PAZ in Live Chichester (77) Kandeen (77), are Back (82), Look Inside (83) and Always There (86)

Note the dramatically different covers for that 1983 album (Look Inside).  One all serious and one all party time. Silly?

From discogs:

English group, formed in 1972 by Dick Crouch.  "The group's music exhibits the influences of jazz, rock, and funk, and classical, folk, and ethnic music; its style characterized by the extensive use of Brazilian percussion instruments." (Mark Gilbert, in The New Grove dictionary of jazz, 1988)

Band is led by the percussionist, a slight oddity, whose name as mentioned is Dick Crouch.

This is basically soft fusion again, very similar to Danish Bazaar, but lacking in the ethnic element which is always, at least for me, a good thing.  They made a surprising number of records in that heyday of fuzak tempered somewhat by the fact they recycled songs from one album to the next all over the place, quite promiscuously, to use that wonderful and evocative word, hopefully also an indication of their personal lives of the time.

The Bell Tree, from Kandeen Love Song (1977), a composition by the leader Crouch:

Three Blind Mice from 1983's Look Inside:

Esa Pethman's The Modern Sound, from 1965 and RIP Chick Corea: June 12, 1941 to Feb. 9, 2021

Just a beautiful album with one foot in the big, still huge jazz world of the early part of the sixties but another considerable step in the soon to come fusionary vision of truly and seamlessly combining the three worlds of European classical and rock with the former element. You can still see the seams, but the compositions are just magnificent, in my opinion.  The artist was featured before, here, in a much later work coming almost two decades later, that had more easy smooth listening influences but was nonetheless well written.

I guess you could say this is very similar to the famed Modern Jazz Quartet (who I hated, even when I was a jazz fan in college), but far far better.

Shepherd Song:

There are so many great ideas in here, full of creative energy and that thirst to break boundaries that seems like the personality of a young man (I see he was 27 at the time).  It's a bit shocking that at least under his own name, there is so little documented in the database.

Robert John Gallo's Painted Poetry / A Place to Live, 1972

 

From discogs:

American producer, musician, arranger and composer who produced multiple hit records for Atlantic Records. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York he moved to Canada and became the house producer for Columbia Records of Canada, Ltd. in June 1974, then its Director of A&R by the end of that year. He remained with them through the 1976 restructuring to CBS Records Canada Ltd. until the early 80s.

In the early 70s he made two really interesting records, mostly in the ssw style, but mixing a great deal of inventive ideas.  The database by default refers to it as 'psych' but in reality we are dealing here with a mixture of styles, the usual kind of sixties-influenced creative songwriting with all kinds of themes and imitations, guitar-based with kinds of supporting instruments, and also some more original work though nothing that out and out can be described as progressive rock.  On the other hand it's much better than the average ssw unknown release and has some really lovely arrangements, so that 's why I put it here, as in the track called Lend me a dollar which sounds kind of indebted to master songwriter Jimmy Webb:

Part of the interest here of course is that the original record came out in 1972 but a new version with a new title was released by famed tax scam label Guiness in 1977.  Wikipedia has a nice article about the label.  You can see in discogs the two releases here.  I'm puzzled as to whether he was part of this scam or not, given that he was a producer himself 'in the biz'.  Presumably he was?

Contre Jour V (1986)

Another in the long long series of easy going light fusion albums along the lines of Landress - Hart Group, the recent Manzanita, blablabla, with a smooth sound and some inventive passages, this time hailing from France 1986, by far the best track or composition is one called Terje which I'm going to presume is dedicated to the great Norwegian guitarist of the same name (and whom I've always disliked due to his meandering qualities):

I mean, how could music ever get any better?  Starting with that soprano sax that always sounds like birds in flight melodiously playing on top of the digital strings, leading into the guitar passages augmented with more horn frills, the song passes into the more traditional fusion territory after a couple of minutes, sounding almost like Danish uber-masters Secret Oyster.  The minor second arpeggiated electric guitar riff (first devised by Mahavishnu McLaughlin?) so commonly seen in guitar fusion is beautifully articulated here with the backing band playing minor passages.

Stupidly the discogs database appears to have misspelled the name of the band, unlike the basement dwellers of rym.  I should log in to discogs to change it myself and add the twenty paragraphs of proof as annotation they always require but I worry that I might be wrong, in which case the basement dwellers (slash vinyl collectors) will probably send me death threats and possibly chop off my balls too.  An experience I never like.  It's clear anyways the band never put anything out other than this.  The majority of the songwriting was done by guitarist Dominique Bousquet, who also wrote Terje.  Here and there among the generic softer fuzak material are some other well written musical passages making it tragic they didn't press more LPs or burn more CDs.

The Music of Fred Stone, 1972, by request

Continuing on with the gentle, acoustic music that is prone to somnolence, here's yet another outrageously expensive album for reasons unclear to me available for your listening pleasure should you decide to pay a couple hundred dollars but really, I'm not sure you'd do that after today.  

A one-off it seems from this composer, the back has an extensive blurb you can read, typical of jazz records.  Note the two different covers, one quite typically abstractly attractive and the other quite ridiculous.

The youtube-sampled track called Alissa is surely the best track and gives you a great idea of what we have here, a mix of chamber-like playing with jazz, usually comprising flute on top of acoustic piano, and with some nice ideas but desperately begging for the more full arrangements of for example fellow countryman Ted Moses although I guess it's not fair to compare the two:

I suppose it's most similar to a very simplified version of the great Lofstrom Music album I refer to constantly and regularly and usually describe as a masterpiece, but not anywhere as good.