Kubist Tier: 20th Letter of the Alphabet -- RIO (USA, 1986)

Looking at the song titles in the image just above or here on the release page for discogs we can tell we're dealing with something interesting, especially in conjunction with the oddball artist name and album title.  20th letter? not 27th?  Many thanks again to my friends for bringing these crazy finds that are still apparently out there waiting to be brought to light and sound.

Quite a bit like the angular off-fusion of Strangeness Beauty or Free Funk Trio from these pages before, we have all instrumental wacky RIO/jazz, perhaps more the former than the latter, with compositions by collective but preferentially from the rhythm pair of drummer Danny Frankel and bassist Darryl Tewes.  You can see the latter went on to create other apparently one-off bands with the creative names of Acre Foot, Page Eight, and The Dark Bob, all the way forth on the fourth dimension up to the year 2014.

Dirk's definitely on the Needle for track A2:






Many thanks again to the dear friends who find these gems.

Jose Pedro Beledo in Escape 1985

This is a wonderful, absolutely delightful unknown mixture of Spinetta Jade-type lush latin pop-fusion with inventive, rich chord changes in a tropically sweet exciting package, and the progressive American style of intellectual electric guitar that we've heard before from the likes of Rick Bishop or Scott Goudeau from these pages.  There is a nice bio online which briefly mentions this album, as well as a second called El Cefiro, which, obviously, needs to be now found, but little on discogs.

The first track demonstrates the awesome professionalism and inventive songwriting:





Fantastic and unknown find.  Thank you again...

Jun Fukamachi plays on the completely unknown cassette Daisy Chain, from 1983, recommended

A famous keyboardist who was also quite prolific in the era, and a lost and unknown cassette... is it like having heaven on a stick? On several tracks you will notice he achieves an impressive Jasper van t'hof-like complex meld of fusion and synthesizer melodiousness in perfect harmony.  He seems to be playing on multiple keyboards (overdubbed) with the occasional guitar accompaniment, occasionally solo, and on some tracks including rhythm section, but the result is quite enticingly full and appreciably fusion. 

As far as I can tell this wasn't released to LP, nor does it appear in the list of his releases.  What luck to have it unearthed by our wonderful musical miners...





Will these old wonders never cease?

I'll include all the other Fukamachi albums that I have on file, there are I think 20 in total, three separate files to download for limited time only. 

Albums are the following: 1975 Rokyu, 1975 Introducing, 1976 Spiral Steps, 1976 Fukamachi at Steinway (possibly incomplete), 1977 Triangle session, 1977 Sgt. Peppers, 1977 Sea of Dirac, 1977 Second Phase, 1978 Tokyo Fusion Night, 1978 On the Move, 1978 New York all stars live, 1978 Dream of Heike, 1978 Evening Star, 1980 Quark, 1982 Synth Fantasy, 1982 Solo Vol. 1, 1982 The Keep - DG, 1983 The Keep - Rockin, 1985 Alien, 1986 Nicole.

Pay attention to the 1978 Dream album, it's masterful, and probably his best work.

Polish composer Jerzy Milian in 73, 75, 78

The material looked interesting especially the ballet / classical album at the top, but proved a bit disappointing in comparison to other such third stream or funk-fusion finds from Eastern Europe.  Which surprised me, as the region tends to be pretty solid in the seventies.
From discogs:

Jerzy Stanisław Milian (April 10, 1935 – March 7, 2018) was a jazz musician, painter, composer and vibraphonist.

A track from 1975 that reminds me a lot of the better known, and perhaps superior J. Stivin:





I apologize for throwing together all three albums here in one file, or to use the correct idiotic verbiage, 'we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.'  Actually, I really don't give a dang about your inconvenience.  How about the inconvenience of having to listen to my wife complain all day about me spending my time on this blog and music?

Czech composer Henryk Debich: 3 albums

I came across this artist in connection with 'research' on the previous Mladen Franko, and two of his releases looked quite promising.  Unfortunately he did recycle a couple of tracks from the first, String Beat, on to the second.  Note the brief review on discogs for the former:

Well deserving of its 5 star rating. Without a doubt the best Polish funk / jazz LP. It's a shame that Henryk Debich didn't produce more in this style. Standout tracks are "Bez Metalu", "Standard In B", "Bądź Wieczorem W Dyskotece", "Na Opak", in fact pretty much the entire LP.

