David Pritchard, 1978 and 1979, and Contraband, 1971

Love the space bird hatching on the top collage, at once so silly and so profound.  Perhaps a premonitory reference to Mahavishnu's Birds of Fire?  But above all, part and parcel of the seventies, that hopelessly naive and naively hope-filled period.

The Contraband band made one stunning all-instrumental fusion LP with the typical Bitches Brew references, full of high energy and almost atonal passages, most similar maybe to the Australian Quasar's two LPs (Nebular Trajectory and Man-Coda).  Also perhaps similar to the (also Aussie) Alpha Omega I have raved about so much on this blog.

In total there were four musicians who contributed compositions to Contraband, notably the keyboardist Pete Robinson who wrote all of side b and guitarist Dave Pritchard.  Always on the lookout for fabulous fusion (can never get tired of that stuff) I saw the latter made two records in the glory years of 1978, 1979, expecting something along the lines of maybe the brilliant James Vincent or genius Don Mock.  Unfortunately, we had too high hopes--but similar to the recent case where Auracle's two uncovered two more by John Serry, I can confidently state these two late-era fusion albums will please fans of the genre not just a little.  There are times where he reminds me of the new agey-tendencies of David Friesen who has also been extensively covered here, not always a bad thing, overall the testosterone has declined like so many a middle aged man and we have much less of the high octane electric guitar gain (distortion) and rhodes attacks.   Said man also, not coincidentally, is a bit too desiring of pleasing his wife as opposed to throwing all caution to the winds in atonality, screwing around with any old genitalial availability in the grand old progressive tradition, as for example the first track on 1978's Light-Year, which is called Black Moon:





In my opinion the follow up is a bit better, consider how it opens with the lovely title Hog Futures:





The addition of trumpet reminds me not a little of the great Jeff Tyzik material, again.

Going back now to the original early 70s fusion tokamak explosion of Contraband, the LP is just over-stuffed with great material.  The first track is one of Robinson's:





Oh for those younger, testosteronal days again!