In the second of this week’s “two-for-one” review slots, Esoteric graces us with two more reissues, set for release at the end of the month. This time around it’s Isotope guitarist and constant factor, Gary Boyle, with his two solo albums, The Dancer and Electric Glide, which first saw the light of day in 1977 and 1978 respectively.

Now, if you’d visited HFoS a year or so back, you would’ve found a place of seething hostility, so far as the the jazz-rock was concerned. It was a musical pariah, persecuted by the very same pen that writes these words now. A lot can happen in a year though, and whereas at one time, anything hitting the HFoS Towers’ doormat intent on jazz-fusion would’ve received short shrift and a thorough kicking on the car park, nowadays the sinewy grooves of bands such as Soft Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra and the aforementioned Isotope have been welcomed into our collective bosom, nurtured and – dare I say it – thoroughly enjoyed.

The Dancer fits into this newfound appreciation of all things fusion, somewhat perfectly.

With the help of an assorted band of musicians, including Zoe Kronberger, who also appeared on the final Isotope album, Deep End, Gary Boyle delivers a sultry collection of sounds that, as Sid Smith notes in the accompanying booklet, could easily be a continuation of that record. Nice!

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

I was nowt but a month old when Jack Bruce took his short-lived band of musical desperadoes to the Manchester Trade Hall for the recording of Live ’75.

Formed to tour the 1974 album Out of the Storm, the Jack Bruce Band dig a little deeper for this particular show, incorporating, not only, that record, but also material from Song for a Tailor, Harmony Row and Cream’s Disraeli Gears.

Featuring jazz keyboardist Carla Bley; journeyman keyboardist Ronnie Leahy; late drummer with The Knack, Bruce Gary; and a post-Rolling Stones Mick Taylor, the Jack Bruce Band was a formidable assembly of musical talent, spearheaded by one of most respected bassists of the 60s and 70s. And the calibre of musicianship on display is more than evident throughout this superior live document of a troupe whose musical alignment was all too brief.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

In 1966, before the term jazz-rock/fusion had been coined, you had your jazz camp and your rock camp; rarely did the twain meet, let alone sit around in a circle, crack open the super-strength chamomile tea and indulge in a full-on jam session.

Unless, of course, you were New York’s own The Free Spirits, whose sole album, Out of Sight and Sound, is widely regarded as one of the first jazz-rock excursions. Live at the Scene captures the band in February 1967, tearing up the then legendary NYC venue, Steve Paul’s The Scene. Well, perhaps not “tearing up”, but giving it a jolly good seeing to, nonetheless.

Fronted by jazz-rock stalwart and veteran guitarist, Larry Coryell (responsible for pushing the embryonic Spirits in a rock direction), the band was a celebrated live phenomenon, some of the unbridled energy and passion of which Live at the Scene attempts to convey. And if it’s a raw, Mr. Sheen-free document you’re after, of possibly the first fusion band engaging in some psychedelically-charged, sonic livestock-worrying, then this release could be right up your jazz-rock boulevard.

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album reviews, jazz rock, psychedelic rock

Thankfully – for miserable old barks such as my good self, anyway – the summer is all but over and a respite from all this sunshine and happiness beckons, with several months’ worth of grey skies, torrential rain, high winds and the occasional blizzard to look forward to. Granted, not the most dramatic departure from the weather we British types have already enjoyed this summer, but at least it gets dark earlier.

Heralding this imminent change of season is the reissue of Jack Bruce’s 1974 album, the aptly titled Out of the Storm.

A formidable offering, it captures the prolific bassist and vocalist (perhaps most famous for making up one third of psychedelic supergroup Cream) during a particularly fruitful period of his solo years. Kicking off with the stately ‘Peaces of Mind’, a progressive piece demonstrating some fine piano-work (which also featured on last month’s ‘Prog Rock Mixtape‘), Out of the Storm maintains a strong pace throughout, never once blowing anything across the threshold akin to a dud.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Experimental avant-garde jazz. Four words guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of any self-proclaimed jazz-philistine. Lol Coxhill – or Laugh out loud Coxhill, as I believe he’s affectionately known to those he’s never met – takes all four of these words and wraps them up in his 1971 double album, Ear of Beholder.

The saxophonist, who’d already played as part of Kevin Ayers’ band, The Whole World, and upon the Shooting At the Moon album, as well as in his own right, under various group guises, saw his first solo offering released on John Peel’s shortlived Dandelion Records label.

There, is that enough crowbarred exposition for ye? What about Ear of Beholder itself? How does it sound? Is it worth parting with my hard-earned shillings for a copy?

Well. As a fully paid up – and, indeed, founding – member of the Jazz Antipathy Society (JAS), my opinion obviously comes pre-loaded with a great deal of prejudice. Nevertheless, as is always my wont, I will approach Ear of Beholder with a fresh pair of ears; take it at face value and various other tired idioms. After all, I have warmed to previous jazz-fusion outings from the post-Wyatt Soft Machine; Pierre Moerlen’s Gong and, of course, the wonderful Isotope. Nevertheless, the chip remains and in general my patience is sorely tested by anything that can be construed as, in the words of the Indian tailor in The Inbetweeners, “too jazzy”. You have been warned.

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album reviews, avant-garde, jazz rock

Hell’s teeth! It would seem Head Full of Snow has become a magnet for jazz-rock fusion of late, what with Pierre Moerlen’s Gong and various late-Soft Machine releases arriving on the HFoS doormat. The reviews of the Soft Machine releases are currently on hold, while work is carried out on a “Which is better?” Soft Machine feature, similar, but grander in scope, to the Pink Floyd one from a couple of years back. Coming soon, to a screen near you.

