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.