The Roaring Silence (1976)

Marshalling white R&B / soul with prog-rock may seem an unlikely project but it’s the one South Afrikaner keyboardist Manfred Lubowitz took for himself. He hit first and often with his band and new sobriquet Manfred Mann in the ‘60s and then again (if somewhat more modestly) with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the ‘70s. Mann long intrigued me from a distance. I liked (but didn’t love) the hits: “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Blinded by the Light” (written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen for his first album in 1973) both made #1, and “Mighty Quinn,” probably my favorite, reached #10. Somewhere I got the idea the albums were good, but I never sat down with them until recently. By way of internet recommendations, I also tried the Earth Band’s Solar Fire (1973) and Watch (1978). The Roaring Silence attracted me most, doubtless because of the Springsteen covers. Versions of the album now include the 3:49 radio edit of “Blinded” as well as the original 7:08 album kickoff. I’m more familiar with the radio version so that’s the one that sounds right to me, though I appreciate the various proggy twists and turns of the longer piece. Mostly I’m just kind of tired of the song now, and also its follow-up, “Spirits in the Night,” a soundalike to the big hit, and another Springsteen cover from his first album. It reached #40. But I found the 8:19 “Singing the Dolphin Through” irresistibly beautiful. I wish it were shorter but I’m still not tired of it, and somehow a little embarrassed that something this overweeningly sweet would get me. Speaking of embarrassing, there’s the embarrassingly titled “Waiter, There’s a Yawn in My Ear” (apparently inspiration for the album’s cover art or possibly vice versa, but someone should have stepped on that title). It’s where the band goes full antiseptic prog in a live setting, tarted up further in the studio. The crowd loved it. I don’t mind it. The album is always at least pleasant for me, such is my 20something corruption. Affection for prog does linger on in my psyche. I note that keyboardist Mann and guitarist Dave Flett can be perfectly competent-plus and even inspired on their instruments. The other main points of interest are “Starbird” and “Questions,” which continue another Manfred Mann project, adapting classical music to pop songs. In the early ‘70s, the Earth Band approached the Gustav Holst estate for permission to adapt Holst’s suite, The Planets. But when they submitted their Jupiter installment, “Joybringer” (now a bonus track on the Solar Fire album), the estate closed them down forthwith. But never say die. “Starbird,” on The Roaring Silence, is based on a Stravinsky theme. “Questions” is based on a Schubert theme—I hope and trust Schubert had nothing to do with a further embarrassment of these lyrics. I mean, really, it can get pretty dopey around here. Still, the album is good for a hit of guilty pleasure when I am occasionally in need of prog, and it also has a solid if not entirely inspired line in soul too.

School Days (1976)

Rock critic Robert Christgau puts Stanley Clarke in the Meltdown list of his 1970s Consumer Guide (with England Dan and John Ford Coley, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, Klaatu, Chuck Mangione, Jean-Luc Ponty, and many others you wouldn’t want to meet in a music discussion group). I can see the point, listening to School Days again lately, but the album has certain sentimental attachments for me and vivid mood memories of the mid-‘70s. It was given to me as a gift by a friend who also happened in his own right to be a highly active bass player, playing in a free jazz ensemble and jamming around. Clarke was a kind of peer, or maybe role model just five years ahead of him, a founding member of Return to Forever and long-time sideman to Chick Corea. School Days is Clarke’s fourth solo album and it raised his commercial profile to new heights, reaching #34 on the Billboard 200 album chart (#2 on Jazz Albums). At one time—say, shortly after the gift exchange—high points like the riff on the title song starting around 1:41 sounded positively heroic to me. I played it loud and I played it often. But after that first one (of six tracks total) the songs drift toward the inane, with various exercises attempting to evoke moods and such: “Quiet Afternoon,” “Desert Song,” “Hot Fun,” so on so forth. There’s a strong sense of dynamics here and an ability to take it down low. The horns are a nice touch, the vocals not so much. There’s too much focus on the bass, but, well. And I loved the overall antiseptic cleanliness of the sound, perhaps the primary appeal to me of fusion. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It was never so much the playing fast that did it for me as it was the doing so cleanly. These were virtues for me in 1976. See Al DiMeola (also on the Meltdown list) or Chick Corea, to come full circle and return to forever. Yet inevitably, in my experience, the antiseptic leads too surely to the sterile. Next stop punk-rock.

