Kinesis New Life from 1980, USA

We've heard so much rich and smooth fusion from the US on these pages.  This one is laid-back and most similar to the previously equally unknown Chateau Breakers, at times the musicians get off the couch and hit us with some nice inventive ideas, as in track b3, Make me Yours:

Baird Hersey and the Year of the Ear (1975, Coessential, Have you Heard) [limited time only]

From discogs:

Baird Hersey is probably best know as a composer and guitarist. In the '70s and '80s he wrote for and played with his big band Baird Hersey & The Year Of The Ear. The group's performances and recordings were highly regarded for their blend of rhythmic percussion and innovative horn arrangements. 

Hersey's is a National Endowment for the Arts Composition Fellow. His diverse career has encompassed; commissions from the Harvard University, New Mexico Council for the Arts, The Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Sound and Light Spectacular, The HVP Symphony Orchestra, and performances throughout the US and Europe in such different setting as the Berlin Jazz Festival and MTV. He has also composed extensively for television. 

He has been a student of yoga and overtone singing for 20 years. In 1997 He began the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. The result was a change in his life, his music and his career. Gathering In The Light is his 11th album Hersey has recorded for Arista, Buddha, Bent Records (4) and Satsang Music. He has studied with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in Mysore India and with The Gyuto Monks. 
(Source: artist's website)

A fuller listing of his credits including appearances with others can be seen on this page. 
In the beginning he appeared as guitarist on the blues rock album with one-off band Swampgas, which will be included down below with the others.  This is totally generic bluesy hard rock (+ 3 acoustic numbers), though it's interesting to note that his 'guitarist style' with the stereotypical blues licks perfectly mastered sounds very much like a guy like Duane Allman, with some Jimi Hendrix admiration locked in there perhaps.  A perfectly understandable attempt for a young artist to achieve rock-star fame.  And I guess that when you compare with other similar bands that achieved star status like maybe Cactus, Montrose, or Redbone, you can't say the songwriting is worse than theirs.  But I guess, to our great luck, that didn't work out for him.  So instead he brought together a large group of highly competent jazz/fusion musicians and created a big band which he later renamed the Year of the Ear.

Suddenly at this point all the university composition education and brilliant arranging that was locked up in that creative mind exploded.  Although it starts with a very unpromising jazz standard cover (the abhorrent Night in Tunisia 1st vomited up for us by Dizzy G.), the remainder of the album features absolutely unique musical ideas, I mean I run out at this point of superlatives.  For long readers of this blog and fans of the overall genre of  'progressive fusion' the one-off 1980 Fred Taylor masterpiece from years back, which I still listen to and enjoy to this day, is most similar.  All compositions and arrangements by Mr. Hersey.  So track A2, Herds Hoards:





You start with a poetic flute intro, leading into a clearly dissonant, tritone-based riff, that just builds and builds-- and here the big band doesn't blow away the electricity as in so much jazz, but instead adds colourful touches to the rock band energy.  At the end, the big band is given free reign to take the track out, as if they are dancing on the grave of the (overdosed) rock band... brilliant. Believe me when I say the remainder of the album, from a3 to b1 to b2, continues at that same highly intellectual, imaginative, quasi-symphonic stratospherically high level, like Mt Everest but without all the deaths from overcrowding and people taking selfies.

It's as if this brilliant man was playing night after night with Swampgas in bars and dives the same old boring blues licks with the flattened fifths and the pentatonic scales in E or A and was dreaming all along of breaking out into a pure heaven of musical possibilities, a heaven where everything exists, like the many worlds universe theory of Hugh Everett the Third.  Have you ever heard atonal fusion?  I think you'll find it in here.  (I said the same about Aussies Alpha Omega a long time ago.)

Unfortunately, he was somewhat brought back to earth the next couple of years, for the follow up album which he named Lookin' for the Groove, if I might put it delicately, indicates the chosen name was highly appropriate.  But he didn't outright compromise everything from that precious expensive university education usually leading to a career in poverty.  It's still creative.  And for sure the track It's been a Long Time is just a magnificently beautiful, uncommonly ethereal song, reminding me a little of Pekka Pohjola's tender ballads:





I guess there is a case of split personality here, because in the same year he made with percussionist David Moss the LP Coessential--  which to me is 'free jazz' garbage and completely unlistenable.  Go ahead and have a listen.  You might enjoy it.

Then, in 1979, Year of the Ear the band made a follow up called Have you Heard.  It has a few nice moments but is again marred somewhat by a paucity of ideas. 

Look at the lovely cover of Swampgas.  Takes me back to my childhood when there was so much wilderness around us.

Michael Bass and His Moderately-sized Orchestra's Painting by Numbers, 1979

What a gorgeous cover, drawing (so to speak) on Bosch / Breughel.  (Note the credit to Neil Dougherty, clearly wrongly linked to an individual of the same name in the database, and note from the back that the title track is dedicated to him.)

This album complements the Feigenbaum and Scott from Random Radar Records, but is nowhere near as good, sounding very much like RIO out-takes from an Art Bears instrumental session with some musical silliness (obviously, the malign Zappa influence) that detracts.  It is fully composed with chamber instruments and lacks the addition of the emotional/dramatic rock element with acoustic and electric guitars, keys, etc. that was at times so breathtakingly beautiful on F and S.

The last track, Blutgeld:





Michael Bass' earlier album called Parchesi Pie (1978) I found to be basically unlistenable, mixing together zappaesque verbal silliness with musical silliness.  You can listen to that one too.

Jarosław Śmietana: Talking Guitar (1984) & From One to Four (1986)

Following up with the Extra Ball material with these 'solo' albums by their leader and guitarist Smietana.  We have the smoother fusion always led by electric guitar instrumental vocalizing, recalling for example the later albums of Karl Ratzer here, sometimes so smooth it's almost featureless.  And a bunch of jazz standard renditions to contend with as well.

From the first album, Cased up Cars:





Note the 'double-guitar' melody (separated by an octave) which I thought was patented and owned solely by George Benson.  The clean sound of the amp/guitar makes me yearn for more distortion, electricity, gain and fuzz-- but of course, we are now in the middle of the eighties, when such actions were strictly forbidden.

From the 2nd, note the clever play on the folk song called Scandinavian Song:





Completely unexpectedly, the second album here proved better than the first.  I'll throw in the one from 1987 too.

Extra Ball, 6 albums, 1976 to 1983

The band made 6 albums in the late 70s to early 80s which feature sometimes lengthy and tendentious fusion with quite a bit more jazz in the mix, sometimes demonstrating original thinking or fresh hooks but less energetic overall than the very similar (Slovak) band Fermata.  There is less of the fresh clear thinking and creativity of the best Czech like Jazz Q.

Sadly the first album is by far the best of the lot.  A few tracks are tight, but otherwise they seem to meander quite a bit.  A relatively ingenious track called "The Seven:"





On the 1979 album, the piece dedicated to Elvin Jones provides masterful pathos:





Unlike the remainder of the album which was written by guitarist J. Smietana, this one was by bassist Zbigniew Wegehaupt.

Despite the extreme beauty of the painting on the cover of Mosquito (1981), the music failed to really bite.  No insect repellent required here.  And by the time of the 1983 Torres album with its Village-People-like cover things have really drastically declined, if such is even possible.