Saturday 13 March 2021

Gijs Hendriks' Rockin' from 1972





He made quite a few albums with different formations and this one I think is his first opus, almost entirely composed by him.  The style of European fusion leaning quite a bit on the traditional jazz patterns is in evidence--think for ex. the Dauner outfit United Jazz and Rock Ensemble or similar ones like Finnish UMO (I think that's what it's called, could be mistaken).  So it's not as excitingly prorgressive as Toto Blanke's Electric Circus to use a well-known and celebrated example, but it was worth trying it out, I was pretty excited to imagine a lost gem in there.  You can imagine my disappointment when it turned out the first track, alluringly called Emptiness, and with a huge list of credits as you can see on the database, was just one long boring solo after another, with only about one minute of composed music and even that being somewhat disappointing. 

But don't be too turned off by my description, of course there's plenty of interesting music in here too.  

Btw notice that the keyboardist is Rob Van der Broeck, who was in masterpiece fusionary outpouring Third Eye, and then several, more jazzy, Free Fair albums.  Plus many other credits that others I'm sure know more about than me.

I found the first track on side b with the duet between acoustic guitar playing major chords in a melodic pattern and the alto of Gijs very nicely thought out, but note this is not representative of the whole:



In terms of a more representative composition, the first part of the long Influenza piece on the second side:








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