Baird Hersey and the Year of the Ear (1975, Coessential, Have you Heard) [limited time only]

From discogs:

Baird Hersey is probably best know as a composer and guitarist. In the '70s and '80s he wrote for and played with his big band Baird Hersey & The Year Of The Ear. The group's performances and recordings were highly regarded for their blend of rhythmic percussion and innovative horn arrangements. 

Hersey's is a National Endowment for the Arts Composition Fellow. His diverse career has encompassed; commissions from the Harvard University, New Mexico Council for the Arts, The Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Sound and Light Spectacular, The HVP Symphony Orchestra, and performances throughout the US and Europe in such different setting as the Berlin Jazz Festival and MTV. He has also composed extensively for television. 

He has been a student of yoga and overtone singing for 20 years. In 1997 He began the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. The result was a change in his life, his music and his career. Gathering In The Light is his 11th album Hersey has recorded for Arista, Buddha, Bent Records (4) and Satsang Music. He has studied with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in Mysore India and with The Gyuto Monks. 
(Source: artist's website)

A fuller listing of his credits including appearances with others can be seen on this page. 
In the beginning he appeared as guitarist on the blues rock album with one-off band Swampgas, which will be included down below with the others.  This is totally generic bluesy hard rock (+ 3 acoustic numbers), though it's interesting to note that his 'guitarist style' with the stereotypical blues licks perfectly mastered sounds very much like a guy like Duane Allman, with some Jimi Hendrix admiration locked in there perhaps.  A perfectly understandable attempt for a young artist to achieve rock-star fame.  And I guess that when you compare with other similar bands that achieved star status like maybe Cactus, Montrose, or Redbone, you can't say the songwriting is worse than theirs.  But I guess, to our great luck, that didn't work out for him.  So instead he brought together a large group of highly competent jazz/fusion musicians and created a big band which he later renamed the Year of the Ear.

Suddenly at this point all the university composition education and brilliant arranging that was locked up in that creative mind exploded.  Although it starts with a very unpromising jazz standard cover (the abhorrent Night in Tunisia 1st vomited up for us by Dizzy G.), the remainder of the album features absolutely unique musical ideas, I mean I run out at this point of superlatives.  For long readers of this blog and fans of the overall genre of  'progressive fusion' the one-off 1980 Fred Taylor masterpiece from years back, which I still listen to and enjoy to this day, is most similar.  All compositions and arrangements by Mr. Hersey.  So track A2, Herds Hoards:





You start with a poetic flute intro, leading into a clearly dissonant, tritone-based riff, that just builds and builds-- and here the big band doesn't blow away the electricity as in so much jazz, but instead adds colourful touches to the rock band energy.  At the end, the big band is given free reign to take the track out, as if they are dancing on the grave of the (overdosed) rock band... brilliant. Believe me when I say the remainder of the album, from a3 to b1 to b2, continues at that same highly intellectual, imaginative, quasi-symphonic stratospherically high level, like Mt Everest but without all the deaths from overcrowding and people taking selfies.

It's as if this brilliant man was playing night after night with Swampgas in bars and dives the same old boring blues licks with the flattened fifths and the pentatonic scales in E or A and was dreaming all along of breaking out into a pure heaven of musical possibilities, a heaven where everything exists, like the many worlds universe theory of Hugh Everett the Third.  Have you ever heard atonal fusion?  I think you'll find it in here.  (I said the same about Aussies Alpha Omega a long time ago.)

Unfortunately, he was somewhat brought back to earth the next couple of years, for the follow up album which he named Lookin' for the Groove, if I might put it delicately, indicates the chosen name was highly appropriate.  But he didn't outright compromise everything from that precious expensive university education usually leading to a career in poverty.  It's still creative.  And for sure the track It's been a Long Time is just a magnificently beautiful, uncommonly ethereal song, reminding me a little of Pekka Pohjola's tender ballads:





I guess there is a case of split personality here, because in the same year he made with percussionist David Moss the LP Coessential--  which to me is 'free jazz' garbage and completely unlistenable.  Go ahead and have a listen.  You might enjoy it.

Then, in 1979, Year of the Ear the band made a follow up called Have you Heard.  It has a few nice moments but is again marred somewhat by a paucity of ideas. 

Look at the lovely cover of Swampgas.  Takes me back to my childhood when there was so much wilderness around us.