JOHN STEVENS/EVAN PARKER - The Longest Night Vol 1

 

(OG 120)

 

Track listing: 19.11/19.44/20.23

 

John Stevens (percussion, cornet, vocals), Evan Parker (soprano sax). Recorded at Riverside Studios, London W4 (? Don't they mean W6?) on "the longest night of 1976" (i.e. 21 December). Produced by John Stevens. Sleeve design: Nicolette Amette.

 

How to find and breach a gap in the electrified barbed wire fence erected around absolutist free improvisation, largely by its creators? "We are the originators" said John Stevens, followed by "Evan and I are two of the most skilled improvisers...of this highly specialised form of improvisation (sic)." To paraphrase the Salzburg guy in Amadeus, a little modesty would not have ill become the drummer. But I don't think the word was in his working vocabulary. As an organiser of improvisation, his mind was firmly his own and he expected his collaborators to bend to it, with occasionally fruitful musical results, but with the equally frequent risk of fall-outs and schisms, and most improvisers, unwilling to be merely an extension of his personality, ended up falling out with him.

 

That number included Evan Parker, who abruptly quit the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the middle of a gig. At the time the SME had been reduced to Stevens and two saxophonists. Ideological differences, you see. Apart from a near-anonymous appearance in the ranks of the "Spontaneous Music Orchestra" - there was one album, SME = SMO, recorded live at St John's, Smith Square, on my eleventh birthday, the music on which flops along with agreeable patience, like the tentacles of a dozing giant octopus - Parker and Stevens had not recorded together since 1968.

 

Hence The Longest Night was an important reunion. So much forbidding critical gatekeeping verbiage has been erected around this two-volume recital with the clear intent of deterring as many people as possible from listening to it (yes, the ghost of André Breton has raised his grumpy head). It's "austere," "forbidding," "extreme." KEEP OUT, commoners.

 

Actually I found it thoroughly light-hearted and good-natured. Vol 1 commences with a series of howls from Parker's soprano and Stevens' cornet - no, he couldn't really play the horn; he just viewed it as another source of percussive punctuation - which seem ostensibly designed to ward off human beings from listening any further but which to me sound much more like delightedly surprised exchanges of "HEY, long time no SEE, how's it going?" Catching up with the chitchat. How civilised.

 

That greeting out of the way, Stevens settles at his reduced drumkit and gets down to serious work. No bass drum, two hi-hats, a child's snare - it's as if he's practising in the bedroom cupboard, trying very hard not to wake up anybody else, and/or cocking a sneer at the (to, interestingly, both him and his late 1976 punk contemporaries) overrated virtue of technical facility.

 

But by God he listens and responds to what Parker is doing. The level of exchange and activity is technically dazzling. Rippling rimshots are his response to the saxophonist's slurred key-pressings and false registers. This is minimally absorbing work, and it's telling that Parker is notably less abstract than he could be (at the time; see Saxophone Solos) as a solo improviser - a compatible partner (Derek Bailey, Paul Lytton) always seemed to lighten his otherwise unforgiving intensity.

 

Parker also indulges in a lot more "conventional" saxophone work here. On "19.11" he and Stevens establish and develop a broad thematic structure and he approaches Steve Lacy's sense of melodicism at times. The music is comparatively quiet but exceptionally busy. With seemingly little need of effort, both men arrive at a satisfactorily climax; there's even what you might term a brief thematic "head" to conclude the piece.

 

In "19.44" they work on this language in a slightly more detailed fashion. Parker's soprano is very near to the blues at some points, and there are a couple of lovely moments when the saxophonist's ululatory incantations are abruptly halted by a single blast of Stevens' cornet, whereupon he moves to a quieter, more meditative cycle of tones and notes. This in turn is bracketed by another cornet alert, and again the two work the music up to something approximating a coda.

 

The side-long "20.23" is absolutely fascinating listening. There remains the feeling that this reunion, though welcomed, is still by necessity somewhat tentative and cautious, but the interaction between the two players here is spellbinding. This is different from what Stevens would do as half of a duo with his (then) remaining SME partner, Trevor Watts - on Face To Face and Bare Essentials you really do get the impression of a single body functioning in two separate but connected facets.

 

Again, the resources available to the two players are patiently worked upon, refurbished and built up. Some minutes into the piece, Parker finally unleashes his double-toned circular breathing technique to mimic a flock of seagulls, and Stevens responds in two places with a sort of shamanic vocal drone (while still fluttering around his kit like an anxious gypsy moth). The music proceeds to escalate in intensity, and when the seagulls return to port, Stevens' cornet is to hand (and he manages to keep playing the kit at the same time - I saw him do this several times and still can't work out how he succeeded).

 

Both horns, over a vaguely sinister drone of hi-hat cymbals, return to a sustained and complementary cycle of figures in order to bring the piece to a close. It is perhaps a gesture to the impending punk sea change that Stevens seems to be questioning the need for "virtuosity" - after all, Parker plays the saxophone with such thorough and rigorous technical skill that it would make most would-be saxophone students give up before even beginning to learn, whereas as a cornetist, Stevens was a great drummer. But both parts fit into each other, and sound delighted to be doing so. This is quite a radical gesture, and I have to say renders this supposedly austere improvisation completely approachable and assimilable. Vol 2, which will be coming up in three weeks' time, comprises "the short ones." No need for any pliers; the fence had been open for us to walk through all the time.

 

Current availability: Reissued in 2007 as half of a double-CD package also containing OG 420 and OGCD 005, and made available to download in May 2021.

HARRY BECKETT’S JOY UNLIMITED – Got It Made

 

(OG 020)

 

Track listing: Got It Made/Moon Dancer/Time Again/Jungle Wild/Spiral Image/Getting It Right

 

Harry Beckett (trumpet and flügelhorn), Ray Russell (electric and acoustic guitars), Peter Lemer (electric and acoustic pianos), Roy Babbington (electric and acoustic basses), Martyn (?) David (percussion), Alan Jackson (drums). Recorded at an unspecified location (but obviously in a studio) on 13 July 1977. Released: December 1977. Produced by Harry Beckett and Keith Beal. Sleeve design: Penny and Steve Taylor. Photography: Fred Kavalier.

 

The third Joy Unlimited album received generally dismissive reviews at the time of its release. With the possible exception of OG 527, it was the most conventional and straightforward, and perhaps also the most commercial, album Ogun ever put out. The dogmatists didn’t like it. What is this fusion fluff, critics queried. What a betrayal of the fiery spirit of free cont. p. 94. What is a label like Ogun doing putting out muzak?

 

I have to admit that I didn’t have much time for the record either. I’d been so taken by the devil-take-the-hindmost freewheeling aura of Memories Of Bacares that I regarded this one as a letdown. Everything here, I thought, just sounds so…bleurgh…conventional. What happened? In the late seventies I was a reasonably angry post-punk teenager. I wanted Pere Ubu, Suicide and Devo. Noise and adventure. A lot of the time these days I still do; that hasn’t changed. What could I do with what sounded like an everyday and utterly unremarkable album of jazz-rock fusion easy listening? What could anyone?

 

But I didn’t let go of my copy of Got It Made. It stuck around. Over the decades I would keep fleetingly thinking; well, maybe I’ll appreciate it someday. Then I found I had other things to do and never got around to that. Until I got the idea to do this blog and realised that I’d finally have to come to new terms with the album. Was it as forgettable as I remembered it being? Well, I’ve already found myself reacting differently to several cherished items in the Ogun catalogue – perhaps I’ll feel different about it now. So I’ve now listened to it, in full, three times.

 

What was the younger me – or indeed jazz critics circa 1978 - thinking? I am absolutely knocked out. Got It Made is a fabulous record. I think it might be one of my favourite Ogun albums. It’s one of those rare jazz sessions where everything and everybody – musicians, material, environment – just gels. Thank goodness I kept it. I knew there’d be a reason to do so.

 

The line-up here is almost entirely different from Memories Of Bacares. Only Ray Russell, and obviously Harry Beckett himself, return from that record, although Martyn David, who was present on the first Joy Unlimited album when his first name was spelt “Martin,” was also back in the group (what IS the situation with Mr David’s first name, anyway? Is it Martin or Martyn? A Google search suggests that either is valid. Use the comments box below to enlighten me). But this is a real Rolls-Royce of a rhythm section. Peter Lemer, Roy Babbington and Alan Jackson – total British jazz heavyweights who’ve seen and done everything and with whom you mess at your peril.

