S.O.S.: S.O.S.

S.O.S - Skidmore - Osborne - Surman

 

(Originally published on Facebook, 15 December 2024)


It's time for the fourth chapter in my survey of Ogun Records. This is the first album on the label not to involve any of the South African or Caribbean exiles directly, and is only present here by virtue of its label. Nevertheless I do think it essential that we should include all of Ogun's releases, rather than a mere fraction of them, since together they tell an emotionally remarkable tale, and in any case most of these musicians are umbilically linked to the SA diaspora thanks to their involvement with the Brotherhood of Breath and its various satellite bands. That's my excuse, anyway...
 
S.O.S.: S.O.S.
(OG 400)
 
Alan Skidmore (tenor sax, drums and percussion), Mike Osborne (alto sax and percussion), John Surman (baritone and soprano saxes, bass clarinet and synthesisers)
 
Track listing: Country Dance/Wherever I Am/Chordary/Where's Junior/Cycle Motion/Ist/Goliath/Calypso
 
Electronics pre-recorded at Griffout Studios (sorry, couldn't find out where that was) on 2-3 January 1975. Producers: Keith Beal and John Surman. Saxophones etc. recorded at Saturn Studios, Worthing, on 9-11 February 1975. Producers: Keith Beal and S.O.S. Released later the same year.
 
This was a major, and controversial, event at its time. These were perhaps the three foremost saxophonists on the British jazz scene; they were all world-class players and at least one of them was acknowledged as the greatest living exponent of his principal instrument.
 
The three men had a strong bond and were in the habit of turning out for each other's individual projects. If you were trying to put a big band together in late sixties/early seventies London and knew these players, then your luck was in because that was three-fifths of your saxophone section sorted out. But they had not previously considered forming a trio between themselves.
 
It seemed a daunting prospect; three saxophones with no harmonic or rhythmic back-up - or so it was assumed. Nothing of this nature had really been attempted in jazz before, and S.O.S.'s role as pioneers remains somewhat underestimated. The World and Rova Saxophone Quartets did not form until 1977 - although Anthony Braxton had experimented with a prototype WSQ on one track of his New York, Fall 1974 album, featuring future WSQ members Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett along with Braxton himself.
 
In any case, neither of these ensembles really strayed beyond the four-saxophones model. But S.O.S. were not like either. The opening track of the only album to be released within the trio's lifetime, "Country Dance," is an agreeable, welcoming introduction, and also the record's most conventional moment; a pibroch-type modal roundelay featuring just soprano, alto and tenor saxophones which is appropriately bucolic - a British folk variation on "The Train And The River," perhaps - and exactly what you'd expect from a trio of saxophones, with each player carefully improvising in harmonic and rhythmic accordance with the piece's main melody, weaving around the musical framework as well as each other, with the occasional euphoric high-register spring and, in places, elements of systems music.
 
The next track, however, is entirely unexpected, commencing as it does with two-and-a-quarter minutes of dark electronics, perhaps hoping to score an early seventies police or conspiracy theory film, before Surman settles on a Latin keyboard vamp, Osborne's alto comes in to solo on top of it - and Skidmore is thrashing away on a drumkit; though no John Marshall or Tony Oxley, he does a very adequate job. The overall result is something like an earthier manifestation of early Weather Report - which is not a farfetched comparison, since Surman and Skidmore, together with trombonist Eje Thelin, briefly augmented that band in early September 1971 for radio and television recording sessions in Berlin.
 
The beautiful Ellingtonian (by way of Keith Tippett's Centipede, in which Skidmore participated? - see the closing section of part three of Septober Energy) lament of "Chordary" sees the trio back on reeds. Surman, initially playing bass clarinet, snakes around the tune's harmonic foundations like an anxious bullfrog before emerging on baritone in a thoughtful solo cadenza. "Where's Junior" is a slightly mournful Brotherhood of Breath (via Canterbury?) riff which spotlights Skidmore's tenor and Osborne's alto before shuddering down to an unstable ending. "Cycle Motion" is based on an aggressive, almost rock-like hook upon which Surman's bass clarinet immediately doubles down before further thematic statements culminate in a squealing free-form scrum before, of all things, the ghost of Keith Emerson's Moog (organ setting) wanders in to conclude side one.
 
Regular readers will recall that "Ist" first appeared on Border Crossing, credited to Osborne alone. On this album, however, all compositions are jointly credited to the trio, and after a rubato opening, with alto and tenor stating the main theme over Surman's bass clarinet drone, the drone then turns into an ostinato which takes the tune in quite a different direction; again, Skidmore and Osborne - the latter a lot more restrained than on OG 300 - take the respective solos.
 
The piece fades into the album's highlight, and one of my favourite tracks recorded by anyone on Ogun, "Goliath," featuring a wholly-liberated Osborne blowing ecstatically over Surman's cathedral of synthesisers (and electric piano?) and Skidmore's punk rock drums. It reminds me of Van Der Graaf Generator or the Dean/Ratledge/Hopper/Wyatt Soft Machine at their most fervent. Towards track's end, Surman's keyboards begin to ascend into the heavens, and there is a holy poignancy which foresees the closing moments of side one, track two, of OG 520.
 
And what to say about the marathon closer "Calypso"? Plenty of cloth-eared Colonel Redfern types complained at the time about the overdubs and electronics, which somehow rendered this music "not jazz." I was eleven when I heard Derek Jewell play this on Sounds Interesting on Radio 3 and I gave not a toss about any of that. Over a Kraftwerkian loop whose repercussions would most keenly be felt in the dance music to emerge from Detroit and Chicago in the following decade, the echoing, rebarbative horns play an out-of-tempo but fundamentally adagio minor key theme, sometimes sounding like the horns of cars stuck in traffic during rush hour in Tokyo, before breaking into angry-sounding false-register howls at differing distances from Surman's loop, which floats from channel to channel in the manner of an undecided butterfly before itself vanishing into the echoes of the infinite. So many unclaimed ghosts. Had, say, Cabaret Voltaire or This Heat put this out in 1981, it would have been applauded as a pioneering masterpiece. S.O.S. is a record so far ahead of its time that nobody else knew what time it would be.
 
Current availability: Reissued on CD in 2006, now available to download here.

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