The soon-to-be reissued Isotope albums from the 1970s are the latest to arrive. The fact they successfully bypassed the jazz filter that hums like an electric fence around the letterbox of HFoS Towers, means they’ve won, by nothing other than the Darwinian theory of natural selection, a reprieve and a window to prove their worth on the HFoS stereo system.

Now, you only have to read back through the archives to catch the drift of my fairly well documented feelings towards jazz in all its manifold forms. Nevertheless, perhaps I’ve undergone a sort of jazz epiphany in the last few months, as my previous hostility has thawed a little, allowing me to find enjoyment in some of the post-Third Soft Machine releases, where enjoyment shouldn’t really exist. Likewise, the last few days spent in the company of Isotope’s self-titled 1974 debut, its follow up Illusion, released in the same year, and 1976′s Deep End, has seen my tolerance of jazz rock shift further afield than the latter-day musings of the Softs, for, and I don’t say such things lightly, I quite enjoyed them.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Gong! One million hippies can’t be wrong!

There, that’s the marketing slogan for any future release from the band of onetime chemically-enhanced space troubadours, well and truly sorted.

To a generation of hippy folk, wilfully indulging in the pleasures of hair-growth, displays of public nudity, daubing one’s body with arcane psychedelic symbols and smoking enough of the planet’s naturally grown herbal “remedies” to floor an equally hirsute Woolly Mammoth, the name Gong will conjure up memories of free music festivals in the deepest, darkest regions of the West Country; LSD-fuelled voyages into the regions beyond our own galaxy; and, of course, 33 minute guitar solos, courtesy of a cerebrally-expanded Steve Hillage.

The late 60s and early 70s provided a particularly memorable period of creativity for the intergalactic doyens that inhabited planet Gong and even when the flying teapot eventually grounded and the founder members had departed, there was Pip Pyle’s replacement, drummer Pierre Moerlin, to take up the mantle and continue the brand.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Call somebody a dog for a long enough period of time and they’ll begin to respond to the name. So goes the theory that I just made up. Likewise, listen to some borderline jazz-rock enough times and, horror of horrors, you may begin to like it.

As you may already know, jazz in all its multifarious guises doesn’t tend to go down too well within the walls of HFoS towers. If any ever turns up at the gates, lugging a sorry looking and shiftless saxophone solo behind it, nine times out of ten it gets short shrift. By short shrift I mean a blindfold and directions to the nearest motorway.

However, for some reason I have allowed an exception to the rule as far as Soft Machine is concerned. Maybe it’s the fact that their first two albums, Volume One and Volume Two, are absolutely cracking examples of psychedelic/prog rock that deserve a place in the collection of all fellow heathens. Perhaps it’s Mike Ratledge’s ability to steer a steady, yet intoxicating course across a Fender Rhodes electric piano. Or possibly, I’ve taken leave of my senses and a padded cell beckons; this review being nothing more than a warped figment of my fevered imagination.

Whatever the rationale for allowing something jazz-flavoured across the hallowed threshold, it will be the second time such an occurrence has… erm… occurred, with Soft Machine’s ninth album Softs also recently getting a glowing appraisal.

This time around it’s the third album, somewhat aptly titled Third, that’s challenging long held opinions on whether Soft Machine was any good following Volume Two. Previously, HFoS has pitched its tent firmly in the NO! camp, but now the tide is beginning to turn.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

It isn’t often you’ll find me eating my words and even rarer you’ll find me admitting to it, but if you read the review of The Soft Machine’s Volume One, just a few weeks back, you might’ve noticed I was rather dismissive of the later releases issued under the Soft Machine name. The threat of jazz fusion has always been enough to see me turn tail and run for the hills. Like a man pursued by the collected recordings of Weather Report.

Released on the Harvest label in 1976, Softs is different. The ninth album by the once celebrated darlings of the psychedelic/prog underground scene (albeit in a completely different guise), takes a step back from the unpleasantness often associated with the j-word and instead sooths a troubled mind with a wholly more palatable, instrumental progressive rock feel.

Dependent upon your own personal view of all things jazz, either the thanks, or the blame, for this diversion can be placed at the door of John Etheridge, whose arrival at Soft Machine camp (the definite article having fallen by the wayside a long time ago), saw a more guitar driven brew leaking forth from the sound desks of Abbey Road Studios. Etheridge replaced Allan Holdsworth, who had played on the previous Soft Machine album, Bundles, the band’s first flirtation with a lead guitarist since 1967′s debut single ‘Love Makes Sweet Music’ b/w ‘Feelin Reelin Squeelin’, featuring Gong’s Daevid Allen.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Alan Bown played the trumpet with rock & roll big band, The John Barry Seven. When the Brit beat and R&B boom exploded, Alan Bown did what any self-respecting trumpeter would do and formed his own group, The Alan Bown Set, soon to be known as The Alan Bown!

With Jess Roden on vocals and a couple of Toytown psych excursions, in ‘Mr. Job’ and ‘Toyland’, under the belt they released Outward Bown and a self-titled album before Roden quit. The vocals for the latter were re-recorded by the late Robert Palmer, he of ‘Addicted to Love’ success, who went on to pull exactly the same stroke as Roden for the next album, quitting the band just prior to its release.

Gordon Neville was recruited to overdub Palmer’s vocals and, now simply calling themselves Alan Bown, 1970′s Listen was the result.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Not one for the feint-hearted when it comes to all things jazzy, 1969′s ‘Igginbottom’s Wrench (apostrophe included) was the first recording of progressive-jazz journeyman Allan Holdsworth, and though still within the realms of prog rock, it skirts closer to the borders of jazz-fusion.

Well to the ears of this fully paid-up member of the jazz-philistine club it does.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock