Playboy's Ivory from 1973, USA

Mentioned in the Michael Jarrett post, this was the best record Playboy put out-- though in my life I've listened to fewer than three, two to be exact.  It was positively reviewed by Tom in the cd reissue wishlist here.  To me it completely makes sense they would have produced a progressive record as this was certainly the zeitgeist in the early seventies.

"Here we go again, another album that is about half excellent, half dreadful. Starts out promising enough with a heavy organ rocker that wouldn't be out of place on a Uriah Heep album. This then leads into three full plain old woman-done-me-wrong rock songs that are... well... they're terrible. No redeeming value whatsoever, no matter how you try to rationalize it. So of course, from there on out it's prog rock heaven. Get out the organ, Moog and piano and let's play us some complicated ELP style music shall we? Heck, some of the riffs even recall the Italian interpretation of the English famous trio (think Alphataurus, L'Uovo Colombo here). And so it goes throughout Side 2, complete with an Indian bit with sitar, tablas and the works. Sigh. Any chance there's a full archive of this style sitting in a vault somewhere?  Like the Yaqui album we have in the main list, this album was released on Hefner's Playboy label. "

Their opening (with hammond as mentioned above) 'Morning Song' is the Roger Kellaway instrumental which appears on his 1971 masterpiece, "Cello Quartet" (a gorgeous album I've played thousands of times and can never get tired of), with lyrics by the singer, Grant Gullickson.  A nice introduction to the record, clearly.





It's important to note that the majority (so far as I can tell) of songs were not written by the performers.  It's for this reason I think that it winds up being such a mixed bag, with even an electronic-synthesizer track at the end of side a.  I'm not so convinced that the b side is really progressive heaven, more like purgatory?  Note for ex. they trot out Jack Bruce's famous Song for an imaginary western, without necessarily improving on his version, which I don't think is even humanly possible.  (If by chance you don't know about Jack's solo albums I urge you to check them out, his work with Cream was a tiny part of his artistic output-- shockingly he is not known for that at all.  Another total and criminal oversight I blame the music/radio industry for, and it's hard to understand why Eric Clapton, whose solo recordings are clearly inferior to Jack's, was treated differently.)

The closer, 'Time After Time' is a really nice composition though, written as a band effort apparently:





Not bad, overall?

AO Part VI.i: Volume 52 by Raymond Guiot [1983]

Classical chamber music here, I thought it might possibly be interesting, but overall too simplistic or baroque for my taste, perhaps about 18th century in style, before the Europeans discovered the beauty of chromatic notes and/or a slight spice of dissonance.  Note that the composer, Raymond Guiot, is different from the Dominique Guiot whose 2 utterly gorgeous library albums I uploaded earlier.

The oboes of Les Estaminets En Flandre {i.e. small cafes} are quite plaintive, as usual:

April Orchestra Part V: The Italian RCA Series from 1 to 16 [missing 15]

Well I think you get the idea.. really reminds me of my old childhood stamp collection...

Remember these are entirely different from the other April Orchestra volumes 1 through 16, in fact, they are copies of previously available Italian library records.  I don't understand why they had to be repackaged or recycled as AO's.  At any rate it's a real mixed bag with a lot of abstract modern Morricone music in the earlier numbers, none of which I enjoyed, but two albums are real delights, the one stolen from "Romantici," which is the Volume 8, and Volume 13 which returns to fusion, though only for one brief LP:





That was Northern Lights from Volume 13, the first track.  Music is by Puccio Roelens.

From the beautiful album usually known as Romantici, here is Nostalgia Di Un Giorno Felice which was composed by the incredibly prolific OST composer Carlo Rustichelli  and was derived from a 1968 Western called Un minuto per pregare, un istante per morire 





With a very Morricone-like sound, wouldn't you agree?  Hearing this soft ballad I'm tempted to try to find the film, though it was rated quite poorly, possibly explaining why I never saw it before when I went nuts over the spaghetti western genre.

Missing AO Pt. IV.iii: Patrick Vasori's Keyboards Music, Vol. 44 from 1982

A pleasant pink this time...  the graphic artists must have been happy with this series.


Recall that Patrick Vasori was the son of composer/arranger/conductor Claude, who was usually called Caravelli on the AO releases.  It was the young'un who composed my favourite AO track ever, Dany's Love Song, from Vol. 31.

Taking a quick glance at his discography it seems he made mostly AO music, appearing in the volumes 16 (a good one), 40, this 44, and the last one ever which appropriately was no. 69 (to come soon).  After this he made another library record called Tie-Break in 1987.  If anyone has a copy please upload it though as I wouldn't mind completing the collection for Patrick.

On this particular record we have all-electronic music, not influenced yet by the 'minimal synth' style that was soon to destroy any proficiency in composition held over from the seventies, and thus, overall, quite a listenable opus, similar overall to the Teddy Lasry albums from later years.

Consider the track called "Connexion:"




For evidence in favour of his progressive compositional skills consider the track called "Fight" which yet again, is indebted to the great Stravinsky's Rite of Spring polytonality:





It's unfortunate that track couldn't have gone on longer, though, overall, this is quite a long album comparably speaking, and by that I mean of course that it actually hits the 38 minute mark.

So I'll let you explore the rest of the tracks...

Some requested library records: Flash Resonances Light Breeze, Atmospheres, World Explorers, Charlotte Detective, Kaleidoscope, Space Resonances, Nostalgic etc.

Cecil Wary's Pop Incidence is one of the best in this series for the prog lover.  I definitely don't have all of them, at some point I should ascertain which are needed and should be ripped.  All the albums above though are well worth hearing, having at least a few good tracks.  Composer Pierre Porte was stunningly prolific in this era, anyone know anything about his stuff?

And aren't those cover photos for Flash Resonance amazing? When I see the shutterstock photographs advertised I'm so saddened by the huge difference in quality from those days.