Fritz Pauer plus others in "Classical Jazz," 197?

This is the kind of album that really gets me excited, promising as it does the combination of classical music and jazz or fusion created by trained and educated composers in the context of completely forgotten and lost music from somewhere in the seventies (based on the liner notes).  Fritz Pauer of course we know well, having featured him before in the past with Live at Berlin Jazz Gallerie and again here more recently with more miscellaneous stuff, from discogs:

Austrian jazz pianist, composer and leader, born October 14, 1943 in Vienna, died July 1, 2012.
Played with Hans Koller 1960-1962, then leading own groups, accompanied visiting American jazz musicians at Berlin clubs 1962-1968. Joined the dance orchestra at Austrian radio in c. 1970, accompanied Art Farmer on four albums 1970-1981. Settled in Switzerland in c. 1986.

This particular record presumably from mid-70s combines three compositions from three different composers, a common but stupid arrangement for these classical records.  The first side is given over to a concerto for jazz band by Pauer in three movements, the first a really nice funky 7-minute long exposition of fusion, that gets a little tiresome when it never leaves the same chord progression or gets developed anywhere, but seemingly becomes just a basis for a bunch of jazz solos.

The second movement sounds like a movie soundtrack for example from a Martin Scorcese, mid-70s, but I don't think it's all that successful with the atonal chamber orchestra beginning passing into an almost easy-listening or muzak-like theme song with tons of smashing cymbals and crescendos on the part of the horn section:





The third part is equally divergent, mixing a bit awkwardly the modern classical and easy jazz aspects--like a dinner party for work people wherein rednecks mix with the more sophisticated girls everyone want to be close to.

On side two there is a totally atonal work to begin with, from the Russian composer, followed by Horowitz, whoever he is, in a piano concerto-like piece which is aptly described by the back blurb as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue redone, but not that much better.

But for the Fritz Pauer concerto for sure this is worth listening to.

By Request, Jazzerie's Another Day from1988

This is contemporary jazz from an unknown Italian quartet that released two records, the first one here from 1988, with a saxophonist (Roberto Ottaviano) playing instrumentals atop guitarist (Nico Stufano) plus rhythm section (bassist Maurizio Quintavalle who wrote the majority of the music here and drummer Mimmi Campanale), no keyboards.  Some synthesizer moments appear and are especially enjoyable applied to the old Shorter standard "Infant Eyes" on the last track.  They get a nice bit of dissonant energy going on the Quintavalle-penned nsong called Primadonna:

The remarkable composer Gustav Brom's Polymelomodus, plus Missa Jazz

Gustav Brom née Frkal

Czech bandleader, conductor, saxophone and clarinet player, occasional vocalist.
Born May 22, 1921, in Veľké Leváre (Slovakia), died September 25, 1995, in Brno (Czech Republic). Brom led his orchestra since 1940 until his death.
During the WWII Gustav Frkal began to use the pseudonym “Gustav Brom” in order to stay unrecognized by the German Nazi regime. After the war in 1945 he changed his surname to Brom officially and permanently.

From discogs.

Like every musician, I suppose, in the world, in 1977 he created this wonderful fusion album.  The remainder of his discography looks less than appealing, obviously.  Despite being bandleader, note that he is not responsible for any of the compositional duties here.  The title track:





An earlier composition (1969), written by Jarpmir Hnilicka, proved to be mildly of interest as well, though it's more squarely in the big band tradition.  Note the 2 different covers.  First track, the Preludium:

A Roberto Anselmi: Strumentali - Storie, from 1985

He made a large number of library records back in the day, this one came out in 1985. The name was one of many rarer library composers requested from the country of Italy. As was mentioned so many times before Italian library records are always curiously overpriced, for me never quite fitting the level of quality of the music.  The bio on discogs:

Roberto Anselmi, italian, director and composer, author of music for images, for several television programs, theater performances, documentaries, theme songs and commercials.

Unfortunately the music is relatively generic library music from the early 1980s.  Much of it seems to have a melancholy bent, such as this one:




Clearly the chamber instrumentation and oboe solos throughout recall such classics as the Aspetti della Natura, the A.R. Luciani, etc.

Bonus, another library I found with him plus Tarossi and Maioli, this one from 1987,which features a couple of nice songs but is also rather generic.

Canadian Terry Watada's 2-LP Night's Disgrace

This album was a big leap of faith, since the description, visible here in our database, includes the reference to avant-garde, which sometimes makes us queasy of course when applied to music, but is sometimes a harbinger of good things to come.  Note that Night's Disgrace seems to be the backing band, which is quite good overall especially in the electric moments, to the Canadian author and poet Terry Watada.  His compositions though which I presume are the singer-songwriter type ones on this 2-LP set are not that great, making it unrealistic for me to purchase any of the earlier 70s albums from him, maybe I'm wrong, but I won't be the one to find out.

The first side is given over to a kind of amateurish jazz imitation, the kind you see in bad movies at piano bar scenes.  Thereafter there is quite a bit of blues and the aforementioned SSW material, even a 1950s doo-wop throwback piece of trash, but usually the electric guitar material is what stands out here.  A bit too much filler, in fact, like the crab cakes we are used to getting at the average steakhouse when you're more than 200 miles away from the East Coast.  Consider the properly-composed song called City of Lights as an ex. of the electric material:





But also, the acoustic song called Only Dreams really grew on me, although its 2-chord simplicity makes it a bit embarassing to admit:




There is also a ten-minute long jam at the end to side c which is really enjoyable but I didn't sample due to its length, the kind of thing usually described in record reviews as 'amazing freaky swirling fuzzed-out mad jam session psych music highly extremely long-sought after by the discerning record-collectors' --from their basements, as my wife so loves to say.
Its refrain is the highly unfortunate "maverick Chinaman, goin' down to Chinatown" which if I were you, I wouldn't dare play out loud in case someone makes some ignorant comment about 'that Chinese virus'...  Today by sheer numbers alone, we really should call it the American virus...  And since unlike the politicians we have an appreciation for irony here, we could even say, no we meant that purely metaphorically.
Yeah, we're all in this together, people.  There's no going back now.

It's interesting though as an experiment in human behaviour, I guess: if aliens attacked us from another planet, we would be more busy fighting each other than fighting off the extraterrestrial threat--that much is obvious to me, unlike what the sci-fi movies suggested (Independence Day?).
The US administration most likely would try to make a deal with the killing aliens: if you spare us and make us your slaves, you guys can have Africa, the whole continent... Put Jared Kushner in charge of that one again.  He's good.  He solved mideast peace.  He's handsome.  He's tall!

So aliens, if you're reading this: Divide and Conquer works on us real good.