Carlos Franzetti, Argentinian mastermind behind Prime Element's Alborada (1976) with Grafitti (1977), Galaxy Dust (1980)

OK, back to the relentless fusion now.

Gotta love the Farrah Fawcett-Major album cover.  But they could've done so much more with that grafitti action.  What an odd, odd decision to go with that as art for an album that is basically relatively standard progressive, slightly funky fusion in the typical American-latin style, in the year 1977.

From discogs:

Composer, keyboardist, arranger and conductor born on June 3, 1948 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is married to pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti.

He composed most of the music (but by no means all) on The Prime Element, for me a masterpiece of fusion.  I'm not going to go through this one in detail because I assume everyone knows it already or at least is familiar with it from before.  There is a great mix in there of latin funk, fusion, and surprisingly advanced, well-thought-out orchestral passages, which, it turns out, were all arranged and composed by the genius-- I don't hesitate to call him that-- Carlos Franzetti.

Moving on to 1977, amazingly the bonus tracks on the CD version of Grafitti are well worth hearing, surprisingly good for outtakes.  So I included both LP and CD versions though there is little need to listen to the former.  Title track of this 1977 release:

Moving on to Galaxy Dust (1980), the utterly uncompromising 'follow up' to Alborada I would say, the classical composition education shines through in a way that is simply astounding.  Consider the track called Gravitational Forces which uses, clearly, an Alban Berg influence to craft and profoundly enhance fusion that is totally unafraid of the massive dissonances of atonal music from the early 20th century, including sliding passages on the violins:

We have to celebrate an artist so uncompromising, who was well aware at the time that barely 0.001 percent of humanity would appreciate this kind of formidable art, particularly at a time when it was no longer in fashion, it was, in fact, a complete joke to critics: those Rolling Stone coked-up assholes I hated so much as a kid and still hate, hopefully they've all ODed by now or died from transplant rejections after hep c and the change in livers and music styles.  

Subsequently his Pavane is, from a starting position of French impressionistic elegance (reminds me of our old fave Satoh), a nice education in the intricacies of progressive fusion, again, unafraid of all that entails:

This is at least as good as most of the progressive fusion previously posted on this blog.  A nice addition to our enormous collections.  

Are you sure it's not the same album you keep collecting? you have so many already, as my wife always says...