 

The album starts, logically, with the title track; a repeated minimalist tuned percussion figure that briefly raises the eyebrow – just where is this record going to go? – turns out to be the launching pad for a terrific and infectiously catchy carnival tune, perfect for a sunny August Bank Holiday Sunday afternoon in Ladbroke Grove. Cleverly, the introductory theme is given to Lemer’s piano, so when Beckett comes in he goes straight into a solo. Ray Russell picks up on what the trumpeter is doing without delay, and it’s uncanny how all six musicians interact so telepathically with each other; even through Jackson’s energetic drum solo, Russell has something to say at the back with his Hank Marvin quivers. Towards the end Lemer builds up tension with high-register keyboard flutters, but these, as the band’s name suggests, are the dynamics of joy. What a fantastic – and danceable – opening track.

 

As for “Moon Dancer,” I think this is one of the loveliest pieces of music in the Ogun catalogue. It’s a beautiful ballad in which flügelhorn, acoustic guitar, piano and flanged Fender bass twirl around each other’s souls like renewed angels. I thought of what a Weather Report with Miles on trumpet might have sounded like – don’t be clever and giggle “In A Silent Way”! – and this piece of music exists at that level. Beckett’s playing in particular reaches the same heights of transcendence that it managed in the closing section of Westbrook’s Metropolis, where he turned a late-night end-of-the-day reverie into a cavern of mourning. Jackson’s brushwork is so subtle you hardly notice its presence. Passionate and heartfelt – and typically, after a final thematic statement (and few other improvisers can put so much into just playing the theme; think of Lester Young stopping midway through a solo because he’d forgotten how the song’s lyrics went), Beckett leaves it to Russell to take the song out with a delicate solo. This is in fact a classic of recorded British jazz, and I think that, with the right encouragement (and lyrics?), the tune could still become a standard.

 

The tempo rises again with the aptly-named “Time Again,” a fast, happy hard-bop number that really benefits from Messrs Jackson and David’s tandem percussive drive, around which the other musicians expertly weave a picture of purposive interaction. “Jungle Wild” is an extended 3/4 highlife workout that of these six tracks comes closest to Brotherhood of Breath-type affairs and finds Joy Unlimited at their most dynamic. The album’s annotator John Fordham singles out Russell’s backing to Lemer’s Fender Rhodes solo – which latter emerges cautiously from a number of improvised motifs, then brightly – and Jackson’s snare drum work for particular attention, but there is just so much going on here; the way in which Russell immediately falls in behind Beckett’s solo and the two players respond to each other with real excitement and humour, or how Beckett, Russell, Lemer and Jackson orbit the steady pulses of Babbington and David as they hold the whole thing together. At times Russell even ventures into high-pitched near-abstraction – but the whole never goes over the edge; the musicians know each other well enough to pull back when needed.

 

“Spiral Image” is another wonderful ballad – a long and meaningfully-meandering melody which makes me think of things like “A Remark You Made” (Weather Report again), although Jackson’s drumming is noticeably more active than it was on “Moon Dancer” – and it is typical of Beckett’s generosity that he confines his contributions to opening (on open trumpet) and closing (on muted – very Milesian) thematic statements, though still manages to encompass worlds within them. In the context of Joy Unlimited, Beckett seems to play the role of a benign football team manager, giving his colleagues plenty of space in which to express themselves.

 

The album concludes with the buoyant waltz of “Getting It Right” in which, again, every player’s contribution matters; Babbington’s bass is particularly exuberant, and if Russell’s guitar generally remains a lot closer to rock than jazz throughout this recording (with even a spot of psychedelic phasing at one point here!) and is less “out” than in his Rites And Rituals days, his command of dynamics, phrasing and tone remains palpable; no wonder the likes of John Barry, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andy Mackay wanted his services. The tune is as catchy as anything else on the record and the band take the album out in high spirits as Russell continues to improvise while the music fades out (with the implication that this middle-eight could go on forever!).

