Eberhard Weber - Yellow Fields (1976)

R.I.P. Jon Christensen, 20 March 1943 - 18 Feb 2020

Another sad farewell to an ECM jazz legend - Jon Christensen has died at the age of 76, after playing on hundreds of sessions for artists including Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, Ralph Towner, Terje Rypdal... the list goes on and on.  Here's a couple of albums in tribute, and a list of previous posts that featured Jon.

Christensen's tight, steady drumming was an important feature of Eberhard Weber's second album as band leader.  The September 1975 session that produced Yellow Fields also featured Rainer Bruninghaus on keyboards and Charlie Mariano on reeds, and saw Weber's music simplify a little from the almost progressive rock-like structures of his debut album.  What emerged was a smooth but propulsive jazz fusion with great expressive leads from Mariano, some timelessly cool grooves on the keys from Bruninghaus, and rock solid backing from Weber and Christensen.

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Jan Garbarek - Paths, Prints (1982)

Jon Christensen had played with Jan Garbarek since the late 60s, and would continue working with him through the 90s.  He provided the perfect base for this keyboardless December 1981 date, again pairing up with Weber's instantly recognisable bass tone as Garbarek and Bill Frisell dripped across the sonic picture like rain on glass.  I tend to tread carefully into 80s Garbarek and beyond, but this album has aged well and is very much a piece with the classic ECM aesthetic.  Kite Dance and the closer Still are particularly lovely.

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Previously posted at SGTG featuring Jon Christensen:
Afric Pepperbird (Garbarek/Rypdal/Andersen/Christensen)
Popofoni (Garbarek/Rypdal/Stenson/Andersen/Christensen etc)
Waves (Rypdal/Mikkelborg/Hovensjø/Christensen)
Solstice: Sound And Shadows (Towner/Garbarek/Weber/Christensen)
Bluish (Stańko/Andersen/Christensen)
The Sea (Bjørnstad/Rypdal/Darling/Christensen)

Nurse With Wound - Man With The Woman Face (2002)

Since Steven Stapleton recently compiled all his "Trippin' Musik" from last year into a box set (that I've yet to explore), why not take a trip back to one of his most eerily psychedelic albums from the early 2000s.  Featuring just three tracks in a succinct 38 minutes, Man With The Woman Face was in hindsight a subtle, understated prelude to the hallucinatory madness unleashed with the Angry Eelectric Finger series.

Beware The African Mosquito (Ring Your Doorbell, Put You To Sleep) is the first extended fever dream that develops from a gently pulsing drone and fluttering, clattering sounds.  Bell tones, snatches of voice and more gradually fill out the lysergic landscape into one of NWW's most striking album openers for some time.   

Ag Canadh Thuas Sa Spèir (Up in the sky, singing) is based around more drones and electronic tones, smudged into a blend of unsettling electronic muck and robotic voice.  Six minutes in, snatches of a full-on Amon Düül style freakout suddenly disrupt, before leaving behind electronic chirruping.  The final 15 minutes plus of White Light From The Stars In Your Mind (A Paramechanical Development) take in even more of a krautrock influence, with a straightup (if speed-shifted) borrowing from early Amon Düül over another pulsing dronescape.  One of the most hypnotic and satisfying NWW records.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister 
Soliloquy For Lilith
A Sucked Orange / Scrag
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Milton Babbitt - Philomel (1995 compi of material released 1970-1980)

Music both bracingly alien and strikingly beautiful from American seralist/electronic pioneer Milton Babbitt (1916-2011).  Babbitt became involved with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the early 60s, and two of his purely electronic works can be heard on the album at that link.

This collection focuses on voice and piano alongside the electronics, and starts with Babbitt's most famous work Philomel (1964).  The vocal parts were written for the soprano Bethany Beardslee, who sings the lead and the electronically manipulated vocal echoes here.  The libretto by John Hollander recounts the myth of Philomel's escape and transformation as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, developing from the virtually mute character in the opening syllables to her final form as a literal songbird.

Next are two versions of Phenomena, which rather than having a text is just built around various sung phonemes, performed in dexterous leaps and bounds by Lynne Webber.  Originally devised for soprano and piano in 1969, then for soprano and electronics in the mid 70s, both are featured here.  The remainder of the collection is piano-based, with a short solo piece (Post Partitions, 1966) and then a really engrossing piano and tape work (Reflections, 1975). 

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George Winston - Piano Solos (1973) (reissued as Ballads And Blues 1972 - The Early Recordings)

Seven years before George Winston became Windham Hill's breakout star, he released his debut album 'Piano Solos' on John Fahey's Takoma label.  Windham Hill reissues, titled 'Ballads And Blues 1972', started from 1981, to make these formative recordings available to the new audiences brought in by Winston's success.

It's a short and sweet, fun little record that packs in all of Winston's early influences on his playing.  The impressionistic, 'New Age' pianism from Autumn onwards is only hinted at here, in a set of bluesy originals, covers (including Fahey's Brenda's Blues) and traditional melodies that cleave more closely to their roots.  Even so, Winston's talents on the piano are clearly fully-formed, and listeners who might not be as receptive to 'New Age' piano music will probably like this better than Winston's later recordings.

Original LP cover

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Previously posted at SGTG: Autumn | December

Miles Davis All-Stars - Walkin' (1957 compi of 1954 EPs)

An essential collection of early Miles Davis, from when he was newly cleaned-up and sounding fresh and vital.  This album paired two earlier 10" mini-LPs, recorded at two sessions in April 1954 with slightly different lineups.  The first two sextet tracks are bold, confident settings-out of his hard bop stall that would lead to milestone albums like, er, Milestones.  The title track might have been taken at increasingly breakneck speeds in concert, but here's it's at a perfect swagger, leaving the fast tempos for Dizzy Gillespie's Blue & Boogie.

The three quintet tracks from the other EP are both a throwback to cool jazz and a sign of things to come in Miles' mellower records.  The trumpet mute goes in, and an absolute Miles classic, Solar, is first up before the group relax into two great standards.  Early Miles Davis, just before the First Great Quintet, doesn't get much better than this.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Blue Moods
Bags' Groove
Miles Ahead
Sketches Of Spain
On The Corner
Agharta

Henryk Górecki - Miserere (1994)

Absolutely stunning collection of Górecki's choral music, which on its release was the composer's first album of his unaccompanied vocal works.  The first half of this collection is taken up by the title piece, written in 1981 as a response to political unrest sparked by the violent disruption of a protest.  Like Górecki's legendary third symphony, Miserere builds with slow deliberation over half an hour, the individual voices introduced in waves of trance-inducing melancholy.

After such a lengthy piece, Amen (1975) is well placed as a moment of simple, spare reflection - its only text is the title.  Then Górecki's earliest piece for voices, Euntes Ibant Et Flebant (1972) wraps up the album's religious selections with more austere beauty.  The remainder of the disc focuses on Polish folk melodies and texts, with a common theme of rivers in My Vistula, Grey Vistula (1981) and the five-part Broad Waters suite (1979).  The latter is definitely my favourite thing here, its gorgeous plaintive melodies capping off an essential collection of 20th century choral music.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Early works
Symphony No. 3
Beatus Vir
O Domina Nostra
Kleines Requiem / Lerchenmusik

Pat Metheny Group - American Garage (1979)

R.I.P. Lyle Mays, 27 Nov 1953 - 10 Feb 2020

Lyle Mays, best known for his long association with Pat Metheny, has died at the age of 66 from causes related to a recurring illness.  To commemorate Lyle's great contributions to jazz from the 70s right up to the 21st century, here's a blast of classic PMG.  Plus more below from previous posts.

American Garage was the second Pat Metheny Group album, and all of its five tracks (in an economic 35 minutes) were co-writes by Pat and Lyle.  The album saw Mays' adoption of the Oberheim synth, and it both builds on the jazz-rock fusion of the PMG debut and also strips it back a bit to a rootsier, rockier sound (hence the 'Garage' concept).  From this distance,  it's just a great little record stuffed with melody, great playing, and a snapshot of the young group just before they became a huge, Latin-influenced group in the 80s and beyond.  Thanks for all the great music, Lyle.

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Previously posted at SGTG featuring Lyle:
Watercolors
Shadows & Light
As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
Offramp
First Circle
The Way Up

Star Inc. - Inner Spirits (1985)

Neat little charity shop find with some great synth textures to be found amidst an hour's worth of New Agey mid-80s electronica, courtesy of Dutch session musician Ed Starink.  Inspired by Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis and Jan Hammer, Starink kitted out his own studio in the 80s with the latest synths and cranked out dozens of 'Space Themes'-type cover albums under various aliases, as well as albums of his own music like this one.

The back cover of Inner Spirits lists an impressive rig for '85, including a Fairlight, Emulator, Roland microcomposer, LinnDrum and all the Korgs, Yamahas and Minimoogs of the day, and Starink gets to work with a bare bones beat that develops nicely on the opening track with a definite Jan Hammer influence.  Second track Crystalline might have some seriously odd production choices in its middle section (thought my headphones had died the first time that hard panning came up), but thereafter the album settles down.  It's a nice tour around the hardware of its day, with quite a few memorable melodies and an obvious talent for arrangement.  If you fancy a mostly mellow hour of 80s electronics, you could do a lot worse than this.

