical and emotionally involving. Travis’s flute is again outstanding on his own “Fourteen Hour Dream” (its title surely a nod to the group’s origins in London’s psychedelic scene), where the supportive excellence of Babbington also takes the ear.

So there it is. There may be no pataphysical ramblings or “Moon in June”-style fantasias emanating from this group trading under the hallowed name, nor a sense of a continuing need to stretch boundaries, but it’s a pleasure to discover that I was wrong to write them off. Maybe I’ll have to trawl through their extensive back catalogue from the decades when I was looking the other way. But even if there isn’t time for that, this is a nice surprise.

* The photograph is by Mauricio Alvarado. Live at the Baked Potato is released on Moonjune Records: http://www.moonjune.com or http://www.softmachine.org

** As several people have kindly pointed out, John Etheridge first joined the Softs in 1975, replacing Allan Holdsworth. See? I told you I hadn’t been paying attention.

Jul 13

16 Comments

Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music

Eddie Gale

The thing I know best about the trumpeter Eddie Gale, who has died at the age of 78, is the first of two albums he made for Blue Note at the end of the 1960s: Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music, an uncompromising title for a piece of music designed to reflect the black experience. In mood and message, it aligns with Max Roach’s slightly earlier We Insist! and Archie Shepp’s slightly later Attica Blues.

Gale had already played with Sun Ra in the mid-’60s and appeared on Cecil Taylor’s first Blue Note album, Unit Structures, in 1966. As a child he’d listened to gospel music and hung around outside a Brooklyn club to listen to Lester Young. He’d taken lessons from Kenny Dorham and sat in with Coltrane at the Half Note: a life-changing experience. He would also be featured on Larry Young’s Of Love and Peace for the same label in 1969. Recording his Ghetto Music project was one of Blue Note’s more unexpected moves. The producer was not Alfred Lion, who took that role on just about every one of the label’s releases, but his partner in the business, Francis Wolff. (Lion had retired when Blue Note was sold to Liberty Records in 1967.)

The five compositions on this album use an instrumental sextet of trumpet (Gale), tenor (Russell Lyle), two basses (Judah Samuel and James “Tokio” Read) and two drummers (Richard Hackett and Thomas Holman), plus a choir of 11 voices, including two lead singers (Elaine Beener and Joann Gale). The leader apart, I’d never heard of any of these musicians before I got the album on its original release, and I’ve never heard of any of them outside of Gale’s orbit since. They seem to have been part of a collective based in Brooklyn.

Whoever they were, they made music with a raw edge and a powerful immediacy. You can hear that on A Walk With Thee, my favourite track from the album. The bass vamp, the martial/bolero drumming, the unison of the horns and voices: it’s a strong brew. Gale has a big sound with a wild edge. Lyle, the tenorist, solos with a kind of suppressed hysteria. It’s an offshoot of what Albert and Donald Ayler were doing a little earlier in the decade. It doesn’t need to be judged according to anyone else’s idea of finesse or sophistication.

A year later the singers and two of the players, Lyle and Judah, were on Gale’s second and last Blue Note album, Black Rhythm Happening, a year later, joined by Jimmy Lyons, the altoist, and Elvin Jones. Gale himself recorded with Sun Ra’s group in the ’70s (Lanquidity on Ra’s Saturn label) before moving to California, where he was an artist in residence at Stanford University, ran a workshop in Oakland and organised music-education programmes in San Jose, where he became the city’s official ambassador of jazz. In 2001 he received an award for his work from the California Arts Council.

Breaking the mode of graphic presentation Blue Note had established under the art director Reid Miles, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music was released with a strikingly confrontational cover, at least by the standards of the time. A bunch of black men in hoods with women in white robes and mean-looking hounds? In 1969, that sent a message. And still it speaks.

* Originally issued on Blue Note in 1969, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music was reissued on CD by Water Music in 2003. The photograph of the musicians is from the original sleeve and was taken by Richard Graf. Some of the details of Gale’s life are from this interview in Jazz Times by Andy Tennille: https://jazztimes.com/archives/eddie-gale/