One-off Airto Fogo, Canada (?) 1973

This all instrumental outfit made some nice funky, horn-driven fusion in the more simple style, perhaps like the great Campo's Garuda Suite, or like Coley's Goodbye Brains and the equally verisimilar Back Door, but with less progressive invention, consider as eg the track High Stakers:

Database info can be read here, little as it is, where you can see the band was led by drummer Sylvain Krief.
Then I noticed there was a little more information that could be found online here on this blog.

A nice album to hear, definitely.

Larry and Julie Coryell in The Lion and the Ram, 1976

I was well acquainted with him, obviously, but never bothered to 'complete the discography' because I had run into too much long improvisation, noodling jamming, and acoustic tediousness in earlier albums, with the exception of the fusion band Eleventh House which produced a wonderful exciting and electric discography in the seventies.  I would also have to mention his superb collaborations with the brilliant Alphonse Mouzon, whose discography is also worth completing.

Then I went back to listen to all his material from the period and was surprised to hear this album, which is quite uncharacteristic since it mixes vocal tracks, definitely a rarity on his releases, which I think are sung by him, with the lyrics written by his wife Julie above acoustic guitar strumming in the folk rock style.  And those songs are quite good, reminding me a lot of way back when Ralph Towner sang so achingly emotionally on the Paul Winter albums, if you remember this post and song from 5 years ago.  I don't think Larry's composition is quite at the same level (as Towner), I'm sorry to his fans who will be upset by this assessment, but they are really excellent here and there, and far past the average songwriting.

On this particular song called Short Time Around the descending chord pattern is quite trite (identical to New York State of Mind by Billy Joel) but the charm of his very plain singing (clearly he is not vocally trained), as well as the guitar textures after the bridge, make this really interesting:

If you continue on to the 3 minute mark very surprising dissonances show up too, which really threw me off the chair when I first heard this track.  I don't think anybody on commercial radio would have approved of the way the song takes us out!

In terms of his classical-style composition, check out the track called Domesticity:

This is at the same level as the 2 'ne plus ultras' I always compare every guitarist to here on this blog, specifically James Vincent and Don Mock.

What a joy to discover something so precious and 'rare,' (not released yet to CD??) that I never heard before.

Addendum

After writing this post, this album really grew on me. I take back any neg. comments about it, it's really wonderful and a masterpiece from beginning to end. What a shame it's not better known or appreciated out there, in the real world!

Uwe Kropinski Solo

 

The music on this completely unknown East German album is astonishingly complex, almost like the great Christy Doran in his most reflective moods, it's all acoustic but the monotony of the instrumentation is not as distracting as I usually find in these records because of the hypnotic focus on the ideas he puts into his music. As I've mentioned so many times before it's hard to play dissonant, complex music on the guitar especially in comparison to the piano due to the stretching of the fingers involved in playing odd chords but also because the 'finger memory' of the standard chords from experience and training almost forces you to play the usual automatic, rote patterns. Of course this applies less to those trained in the classical educational sphere which this amazing artist clearly was.

A short track called April gives you an idea of how complex his playing can be:

I found some later albums from him, which, almost and sadly predictably, were not quite as inventive and interesting.

Back to Kubist Tier with the cassette only release, Demonstration

 

For sure this is the sound of heaven for these jaded ears, accustomed to endless playings of Genesis, King Crimson, etc., because here we have the real stuff for us progressive rock fans, which is complicated, dissonant, well-written instrumental, guitar-based compositions of unusual creativity and deep in ideas to transform the auditory lobes of the double-hemisphered organ / loculated mass entoured by the saclike meninges we call for lack of a more appropriate word the brain.

Recall I posted their other album in the past, here, long ago (April 2018). Surprisingly the music here might be a little more accessible than the predecessor, though of course to the average human being the word 'accessible' needs to be replaced by 'incomprehensible'.  The first track, called My Three Chins:

All the other tracks follow along the same lines--thankfully!

Yopie Item and his Combo 2, Live with Idris Sardi 1976

 

This album features some nice fusion with violin by Idris Sardi, whose page is here.  Similar I guess a bit to Didier Lockwood.

A track called Jali-Jali: