Back to Neil Ardley again with Time Flowers

 

I thought I had thoroughly listened to all his discography some time back with the post here, but I was quite wrong about that. Although this music from 1971 is mostly quite ordinary and even too much in the big band direction there is one standout composition which absolutely blew me away and hopefully others too, called The Time Flowers. As the narrator explains, it's a symphonic poem based on a science fiction or fantasy short story. It covers just about everything interesting and creative in modern music and fusion, perhaps you could compare it to the long suite like the Peabody Wind Ensemble track Fourth Stream, but more refined and delicate in ideas and occasionally even more atonal and dissonant. For me, the perfect mixture of complex classical music and fusion that I absolutely crave at all times. It also seems shockingly strange to me that such a great piece of music is so completely forgotten, even for those, like me, who are very well acquainted with Neil Ardley. Note that it's co-composed with Keith Winter, keyboardist on the Isotope albums.

There's a whole bunch of other luminaries on this collection btw, including Heckstall-Smith, Dave Greenslade (who is going to come up here shortly too), my beloved Mike Gibbs, and our old library favourite from long ago, Frank Ricotti on vibes, amazingly, on the Time Flowers composition.

I suppose I might have encountered this back then when I quickly went through all his works, but somehow I missed this one. Good to look back once in a while.