Pal Thowson in Carnival, 1981, and Sympathy, 1983

Carnival continues the same wonderful light and smooth fusion style of its predecessor Surprise but on Sympathy he went all out with the commercial songs and therefore holds very little of interest for us here.

I posted both anyways.

The music is not quite as brilliant on Sympathy, I guess predictably (since crazy complex and creative originality peaked for fusion in the mid seventies time frame), the full credits can be found on this page.

Shockingly the album starts off with Gino Vanelli's Brother to Brother composition, recall I raved about his music way back here, long long ago in 2021, and to be honest I still really love his stuff, he was as underrated as they get. He has lost Eberson (sadly) and bassist Arild Andersen, Hakon Graf only contributed one track, but the final one is by our beloved Palle Mikkelborg, it's called It was Just a Dream and it's almost as nice as the closer for the preceding one:

The replacement composer for Eberson is trumpeter Fred Noddelund, who in contrast to the fusion plays a chamber style of music. You get a sense of that here on the Sundown track he wrote:

Hakon's track called Highway I'm pretty sure appeared on one of his solo LPs:

Anyways, you get the idea. It's a mixed bag. Not so the next album from 1983, Sympathy, that one is much more monolithic, cohesive, being just a bag of rocks for me.  Despite it again featured Eberson and Hakon Graf.

Pal Thowsen beginning with 1979's Surprise

 

A Norwegian jazz drummer, discogged here. He played with Jon Eberson and Hakon Graf in the wonderful fusion band Moose Loose, who I'll feature a bit later.  (Hakon the keyboardist also played in the great Hawk on Flight and Blow out the one-off fusion masterpiece. I'm surprised I never posted all those albums before.)

For his own works, Thowsen played a really nice, smooth but emotional and at times intense fusion.

If you take a look at the full credits, available on this particular page, you'll see he is accompanied by bandmates on guitar Eberson and Hakon too, and Arild Andersen on bass (oddly, also the producer on this). He himself didn't compose any of the music, credit seems to be spread out among all those other artists. Quite the surprise then that this music didn't come out as another Moose Loose LP or even Jon Eberson Group.

Rainbow Dance is an Eberson composition:

Note the really soft and lovely atmospheric closer called To You, which was also penned by Eberson:

With Hakon of course playing those lovely spacey synth chords.

Frode Thingnaes Quintet's Direct to Disc from 1980

 

Information for this one here. As before in the preceding post the fusion here is so smooth and professionally played it sounds like you're on a late night TV talk show from back in the day and being moved from one stylish velvet elevator to another, quite imperceptibly.  With one elevator after another featuring the same sounds, rhythms, melodies, it's difficult to even tell the tracks they're on apart.

Consider the opener called Bumpin':

Frode Thingnaes Quintet's Night Sounds, 1979

 

Of course everyone recalls I posted his 1974 album, back here. That post was, to me, astoundingly popular (the one with the armadillo or pangolin on the cover).  

Discogged here for informational purposes, with the quintet's discography here.

Some very very light, very slight fusion here but played with perfect timing and brightness and multiple instruments, not quite orchestralized arrangements. The title track:

Happy the Man's Muse Awakens, 2004

 

Big surprise here, which I wasn't aware of.  

Obviously we all grew up with (ha ha) this classic Canterbury-style US band from the 70s, discogged as per:

American progressive rock band from Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA, that was formed in 1973, disbanded in 1979 and reformed in 2000. The band released three albums between 1977 and 1983 (the third was recorded in 1979, but first released in 1983). After a long hiatus, Happy The Man released a new album in 2004 with a new drummer and new additional keyboardist.

It's a bit surprising because I always assumed Kit Watkins was the main compositional force behind those wonderful early albums, but of course he's absent on this one, replaced by a certain David Rosenthal. Despite the switcheroo the music is consistently strong, and perfectly representative progressive rock, quite 70s based, still keyboards dominant, but with the dissonances, the synths, the emotional elements that make it fully compelling, with a great deal of variety, odd changes and interesting arrangements, just as you'd expect. Well, sometimes our expectations are low for these later releases, but in this case they exceed them magnificently.

It starts off with Contemporary Insanity:

I love anything and everything relating to Hawai'i and can't resist posting any track homaging those beautiful Garden of Eden isles of the mid-Pacific, and Maui Sunset really brings it home (those poor folks are still recovering from the horrific fire in Lahaina last year, let's remember that dreadful consequence of climate change's cruelty):

Altogether a wonderful album and a delight to listen to, I will for sure be paying close attention to these tracks in the days to come, or as they say in other places: 'monitoring the situation very closely.'