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Ana-Maria Avram / Iancu Dumitrescu - Remote Pulsar (2005)

Longtime readers here will know what to expect from these two Romanian spectralist composers.  If you're unfamiliar though, just sample the first three releases in their catalogue below, then enjoy the rest as they take orchestral, chamber and electronic music and stretch them into ever more extreme distended shapes of sonic mayhem.  Or indeed just start here with today's post, the most recent release I've got up to so far in the music of Iancu Dumitrescu (b. 1944) and Ana-Maria Avram (1961-2017), and one of the most understated by their standards.

Dumitrescu's three tracks are up first on this collection, two of which are reconfigurations of his computer music pieces from album No. 18 in the catalogue (in list below).  Remote Pulsar and Numerologie Secrete both benefit from being fleshed out by the creak and clatter of Dumitrescu/Avram's Hyperion Ensemble.  In between these tracks is a fine workout for percussionist Thierry Miroglio.

The three Avram pieces that complete the album start with another percussion piece, the highly atmospheric Galaxy-Reflection performed by Gustavo Aguilar with some subtle electronic sounds.  Quatre Etudes D'Ombre is another solo piece, this time performed by Isabelle Hureau on bass flute.  Lastly, the Hyperion Ensemble performs the droning Lux Animae, perfectly concluding one of the most eerie and subtly unsettling Avram/Dumitrescu discs that relies on atmosphere rather than sheer power.

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Previously posted on SGTG:
ED.MN.1001 - Medium/Cogito
ED.MN.1002 - Au Dela De Movemur
ED.MN.1003 - Pierres Sacreés
ED.MN.1004 - Musique de Paroles
ED.MN.1005 - Galaxy
ED.MM.1006 - A Priori
ED.MN.1008 - Five Pieces
ED.MN.1009 - Ouranos II 
ED.MN.1010 - Meteors & Pulsars 
ED.MN.1011 - Musique Action '98
ED.MN.1012 - Etoiles Brisees
ED.MN.1014 - Orbit of Eternal Grace
ED.MN.1018 - Remote Pulsar
ED.MN.1019 - In Tokyo

Vyacheslav Artyomov - Way (1990)

To complete the postings of Artyomov's music that I have, here's Way.  Another in the series from when the final-stage, gradually opening up Soviet Union caught the CD bug and pressed dozens of mostly classical releases, it compiles three recordings from the mid 80s.

The first of these is the eerie drift of Tristia, written in 1983 for piano, organ, trumpet and vibraphone with string group.  The sustained atmosphere it creates makes Tristia my standout track on this album.  Then there's two symphonic works: In Memoriam, completed 1984, with a sprawling solo violin part, and the first in Artyomov's Symphony Of The Way series, Way To Olympus, also finished in 1984.  This 33-minute work gives the brass a thorough workout before crashing to an end with an organ chord, having evoked the epic journey of its title.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Elegies
Invocations
Requiem

Vassilis Tsabropoulos with Arild Andersen and John Marshall - Achirana (2000)

Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos made his ECM debut with this October 1999 session, and he's since become an ever more exquisite composer and player.  He's first heard in this most modern-ECM of formats, the piano trio, subtly and with gentle understatement as the title track gets underway.  It's the first of two group improvisations, with the second, Diamond Cut Diamond, being much more alive and propulsive and proving this is a well-chosen trio that gelled really well in the studio.

From there, it becomes increasingly clear that the real group leader is probably Arild Andersen, as soon as he wraps a characteristically solid-oak-carved bassline around his composition Valley.  A further Andersen-penned track is She's Gone, based on a Norwegian folk song.  Throughout the rest of the material written by Tsabropoulous, Andersen plays some of his most sublime bass work, whilst the pianist carries on in gorgeously understated mode.  John Marshall proves to be a great sympathetic drummer throughout, making this one of the very best ECM piano trio albums.

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Vladislav Delay - Multila (2000)

Finnish electronic minimalist Sasu Ripatti returns later this month with his first album as Vladislav Delay in over five years, so time to dig out an early classic of his.  Although it's technically a compilation of two EPs, Ripatti regards Multila as a proper album in his discography.  It came from a fertile time in his career: "The Helsinki period... where I wrote lots of music and didn't do anything else", and the resulting EPs and this CD came out on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction, the sublabel used for their most avant-garde releases.

Basic Channel and Chain Reaction would prove highly influential on the dub techno and minimal techno scenes to come, and there's certainly long stretches of Multila that sound someone doing a Perlon DJ set at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  None more so than the epic 22 minutes of Huone, the most propulsive track here that at least has a clear beat to follow throughout. 

Elsewhere, the rhythm tracks are submerged so far in the murk as to just offer a vague suggestion of where they should be, or reverbed/delayed into incoherence (as on Pietola) or absent altogether other than little blips of static (Karrha).  Regardless of how far from the dancefloor Multila drifts, it always ends up taking you on a journey into inner space that never stops paying its own reward.  Timeless, essential electronica.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Anima