The second album here bizarrely and unfortunately was only released on cassette, but as you know, this is not a problem for us here on this blog with our ultimate capacities for unearthing the rarest of gems from oblivion.  It doesn't appear under the same artist, due to I guess a deficiency in the database with regards to the slavic languages we've seen before with respect especially to Russian artists.
In my own personal opinion both albums are masterpieces of the mid-seventies library funk-fusion genre and really deserve more interest.  Consider the second track from the 1978 cassette, which could stand with the best of the well-known library composers (Amfora, by one Malinowski):





From the former record, consider the track A3 called Gry:





A wonderful combination of soundtrack excitement, atmospheric darkness, and that great, incomparable 70s funk sound, I think you'll agree.  This is by Zylis, who contributed some absolutely fantastic tracks to one of my all-time favourite library records, Documentary Sequences.

Library Artist Mladen Franko, 13 LPs

I didn't bother this time to put the album covers in order, especially with the added problem that the database doesn't provide years of release for quite a few of them.  Who cares, when we have 13 records to digest, some of which are quite forgettable.

The 1980 Sonoton album called Contemporary Sounds Vol. 2 (the Vol. 1 is a different composer, Danny Burdson) features some really stunning advanced composition, for ex. the track called Atoll:






In that same annus mirabilis, the 2 albums called Amazing Space feature the best sounding library funk-fusion you could hope to hear, approaching the great Puccio Roelens, the opener of the first volume called Sound Safari:





But don't waste too much of your time on the remainder, most of these are completely pedestrian.

Roland Bocquet of Catharsis / Paradia fame in The 1982 OST La Balance

Superb cover art again for Paradia, reminding me a lot of Matisse crossed with the French artist Sempe, and how beautiful to see it's by Bocquet himself.

I guess this artist needs no introduction, certainly for me the 1977 record Paradia is a masterpiece of expressive Gallic progressive music, perfect in its smooth and well-executed professionalism, and thus leaving his old Catharsis band far behind.  Long ago I was excited to find out he made those two other Robot library records, but they proved disappointing to me in comparison to his chef d' oeuvre, particularly since he recycled some of the Paradia compositions for them.  To complete his discography I bought this soundtrack he wrote for a movie, which I remember well from my art film days in university, called La Balance, with Natalie Baye.  From imdb:

Nicole is a Parisian streetwalker and Dede is her racketeer boyfriend, on the outs with his mob bosses because of a dispute over Nicole. When a police informant ("la balance") is murdered, the cops have to scramble for a replacement. Deciding on Dede, they begin to put a nasty squeeze on him and Nicole.

Despite the briefness of the above I do remember it was a great movie from the twilight of the golden age of French police movies.  (If you understand French you can, as usual, see the whole thing for free on youtube.  I guess the nostalgia of the art video rental stores is something only us old guys can indulge in and soon it will be a totally forgotten memory too.)

Ultimately, Bocquet only contributed a little to the soundtrack, but what he did do is astonishing:






This being A2's rendition of La Chanson de Nicole.  (Another appears with vocals on the b side.)  How many times have I made the same comment: no music this beautiful is ever written anymore.  Just check out how effectively the simple electric guitar solo adds punch to the ostinato rhodes piano and string arrangement weaving in and out of the synthesizer melody like birds in the sky.  Then towards the end, the guitarist dialogues on his own with the rhodes, like a suitor pleading with a beautiful woman.  Such artistry!

Sadly there is a lot of filler on this record, explaining why it has been forgotten by time.  In particular, the last tracks on each side-- and I will be polite about it-- are absolutely stinking piles of shit.

But the Chanson of Nicole should never have been forgotten...

Smith, Hellborg, Shrieve -- All Our Steps... from Germany 1983, by request

The trio includes American composer/pianist Michael Smith, the well-known Jonas Hellborg on bass and Shrieve on drums.  On the database it's described as fusion but it turned out to be more of an acoustic set, with a grand piano solo to start side one and a drum solo for side two.  So despite the high expectations, given the performers, it was a bit disappointing overall, with the ensemble performances not generating the kind of renewable energy one would have earnestly wished for.

I'll throw in another record I found in the course of looking for requests, this performance from 1985 (not the one which was requested I realize!) which features again some famous names (Kenny Wheeler, Norma Winston, John Taylor, etc.) and equally some interesting compositions. Note that bassist and composer for side b, Paolo Damiani, was on the amazing seminal prog record Buon Vecchio Charlie which everyone knows.