Erpland (1990)

Every now and then I get sentimental and like to recall the origins of this blog in 2006 and 2007, as an "MP3 blog" with dangerous illicit downloads and such. Google delisted me along with all the rest of us and I'm not sure I've ever made it all the way back. But don't worry, that's all behind me now. I pay Napster $10 a month to do it for me (≠ endorsement). Ozric Tentacles was one of the bands I had never heard of until these downloading days, which introduced me to many acts I had never heard of, for example Spock's Beard, 8 Days in April, and Chicken Shack. Most seemed to fall close to prog and/or metal designations, which says something that still surprises me about my taste as filtered by the internet. Many of these strangers were better than I expected, sometimes by a good deal. But mostly I was busy at the time with other priorities so it took me a while to get to them. I still don't really know Ozric Tentacles well. On this early album they are a synthy instrumental British prog unit playing somewhat in the tradition of Genesis (minus the folklore elements). The obvious peers are more from central Europe, notably Mannheim Steamroller and Tangerine Dream. At 73 minutes, Erpland is plainly a product of the optimistic new CD era. With 12 tracks averaging over six minutes each, it's heady and indulgent. At its best it is like a psychedelic Steely Dan without the sneering cynical lyrics (arguably the Dan's best point), or aimless and freewheeling jam fragments like the Todd Rundgren's Utopia album. At its most pablum Erpland is easy listening elevator stuff, a little too close to Mannheim Steamroller for my comfort—actually, I just learned this minute, Mannheim Steamroller is a US act from Nebraska. Don't be fooled like me by the German word. Erpland has been a fun album to finally get to but I must say it's not giving me a lot of incentive to pursue Ozric Tentacles further. I can report I had the same experience with Spock's Beard, which leans more into metal. I'm sorry to report 8 Days in April (krautrock) has never been available on streaming as far as I know—I happen to know it's the best of this bunch. But Chicken Shack is on Napster—I took a couple songs and may be able to report back more later. Meanwhile, this blog turned 15 this month. Happy blogiversary to me!

A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

(Uncorrected short version here.)

A Tribute to Jack Johnson is a great example of "electric Miles," a late phase of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's career begun in 1968 with In a Silent Way. Electric Miles not only wired and amped up his icy attitude and complex sound, but began looking to more contemporary sources as well, such as Sly Stone and James Brown, for the self-conscious explorations of identity that provide so much urgency here, still, for this and for so much of his work from the time, at once operating inside a tradition and yet feverishly innovating and expanding it. This album is well known, much loved, and there's not a lot I can add except to echo the sentiment that it's one of the greatest albums ever made, jazz or rock, and you should probably go listen to it right off.

Brian Auger's Oblivion Express, "Dragon Song" (1971)

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Staying with John McLaughlin and things fusion one more week, British keyboardist Brian Auger's first album with his Oblivion Express band offers some slight pop sweetening and really makes the instrumental by McLaughlin gleam. Auger's take on "Dragon Song" (also on the Devotion album) is not so much dreamy and textured as streamlined and propulsive, not so much intuitive as professional, like the engine of transport the name bears. Among other things, the Oblivion Express included drummer Robbie McIntosh, later of the Average White Band, who in turn would later bring in Oblivion Express guitarist Jim Mullen to that project. I might like the McLaughlin original a little better now, but in high school daze the whole Brian Auger album this song is found on became an obsessive favorite. "Dragon Song" stays well within the bounds of what it intends to be, a straightforward blast, with a churning, catalyzing bass figure that sends it hurtling down those tracks. Mullen steps in and peals off a solo I seem to know still note for note. Then Auger has his turn on a Hammond organ (or similar keyboard). Hey, didn't we have a time doing it this way. A bewitching riff, a tight band, solos, music for chair-sitting and head-bobbing at home. With Brian Auger's discography running now into the dozens of albums (none of which I know after the mid-'70s) it's fair enough to call him a professional in the business. But if there is formula and calculation to this, that doesn't make it any less effective. Although it may account for why I lost interest in him relatively early.

John McLaughlin, "Devotion" (1970)

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The Devotion album does not sound like much of anything else in John McLaughlin's catalog. There are a couple of reasons for that: producer Alan Douglas (of the Douglas label, on which the album was originally released) mixed the sessions when McLaughlin was not around, and McLaughlin did not like the result. Douglas got in trouble again later for his work with various Jimi Hendrix tracks after Hendrix's death. But on that score what I know is that my favorite posthumous Hendrix album, Blues, gives Douglas a production credit. And Devotion is my favorite John McLaughlin album. So I guess Douglas has to be doing a few things right by me. I never cared for the Mahavishnu Orchestra albums; the only other project by McLaughlin I liked much was the collaboration with Carlos Santana. I liked his session work with Miles Davis very much, of course, probably more than any of his other work. This 11-minute lumbering slow-burn title song is as good an exhibit as any of the tilt of Devotion, with a classic rock band outfit playing it loose and dreamy. Drummer Buddy Miles (of Hendrix's Band of Gypsys) and bassist Billy Rich are the rhythm section, Larry Young plays a spooky organ, and McLaughlin is on an electric guitar that swivels between squalling and lyrical, sometimes getting them both at once. This is definitely the heavy stuff, with a bottom massive enough to bear its own gravity, a sluggish tempo, and ample room and atmosphere for strange noises to paint various pictures. All four feel totally involved: Rich's swelling bass patterns are often the most lovely thing here, Young's organ lines float at eye level, jagged, translucent, free floating, and McLaughlin's playing is deliberate yet with that sense of rhythm and texturing and anti-melody that is like few others, and was trail-blazing in its time. Let this one flatten you.

