Whole Earth Rainbow Band - What's a WERB? (USA 1975)

These guys hailing from Minnesota (red dot on the map) made quite a few albums, surprisingly many in fact (4) way back in the seventies, performing mostly improvised and tendentiously long, tangential and digressive instrumentals augmented by even longer boring soloing, but this one and presumably the last they made is the best by far because it does have composed passages throughout all the endlessly viscous meandering.

On a track called Northern Lights the use of synths buzzing up and down the whole tone chords on vibes and rhodes and atonal sax melody really is entrancing:





And moreover close to the 4 minute mark the synthesizer comes to the fore and takes it to an extreme, buzzing loudly all the way up a few octaves in front of the music.  It's surprising that it works.  Subsequently of course the track continues on with those overlong solos which are the embarrassing hallmark of American jazz.

Further on, a side b fully electronic keyboards song recalls the Ratledge-dominated compositions of the later Soft Machine, like for example The French Lesson off the 7th album:





Lovely stuff.
Steve Kimmel played vibes on these albums with players whose names I don't recognize, he later hooked up with Mike Elliott, Bob Rockwell, etc., for the Natural Life albums I ripped long ago and posted again recently.

A review on discogs overhypes them quite a bit but I'll quote it here:

A wonderful journey with many of Minnesota's best jazz players. Here they are putting down their free stylings and focusing on a more avant prog fusion situation. Think Soft Machine, Stark Reality, Tony Williams (Emergency, Turn it Over), Roy Ayers vibes. Rhodes. This is an overlooked gem in the age of inflation.

And indeed after the Age of Aquarius there came the Age of Inflation, while today, as my wife put it so well, and I realize every time I drive my car to work in the morning, we are in the Age of the Asshole.