Grupo Ramo, Brazil 2009

This album is by far the best chamber progressive fusion CD I have heard from the current era, hence no download today.  I am completely shocked and dismayed that it has passed 'under the radar' with apparently no one knowing about it, and moreover, the CD itself is now incredibly hard to purchase!  There is no justice in this particular subsection of the art world...  The beauty of these compositions, the care and tenderness the artists put into their work, the perfection of the whole, are truly insurmountable at their peak in Parnassos.  In some ways it recalls to me the lineage of Gotic and Kotebel (particularly their Structures --highly recommended too), but with more classical education, almost an infinity of it in fact.

I'll present four samples, in my opinion the best compositions, to get an idea.  I 'm not sure where the official CD purchase page is which I would direct you to, maybe someone could help me there.  Note the sparsity even of the RYM page here.  So far as I know, they are not even entered on discogs.

Musicians:

Daniel Pantoja (flutes)
Felipe José (cello, flute, guitar)
Rafael Martini (piano, guitar)
Frederico Heliodoro (bass)
Antonio Loureiro (drums)

Samples (check upper right).

Here are my observations...

Mosquito (obviously not dedicated to the Zika virus??)





Just a beautiful chamber jazz composition, perhaps recalling Argentinian Alas as well in their best and most creative moments.  (Didn't they also do a mosquito song?)


Cão Andaluz starts with a gorgeous solo flute intro that comes down onto a melody taken over by the cello like a relay which then hands over to a flute-piano combination.  The descending pattern is then played by various instruments alternatively.





At the start of Benesse you'll notice the guitarist plucking the strings in some odd places to create that middle eastern atmosphere to perfection.  Often these types of Asian songs then move into tabla-plus-one-chord monotony that breaks my heart and patience each time, here, we are treated to an incredibly tender song played by acoustic guitar and cello that continues to evolve even as it moves along into new keys and chords throughout, without ever really repeating itself.  Quite stunning in terms of how nonstandard this is as evocation:





Finally, the closer José No Jabour again uses a cliche of latin music, the wordless singing such as M. Nascimento once perfected, but the movement out of the intro then like the preceding example continues to shock and amaze us with its changes and originality:






Overall, a stunning find...

Spanish Franklin's unreleased magnum opus Life Circle from 1974 [no download]

Back on holidays now and therefore no downloads for the next two...

Quite recently someone made mention of how surprising it is that there is still classic progressive rock available to us we don't yet know.  Here's the perfect example of that--  at least for me.  But I doubt anyone knew of this one before it was rereleased in Spain in 2007.

Discogs:

Spanish prog-rock band founded in 1971 by Pablo Weeber and Antonio García de Diego (with Mariano Díaz on keyboards, M. A., Rojas on bass & Juan Cánovas on drums), backed by producers Maryní Callejo and Teddy Bautista. They released one single and after a year another one with different musicians (Pino Scaglianini on keys, Terry Barrios & Chema Espinosa on drums, Juan Toro on bass), and an LP that wouldn't be released until 2007. They split-up in 1976.


Consider the track called Renaissance, with its gorgeous tritones, of which I'm sure we could never get enough (btw the tritone is the odd-sounding sustained note at the end of the melody that gets repeated in different keys).  Not only is this melody developed by modulating it into different keys, going up fourths or thirds, and at one point even piling on the second interval melody up creating an additional unholy dissonance thereby, but in the middle passage notice how exuberant the soloing gets with the electric guitar on one and keys/synths on the other channel.  Really recalls the masters of electric Italian prog like Campo di marte or the great Alphataurus, doesn't it?





But stay till the end, where the mellotron strings take us right off the planet and into outer space...  where we belong, after this track.

Shocking this wasn't released at the time, in the early seventies!!

Consider next the utterly inappropriate dissonances of Caos - decomposing that build and build until you're gasping for relief like a beached whale:






And I think after hearing those two sample you will surely get this immediately if you don't already have it.

Note that the CD compilation includes what are surely inferior singles/cover versions before the magnum opus that constitutes the all-instrumental album called Life Circle, obviously a concept album about the universe or creation.

Klaus Lenz (Big) Band's Aufbruch (1976) and Wiegenlied (1977)

Back to the baby we saw earlier this month, now digging some red-hot fusion on big-ass headphones.  This GDR band appeared before of course with Uschi way back when.

The Igor song is gorgeously and progressively out of this world, with its chromatic hammond opener that could have come from any of the classic French fusion masterpieces, like Vortex:





The following album did not quite hit the same heights of compositional progressiveness however, the title track being a good example of what is missing and what is still to be found here in this music:

L'Orchestre Sympathique ‎– Live In Detroit 1981, Canada

These guys made three records back in the day, thirty-five years ago now, and they all sound similar, (indeed certain songs are recycled throughout the trilogy) but are admirably composed chamber-fusion works by a very very talented group of musicians.  I believe the best is actually the last released 1982 effort from the Montreal Jazz Festival, with the stunning Nuit Inuit composition.  Surprisingly only the first record was rereleased on CD.  I trust the others will soon be too, and this will be a temporary link.

Here's Queeche Valley:

Happy Fathers Day!

As I've said before, Fathers Day is, in some sense, the diametric or perhaps bipolar opposite of Mothers Day: where the latter is full of guilt and angst, womblike dark reflections on existence, the unforgiving brutality of having been brought into this world in a puddle of blood via the appropriate obtuse angle of two legs, the obligation of the siblings and their cuckoo nest-mates to the master feeder who kept them alive when none else could, though not from love: purely from an instinctive drive powerful enough to self-sacrifice as we see in certain spider species whose mothers let their children feed on their own body after birth-- can we then argue those mothers love their spiderlings more than a human mother? are their Mothers Days not far superior to those of humans, who are not permitted to feast for taboo reasons on the maternal body before her death?-- on the other hand Fathers Day can correctly be regarded in its proximity to the summer solstice as full of light, indeed a maximal amount of illumination, representing as it does the opening door of summer, the memory of sunburns and fishing, meat in fires and the celebration of the great unparalleled and ancient human invention of the controlled fermentation of sugars.  Rather it is the anti-guilt, the duty of forgiveness, a kind of confession of mortality which is to be inherited by the younger ones, as can be seen in the fact that where the day for Mothers must perforce be planned ad nauseam without involvement from the celebratee (else she instantly develops a bad mood that persists through the day or even the next few, often exploding into anger over trivial nuisances), the day for Fathers to the contrary must be completely organized by the king oops I mean the man himself without any obstruction from the all-too-human forces of shame, guilt, or even moderation, nor should there be any deviation from its proper course of complete life-enjoyment by the influence of any mothers in the extended family who understandably will through the effect of a bit of jealousy, or, sometimes, protection of the little ones, attempt to redirect the festivities in a more austere, controlled direction.  And if the Father doesn't receive either a gift or a card in the morning, because he probably doesn't even deserve either, who cares? it will hardly be remembered by the next day after the party...  For the spirit of Fathers Day is the spirit of receiving from oneself, giving to oneself, celebrating sperm and life, and if after all the bbq ribs and lobster and the debts his family has incurred on his credit cards cause him to have a heart attack by night's end, what does it matter?  At least his family will wake up tomorrow the beneficiary of his insurance policy...  So let us celebrate Fathers Day!