 

What a superb record Got It Made is. It deserves to be far better known. And it took me well over half a lifetime to arrive at that conclusion. Why? Because of free jazz dogma. Because if something wasn’t atonal or noisy in the seventies, it was routinely deemed as being of no consequence. Because critics chose to subscribe to dogmatic and inaccurate notions of how musicians “should” play, ignoring Beckett’s Barbadian background and pretty much all of his musical history. A world in which melody, tonality and rhythm were regarded as cardinal kapitalist sins. Hence, until almost fifteen years after Beckett’s passing, we have largely chosen to be blinded by outdated and indeed expired notions of theory and approach, rather than to open the window, let the light in and simply enjoy good music, whatever its nature. I think that Got It Made, given the right push, could even become a hit in the 2020s. We disregarded it at the time because, from a personal perspective, I was too young and inexperienced in life to get it and, from a general perspective, because Beckett and his colleagues weren’t playing the precise type of music in the precise type of way that was, at the time and for far too long thereafter, expected and demanded by far too many people. A lifetime later, I realise why I never got rid of the record – it was patiently waiting for me to grow up and understand it.

 

Current availability: Out of print but it can be listened to on YouTube. Bacares and Got It Made have a combined running time of ninety or so minutes so they would either need to be reissued separately or as a double-CD package. Actually one of the majors should pick up on Got It Made. They’d be surprised by just how bloody good it is.

ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE – Happy Daze

 

(OG 910)

 

Track listing: Nicrotto/Seven For Lee/Sweet F.A./Three For All

 

Elton Dean (alto sax and saxello), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Harry Beckett (trumpet and flügelhorn),  Marc (sic) Charig (cornet and tenor horn), Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones), Keith Tippett (piano), Harry Miller (bass), Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums). Recorded at Redan Recorders, Queensway, London W2 on 26 July 1977. Released: November 1977. Produced by Elton Dean and Keith Beal. Photography: “Yuka.” Sleeve design: uncredited.

 

If you wondered why so much of recorded British modern jazz of the seventies is comprised of stolid, stodgy “suites,” then blame the Arts Council. As much of a box-ticking enterprise then as it is in these starved Let’s Create days today, they were never going to give Hard Working Taxpayers’ Money to jazz groups just to tour or record willy-nilly and be themselves. Oh no, the musicians had to prove they were “serious” by which it was meant they should come up with classical music compositions or, indeed, “suites.”

 

Most British jazz musicians of the period, needing to eat, regarded the matter as an occupational hazard necessary to negotiate in order to get that Government grant, and most worked their way around the system. Happy Daze was commissioned by and for the 1977 Bracknell Jazz Festival, yet three of its “movements” were recycled Ninesense band book stalwarts. On the invaluable Live At The BBC compilation of sessions released by the Hux label in 2004 – not easy to find today, but worth picking up if you see it at a reasonable price – one is reminded that “Nicrotto,” “Seven For Lee” and “Sweet F.A.” were once called “Nicra,” “Seven For Me” and “Sweet Francesca” respectively (meanwhile, the same collection’s “Bidet Bebop” would later crop up on OG 410 as “Dede-Bup-Bup”).

 

Therefore, faced with a commission and money, Dean yanked these tunes together with a fourth and welded them to a vague concept – thus a “suite.” It was recorded on the Tuesday after the band had performed it at Bracknell. And although annotator Steve Lake does his sprightliest to get us interested, Happy Daze has some flaws which I think are now endemic to the condition of British modern jazz of the mid-to-late seventies.

 

It begins well enough with swirling piano and drums, and echoing brass fanfares, like a huge ship getting ready to set sail from port, Harry Miller furiously sawing away with his bow as though cleaning the timbers. Then all calms down and the ship is at (a fairly placid) sea (the drift of virtual cumulonimbi seems to have a lot more in common with Keith Tippett’s approach to composition) – but the waves soon turn choppy, and the premature trombone iceberg of Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti looms up in the near distance.

 

With the presence of both trombonists, and Keith Tippett, the aim seems to have been to recreate the intensity of Listen/Hear, with the long and vaguely sinister modal build-up mutating into rapid-fire free play. Indeed, given that this piece was already familiar to Ninesense under the title of “Nicra,” it’s possible that it could have been a starting point for what happens on OG 010.

 

Only this time it doesn’t catch fire. It’s actually a bit of a damp squib. The two ‘bonemen blow rather desultorily around each other and even Tippett can’t really get the sparks to ignite. I suspect one of the main reasons why Listen/Hear was such a spectacular success was that these three men were faced with an unfamiliar rhythm section, which provoked them to try different improvisational tactics. With Miller and Moholo-Moholo they sound, ironically, just too comfortable and it becomes free jazz by rote.

 

Furthermore, “Nicrotto” is yet more evidence for the prosecuting counsel seeking to address the question of what went wrong with British (or British-based; four of Ninesense’s members did not come from the U.K.) free-to-modern jazz from around 1977. Paramount in finding an answer is the seeming incapability of musicians to differentiate between improvising, live, and making records, which like it or not are entities of structure whose purpose is to be listened to repeatedly.

 

As well as placing a barrier between the music and any potential listeners. “Nicrotto” is an illustration of one thing British contemporary jazz on record got continually wrong, namely the “PUTTING THE DIFFICULT BIT FIRST” malady. Beginning your album with its longest (twelve minutes) and most extreme and uncompromising (or, in my perverse view, its most conservative) track is asking an awful lot of your listeners. It’s like erecting an electrified barbed wire fence designed to keep trespassers out. As well as any curious passers-by who might want to check your music out but, repelled by what they initially hear, quickly slink away. And to me it’s as sheerly predictable in its way as anything Kenny Ball might have played on television at the time.

 

Things, happily, do improve – to a point. “Seven For Lee” is a great, snappy jazz-rock modal workout with a solid underlying core of rhythm. A bit third/fourth-album Soft Machine, a lot more second-album Keith Tippett. It lacks the maniacal nature of the BBC Jazz In Britain reading, which features Tippett, on celeste of all instruments, going frankly insane with his no-tone clusters, but Dean, in a yearning-verging-on-panicking John Surman mood, does very well on saxello as Tippett carefully swings his accompanist’s pendulum from straight comping to free-ish upper register rabbit runs and back. Mark Charig, making his third (and possibly misspelt?) consecutive Ogun appearance, not so much. His solo is fine in itself, moving from Henry Lowther-esque tarnished elegance to Don Cherry-style questing, whinnying upper register whimpers – but seems superimposed on the music, rather than naturally arising within it. And whatever his many virtues, this piece requires rhythmic acumen, and while I don’t expect fluid bebop runs or indeed any bebop runs at all, the sad fact is that Charig just doesn’t swing.

 

“Sweet F.A.” is an Ellingtonian ballad, or an element of a ballad anyway – these pieces are basically one sequence repeated ad infinitum – which inspires a strong and generally lyrical tenor solo from Alan Skidmore that only really goes off the mark (though never over the edge) when somebody presses the “now play free” button (more about that in a moment). Tippett, however, gives us the album’s finest solo here, and probably one of his greatest recorded solos, swimming between limpidly forlorn whole-tone chords and Bill Evans-via-McCoy Tyner lyricism – it’s as if he is examining, then exploring and extending, the implications of the bitonal phases of Evans’ “Peace Piece.” Then he switches to a long, angry fast run which he takes to the point of detonation before electing to settle back, meditatively and musically. If you don’t buy the album for any other reason, get it to hear this.

 

The record concludes with the bright waltz of “Three For All,” an attractive fragment almost worthy of Kenny Wheeler’s big band – you can imagine Norma Winstone’s voice singing in unison with the horns. The first featured soloist is Dean again, this time on alto, and the proceedings bounce along relatively amiably until…

 

Well, it seems like a conditioned response, but it keeps happening on Ogun records of this middle period. The moment where an inaudible switch is pressed and suddenly horn and piano go off-piste and into the world of free improvisation. Therefore Dean is quite lyrical until Tippett begins scuttling across the keyboard like an impatient haven’t-had-anything-since-breakfast mouse, whereupon we get the howls, the whines, the noises. Dudu Pukwana and a disciplined Mike Osborne could have pulled this type of caper off, but once more to Joe “What Is Jazz In 1977?” First-Time Listener it’s the equivalent of a barking Alsatian warning strangers away, and poor Joe ends up running a long way away from this field of music altogether. Huh? Why can’t they play straight? They were doing so well…are they trying to prove a point? Then good old Harry Beckett arrives to calm things down and get them back on course, although even he gets momentarily diverted into mock-freeisms (one very major problem with Happy Daze is that its solos are, for the most part, far too long – perhaps to compensate for this “suite” only having four components?). Finally there’s another theme statement which erupts quite unnecessarily into a mass freeform shriek (or, in this case, more like murmurs of complaint) before concluding with Tippett’s booming bottom notes to mark the ship having irretrievably sunken.

 

My problem with records like this is that their “free” components are not really free at all and are, if anything, inimical to those unaware of the workings of the British free jazz/improv labyrinth. And focusing on the “out-there” stuff just isn’t what Ogun is good at. The freakout bits are stimulating in moderation or totality. But some of these musicians seem to me to do “free” so badly. They’re so much more convincing when they utilise free playing as a natural corollary in the context of their music, or rather a lot of time when they simply…play jazz.

 

When people fondly recall Ogun Records they think of Spirits Rejoice!, Family Affair, S.O.S., Tandem, Frames, Blue Notes For Mongezi, Procession. Ingeniously-constructed albums full of genuine inventiveness coexisting with the rawest of emotions. Catchy tunes and danceable rhythms launched into space. Or they think of Ovary Lodge, Voice, Listen/Hear, Pipedream, The Cheque Is In The Mail, The Longest Night – an incredibly diverse range of approaches to group improvisation which always give off the scent of the new and unexpected.

 

But these are all records of adventure. Discordancy and “weirdness” for their own sakes cannot go anywhere. Instead they just pile up and gather dust. It’s a bit like the cumulatively tiresome parade of gore and grotesquerie we were fed on Inside No 9. It isn’t the sub-Tobe Hooper horror tropes or the ceaseless fourth-walling that we remember from that series. It’s “The 12 Days Of Christine.” Or “Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room.” Or “Love’s Great Adventure.” Or even “The Referee’s A W***er.” Well-constructed stories containing both emotion and heart.

 

Ninesense’s reputation, in any case, is mainly based on their live work. Neither of their two Ogun albums really captured the spirit of the band and I don’t suppose, by definition, any recording could have done. You had to be there (and even then – I saw them at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in March 1980. From memory I think it was Larry Stabbins and Marcio Mattos in the band rather than Skidmore and Miller. Use the comments box below to put me right if necessary). I have kept Happy Daze because it does show endeavour and, in one instance, potential greatness. And the tunes (or the three tracks which have palpable tunes) are very good. My central problem with the record is that its endeavour is misapplied. It needed to have come in a little, having been “out there” for so long and so resolutely.

 

Current availability: Reissued, in tandem with most of OG 900, on CD in 2009, and made available on download in February 2021.

MIKE OSBORNE QUINTET – Marcel’s Muse

 

(OG 810)

 

Track listing: Molten Lead/Sea Mist/Where’s Freddy/I Wished I Knew

 

Mike Osborne (alto sax), Mark Charig (trumpet), Jeff Green (guitar), Harry Miller (bass), Peter Nykyruj (drums). Recorded in London on 31 May 1977. Released: autumn 1977. Produced by Mike Osborne and Ron Barron. Photography: Eamonn Hannon.

 

Apparently this is one of Ogun’s most popular releases. It reappeared on CD relatively early and I was somewhat baffled. Ahead of Tandem? Having listened to it again for the purposes of this blog, I have to say that my bafflement persists.

 

Marcel’s Muse – I haven’t uncovered any explanation of the title, and neither has anybody else as far as I can tell – was Osborne’s penultimate appearance on Ogun and his last as a leader. Although other archive material subsequently came to light, this was the last “new” Mike Osborne record to be released in the musician’s lifetime. As a bandleader it was also his first quintet record since 1970’s Outback.

 

Now I’m aware I have to tread exceptionally carefully here. That Mike Osborne had to deal with increasingly severe, and ultimately incapacitating, mental illness throughout the second half of his life is beyond dispute. That he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia is a matter of record. But Marcel’s Muse really does sound to me like two different records awkwardly trying to emerge from the one pair of grooves. One is what could have been a remarkable post-bop group album, the other is a screeching, nails-down-blackboard avalanche of ill-defined noise like it was still ESP Records circa 1965. Both playing at the same time.

 

That latter analogy maybe isn’t fair. Listening to the opening “Molten Lead,” however, it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion. It starts with a terrific, boppy, scene-setting two-horn theme which abruptly decides to alternate with squiggly post-Ornette howling before “progressing” into some very awkward-sounding, and to be frank also quite dated-sounding, “free” interplay.

 

Osborne’s opening solo crystallises the record’s essential dilemma. My goodness, he was an intense player. Also, when not provided with the right environment, a rather one-dimensional one. He continuously races up and down his keys rather monotonously at breakneck speed except when he arbitrarily interrupts his runs with hoarse squeals and honks. But listen to what he achieves with Westbrook (I’ll give you an example –  “Lover Man/For Ever And A Day” on Release, and here’s a second – his duet with Norma Winstone on “Love Song No 4” from Love Songs) or how wonderfully and naturally he dovetails into and enhances the music of Stan Tracey or Isipingo. In a lot of ways these musicians recognised his limitations and found ways to render them creative and truly imaginary. “Ballad Forms” on Tandem is perfect, saxophone and piano thinking and breathing as one.

 

On most of Marcel’s Muse, however, he just seems content to be Ossie-by-numbers. The remainder of the band is an interesting and not altogether compatible mix. Outback, with Miller, Moholo-Moholo, Harry Beckett and Chris McGregor – that was inspired, disciplined, structured and genuinely imaginative and creative music-organising, with well-thought-out themes and improvisational development. S.O.S. with Skidmore and Surman? These guys could read each other’s minds. Their telepathy was instinctive and unearthly.

 

With this quintet I’m not so sure. I feel Mark Charig is essentially wasted here, particularly so hard on the heels of Pipedream. Listen to the lucid, articulate, emotional trumpet player on that record, and endeavour to equate that mental picture with the squabbling, squirting, smeary stuff he plays here, as though simply trying to keep up with the momentum. Likewise guitarist Jeff Green – also fresh from Intercontinental Express – offers some strikingly creative support playing; at times on “Molten Lead” he even approaches Keith Tippett levels of cascading intensity. But on the whole he sounds like an adept modern mainstream player marooned in a noisy whirlpool, his enterprising solos indicating what might have been, had they not been intentionally lost in a storm.

 

Harry Miller is as reliable and ingenious a bassist as ever and, if anything, oddly relaxed in this setting. But think of the phenomenal interplay of the trio with Miller and Moholo-Moholo, how each man really brought out the best and most powerful in the other two – and wish to God Louis had been available to play on this record, because one has to say a capitalised NO to Peter Nykyruj, whose drumming here is frankly

 

BOLLOCKS

 

I haven’t been able to find out much about Mr Nykyruj, and since he sadly passed away in 2004 I don’t suppose I ever will. I somehow got it into my head that he was Dutch, possibly because he seems to have been based in the Netherlands at the time and largely worked with Dutch musicians, but he actually appears to have hailed from Australia, where earlier in the seventies he worked with a progressive rock-fusion band called Snakes Alive. I’m reminded of the time Moholo-Moholo couldn’t make a Brotherhood of Breath gig and they got the chap out of Gong to deputise. A fine player but not the right player for that band, and halfway through the set he was unceremoniously ousted from the drummer’s seat by…Alan Skidmore, who remained there for the rest of the evening.

 

But Nykyruj is no Moholo-Moholo. For a start he never appears to listen to what anybody else is doing. He’s always too loud or too quiet. In “Molten Lead” there’s this unrelenting, monochromatic barrage of thunder, and when he comes to his own solo it’s suddenly all shhh at the back, my tinkling herd of Alpine cattle need to creep onstage. He sounds like somebody who’d like to be Han Bennink but doesn’t possess a fraction of Bennink’s always very firm grip of dynamics. It’s like being stuck with Rusty “I Am The Music Maan” Goffe when you’d much rather have Max Roach.

