Friday, 16 June 2023

Big Jim Sullivan Band's Test of Time, 1983



Note on the discogs info page, it says 'successor to Tiger band'. 
This surprised me first of all because it came 7 years later, and because I thought the Tiger outfit was not very good, not progressive, and definitely not fusiony, like this release from the artist called Big Jim Sullivan. 
With respect to the latter, he was a session guitarist for the most part, as you can see here

[real name] James George Thompkins

Prolific session guitarist (born 14 February 1941, in Uxbridge, Middlesex, England, died 02 October 2012) whose career started in 1959 after meeting Marty Wilde in a coffee bar.
Launched Retreat Records, with Derek Lawrence.
He played on fifty nine number one UK hit singles, and his lengthy career included stints with Tom Jones and the James Last Orchestra.


So far as I know there's nothing further interesting in his own albums which are mostly cover versions or blues songs, but I could be totally wrong.
Anyways this is just a wonderful piece of electric fusion, very similar I think to the later Jeff Beck masterpieces.  A track called Strange:




A track called Sexy Doreen from the second Tiger album has a nice tritonal chord jump:



10 comments:

  1. Coolness... thank you!
    Bless...

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  2. Big Jim was kind of a teacher for young fellow studio guitarists like John McLaughlin and Jimmy Page. He also played sitar and released albums in the 60s under the name Lord Sitar playing instrumental versions of contemporary hits. Later he was part of Tom Jones' touring band.

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  3. Please friend, can you reúp this rare but nice album?
    Frode Thingnaes "Feelin' All Right" (1974)
    Thanks a lot

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  4. Great review, but... maybe you forgot to include the link?

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    1. presumably gets removed by a blogger bot each time i post, sorry

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  5. it wasn't a successor - EMI refused to release this, their third album. It came out years later under the name 'The Big Jim Sullivan Band'. The main players are the exact same band,

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  6. Thanks for this - I had never bothered to check out Tiger albums after the first one (didn't realise there were any) and had no idea Big Jim's later band album was so good! Unfortunately the Big Jim Sullivan Band album rip sounds terrible, drenched in crackle and fuzz. Does anyone have a rip of one of the old cd reissues to share please?

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  7. link removed automatically by blogger, presumably...

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