More Marie Rottrova and Flamingo in 1974

Going way back to close to the beginning of the series I thought for completeness sake we should hear this one too.  Unfortunately not as much to hang on to overall.  For example,  A3 Dlouhá Ulice by Drahoslav Volejníček:





I was surprised to hear that track B5 stole a small instrumental from Chicago, apparently without credit.





Specifically, it's the virtually unknown track called AM Mourning from Chicago 2 that was lifted.  Not that anyone would ever have noticed.  Nonetheless, some nice compositions, surprisingly, one from Polish genius Czeslaw Niemen, which proved disappointing and not progressive at all, and one from Jan Spaleny who you may recall I covered in conjunction with prog outfit Mahagon (I think the links for those were taken down there, sorry).

More Marie Rottrová with Já A Ty from 1983

Later on in the 80s as we are here we find her deep voice is a little hoarser, from all that smoking (possibly), drinking (probably), drugs (definitely), and (maybe) the swallowed seed of so many rich and powerful music executives.  How times have changed.

The first track as sample:

Torsten Brandes: 1988's 5 Kleine Stücke Für Gitarre

Unfortunately very little here to hang on to, less than one side of a vinyl in equivalent length with 5 tracks totaling I'm guessing about 11 minutes, I desperately wanted to hear this due to the amazing creativity he brought to his duo with David Ward MacLean in Mystery Men and their masterpiece Strange Fruit.

Some scant information here.  Clearly these sound like composition exercises, but they are extremely high in standard and interesting, or to the average human I suppose, weird:

Howard University Jazz Ensemble HUJE '83, by request

Recalling my earlier comments about the university jazz bands lacking representation by African-Americans, who single-handedly invented the genre, this time checking out the photo of the band members on the inside we can see a hundred percent affirmative action in action with nary a white face to be seen in a sea of hip cats circa early 80s. The superior swing, the smoothness and the soulful singing on one track (Genesis) bear witness to their communal abilities here.  And since composition credits are spread out among such a large constituency we get presumably the cream of the crop in writing quality.

This is the requested 1983 installment from a long line of records.  And on the strength of this it's clearly worth hearing some more.


From discogs:

Howard University Jazz Ensemble (HUJE), Washington DC, USA, was founded in 1975 by its director, Fred Irby, III. Outstanding performances in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean have caused it to be recognized as one of the foremost college jazz ensembles. HUJE has been heard on radio and television as well as in concert, often appearing with celebrated performers. Members of the HUJE have won awards as performers and composers/arrangers, and the ensemble includes among its alumni several practicing jazz artists. Additionally, the HUJE was featured during the 1992, 1996 and 2005 Kennedy Center Honors Gala (CBS-TV). The HUJE has released thirty-four recordings in a distinguished series that began in 1976.


Btw, for those like me who were wondering, Howard University is in Washington, D.C.  A beautiful city, well worth visiting in the summer, with its grand monuments and enormous bureaucratic buildings reminiscent of the height of the Roman Empire, or perhaps the ancient American Empire, its wonderful museums, particularly the museum of democracy in which you can witness what a grand political system once existed here, the memorials of the great presidents of the past, none of whom will be equaled ever again obviously, the enormous and well-stocked swamps all around with their interesting and often abnormal lifeforms (please don't get too close, some are very dangerous).  There is a sense of all the wealth and power of the world passing within the perimeter of the city, from the hands of very lucky middle-aged white men to other very lucky middle-aged white men in order to further impoverish the 99.99999999 percent of citizens of the country, representatives of whom you will see sleeping peacefully on the many dirty sidewalks, perhaps politely asking for a crumb outside the boutique hotel gourmet restaurants where water costs 20 dollars a bottle and is shipped from 10,000 miles away.  Go perhaps to a place called Foggy Bottom where you may be privileged enough to see someone with a million, or even a billion times more money in their wallet than yours and don't be envious, they must be a billion times better a person than you.  Needless to say the most important man in the world resides here, and the luckiest too, with his harem of porn stars.  But be sure to stay safe and heed the common warning of the travel guides, if your skin is colored, stay away from the police: they are likely to kill you for holding your cellphone.

First track, called Hot Line, quite representative of the contents:





A beautiful record, from the beautiful city that is also lucky enough to be its own state.