 

The first four or so minutes of “Sea Mist” are really inspired. What initially sounds like guitar feedback is actually Miller bowing his bass, high above the bridge. It’s simply a slow, delicate guitar and bass duet but it’s completely absorbing and absolutely compelling, like a meatier variant of Ralph Towner and Eberhard Weber. Unfortunately Osborne can’t leave well alone and starts shrieking over it, upon which the piece declines into a series of band-within-band trio/duo setpieces, all rather agitated and unrewarding. Guitar and bass return to conclude the piece, inconclusively. It should have been left to Green and Miller alone.

 

Side two presents us with the record’s central problem. Again, “Where’s Freddy” is a powerful hard bop theme begging for Don Weller and Bryan Spring to come along and make sprightly swing out of it, but again it disintegrates into aimless free-for-allism, Charig and Green sounding as mislaid and misplaced as ever and Osborne seemingly on autopilot. Why not just make a straight-down-the-line modern mainstream jazz record, which I am sure at least four of the five participants would have been more than capable of achieving? This is where a lot of people started to become a little impatient with the free thing. Here, as elsewhere on the record, seem to be sound-effects as opposed to musical ideas, randomly fluttering polytonality for its own sake. It was May ’77; were they getting a little anxious about the punks drowning them out, or of being left behind?

 

And then, suddenly, the record wakes up.

 

“I Wished I Knew” is the only non-Osborne tune on the album. It was composed by Bill Smith, a figure distinguished enough to work with Brubeck as clarinettist and composer, both before and after the Paul Desmond years, and a significant and innovative classical writer in his own right. It is probably best known from Freddie Hubbard’s rendition on his 1961 Blue Note album Goin’ Up. As you might imagine, that record is transitional in nature; you can tell where young Freddie is heading but he’s still pulling himself up from his Clifford Brown roots, but he gives the tune a fine and striking interpretation – then again, what young player wouldn’t be inspired in the distinguished company of Hank Mobley, McCoy Tyner, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones?

 

Osborne and his group play the tune straight, and it is lovely. Suddenly his old magic has returned; he has a lambency comparable with a higher-pitched Bobby Wellins. All the solos are sensitive and Charig’s in particular is lyrical and profound, only slightly reflecting Hubbard’s style, but with a touch of Lester Bowie’s half-valved weary sardonicism. So much better than reducing him to a Sky Bet League One Don Cherry, wouldn’t you think? Meanwhile, Nykyruj’s drums and cymbals are so low-key you’d hardly notice they were there (which is an advantage); at times you could almost be listening to a rehearsal of Kenny Wheeler’s Angel Song. An only slightly spurious solo alto coda takes us comfortably out of the record.

 

So what is there to say about a messy record made by a messed-up mind? Fortunately Osborne did manage much worthier work before his final breakdown in 1982. I recall a Radio 3 Jazz In Britain quartet session from around May of 1980 in which he was joined by his old Westbrook colleague Dave Holdsworth on trumpet, and I think Paul Bridge and Tony Marsh were the rhythm section (use the comments box below to correct me if I’m wrong about that). That was really tremendous music, free-ish but organised, and he sounded in splendid shape. Such a shame they never got around to releasing a record in Osborne’s lifetime.

 

I don’t know, except that Osborne was more than a little depressed as the seventies merged into the eighties – there may be an indication that he felt the nexus of South African musicians were leaving him behind, or putting him out to pasture (in fact most of them had simply left Britain, primarily for economic reasons). At the time of his nervous collapse he was even scheduled to work with John Surman and Alan Skidmore again. But this was a mind in turmoil, and that turmoil is reflected in three-quarters of Marcel’s Muse; here’s a musician who doesn’t really know what he wants to do, caught between two conflicting musical streams and uncertain which one to swim down. I conducted a Google search for reviews of the album and they are, shall we say, ambiguous and divided. It doesn’t give me any pleasure writing this but I have to be honest – either you’re a Wire/Quietus head who digs this on the level of a jazz session being disrupted by strident anarchists (which is a quaint late sixties gesture but hardly makes for repeated listening) or you see this record for what it is; the confused product of a mind nearing the end of its tether.

 

Current availability: Reissued, in tandem with OG 300, on CD in 2004, and made available on download in February 2021.