Brian Auger's Oblivion Express (1971)

Another big fave from high school era this somehow ended up being the one and only Brian Auger album I ever cared for. Not even sure it's really his debut, though maybe so for the band. The artist he reminds me most of nowadays is Todd Rundgren playing with Utopia, post-Bitches Brew fusion with a decidedly pop flavor and little of the steaming atmospherics of Miles or the Soft Machine, instead erring on the side of martial and tidy. Kept his tempos nimble and quick. Played a reedy Hammond that nicely provided a variety of moods and layers of sound and dimension. Went to the right elements: Weird time signature, check. Cover of John McLaughlin, check. Majority stake in future members of Average White Band, check. What do you do? Rock it.

Devotion (1970)

John McLaughlin, a guitarist apart as he proved once and for all in sessions with Miles Davis, spent much of the '60s as an in-demand sideman for the likes of Graham Bond, Georgie Fame, and Jack Bruce, even Bowie, Hendrix, and the Stones. Approximately here is where he started out on his own, though it was the Miles dates and then the Mahavishnu Orchestra where he broke as a star, at least as much of a star as a fusion artist can be. For me, never a fan of notes-per-second, strange time signature noodling, which is how the Mahavishnu stuff sounds to me, this is the album that counts (well, this and those Miles sides) -- all moody layers and washes of smoky, doomy sound, as sure-footed as a muscular feline padding about the place. And, oh yeah, works on some level as a spiritual exercise too. Profoundly moving. Food for the soul. One of a kind, this. One for the ages.

Head Hunters (1973)

"Chameleon" I guess nobody can ever accuse Herbie Hancock of proceeding without commercial instincts. Here, with "Rockit," even when he was still with Blue Note, he has never shown much fear of appearing shallow, but just plows on with what he's got and whatever is out there, whether it's disco or the jazz-rock fusion or whatever. So caveat and all that. There may not be a lot of what you might call substance here, but it just sounds so cool -- or, failing that, so cheesy cool -- that it's hard not to forgive it any crassness. It's just fun to listen to and to have playing in your living room. In fact, I really wish I had a mask like the one he's wearing on the cover.

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Big Fun (1974)

"Great Expectations" Some weird stories for me with this one. The first time I bought it, as a used album a couple years after its release, I didn't discover until I got it home that it was caked with some gritty substance -- sand, probably, or maybe salt. I'd never encountered anything like it before (or since). The surface noise was outrageous and I could only imagine what it was doing to the stylus. Then, years later, buying it as a CD, a record store clerk became abnormally excited that I was purchasing it. "Oh boy," he kept saying enthusiastically. "Big fun. Big fun!!" Just about anything from a record store clerk needs to be taken as sarcasm on some level, but he seemed sincere enough about it, and in fact I think it made me like these Miles Davis slabs even more. Not that they aren't perfectly fine all on their own. They are. But human psychology -- I'm starting to think it's nothing but a joke.

Live-Evil (1971)

"What I Say" Maybe it's just me but practically 40 years on this sounds as fresh, potent, and compelling as ever. The titling strategies of Miles Davis here may be a bit eccentric, not to say tipped over into the unblinkingly weird, with "Sivad" and "Selim," respectively, kicking off both album side 1s and CDs. And while it's approximately here that he begins his evolving sojourn toward a street cred that may have lived only in his mind, looking forward to the exercises of On the Corner, its cover graphics continued the themes of liberation begun with Bitches Brew, here turned somewhat inside out. Either that, or Columbia wanted to make the most of its relationship with unmistakable cover artist Mati Klarwein, who they also went to for the cover of Santana's Abraxas.

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In a Silent Way (1969)

"Shhh/Peaceful" Great slabs of Miles Davis, 20/25/30-minute jams uninterrupted at a time sometimes even more, all day jazz deep into the night, an indulgence since I was a teen, and it all starts approximately here. Not that this is typical -- in fact, it's more the oddity compared to what followed. As Miles chased his legend into the '70s the rhythms came forward far more than anything here, while harsh and brittle shards of electric guitar battled the rippling electric piano keyboards for supremacy. Miles's own solos never changed much, in terms of quality, as lyrical and poignant as ever. But this is before all of that and not nearly as unruly. It's a study in improvisation, set pieces all quiet and hushed and subtle, the groping among the players almost too painful to bear. Until suddenly everything falls into place, a discovery is made like a sunrise in sound, and they all fall onto it, devour it. Then the beauty is almost too painful to bear.

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A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

"Right Off" This one's durable, always sounds fresh and you can play it twice or more daily and it only gets better. It's a wonder that I ever stop listening to it at all. The first (vinyl) side, aka "Right Off," cooks up a funky stew that stretches forever. John McLaughlin shines as always with Miles. The flip, "Yesternow," is based on an almost self-consciously ugly bass figure that may or may not continue for the entire 26 or so minutes. The merry crew travels to many a tidy harbor and through storms at sea. Then, if you're anything like me, you always jump when James Earl Jones starts yapping, because you always forget that he does.

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